YouSaid · the spoken record

David Suchet

lines on the record: 48
first: 2009-02-08
most recent: 2009-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My luxury. Would I think be my clarinet with an endless unlimited supply of reeds that I'd never get sick of the sound of my clarinet, so my clarinet?”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a very visual person, and because of my love of photography, I would take a book called Magnum Magnum, a wonderful book of photographs of the twentieth century of people, places very evocative, so I could look at the whole the major century where I grew up and constantly be reminded of that, and that would be my book.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“were my final piece of music is a monastic chant by Peter Abelard which he wrote in the twelfth century and its David's lament planctus David over the deaths in battle of Saul and Jonathan and one of the verses in the song is the futility of war, profitless victory obtained in the meantime how empty, how brief I now perceive joys to be.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know is the answer I used to in my romantic imagination think of myself as someone who would like isolation but you know you have to look at yourself and have to understand yourself where do you get your energy from? And I know I get it from being with other people. So I'm not going to be a very happy on my island, I don't think.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was very hard at first for them because I had found faith, but I hope it's never encroached any negative way, but I have to say for myself it's been an anchor, it's been a wonderful bedrock for my life and my belief.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a very optimistic, and yes, and I feel that everybody's life, however hard it is, is a gift, and we have to do the best we can with it. But look at the world right. And if this is all there is, then there must be something better. So I was searching for something and cutting a long story short, I wanted to read something that I knew was fact. So I read a letter from St. Paul, Paul to the Romans, and suddenly reading that, I saw a way of life to which I wished to adhere, something I'd been looking for all my life, really, something beyond what just is around us, and I became very committed, and not without its hassles and troubles and trials because I don't think having a faith in today's society is an easy thing. It's a very hard thing.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it is true I went through a conversion experience in nineteen eighty six. I've always believed if this is all we've got, then it's not very good. I've always felt that.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the next piece of music takes me right back to my first performance in Amadaus at the Old Vic Theatre Salieri is who I played, and Salieri has this great speech over this piece of music, and it affected me so much in performance that it become for me every time I hear it and I went to St. Martin's in the field recently, and they were playing Mozart's requiem, and the whole experience of being Salieri in that play came back to me.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't well I wouldn't be able to do Romanica Du Poiro for you, because my voice as you hear it now. But if I think of Poirot as a walking brain, which I do, he wouldn't have his voice down there, it would be in his head, so I would have to move my voice from the bass voice that you hear now slowly to the chess voice and to the throat voice, into the head and up to the top of the mad, and then put on the accent and talk like him in that is your cute port.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I even knew I was ever going to play Robert Maxwell, and she gave me an insight into the sort of personality that Bob Maxwell possessed, very difficult man and a terribly hard beginnings and all the rest of it, but she gave me an insight into the character, and I also had recordings of his voice to learn Bob's voice and to speak in the way he spoke and find his rhythm just opened the door for me, and voice actually opens the door for me in many characters.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Betty. Betty Maxwell Well, actually, funnily enough, meeting Betty was to do with a series that I did when I played Augustus Melmot in the way we live now, and I ironically I based that character on Robert Maxwell.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David Suchet, I was watching the screen, I wasn't watching the podium. And I turned round and looked at my wife, and literally our jaws dropped, because then I had this marathon walk to the podium, in fact halfway through I started to run, because I thought I'm never going to make it. And it was a wonderful surprise.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also at our table. I was sitting with the Norwegian football team. So there was I, you know, as Maxwell was saying, hello and what do you play football? And I said Marvus Who do you play for? Novi. And so the conversation in the evening went on. Yes, where do you go after? Where do you go? So when it was announced and the winner is”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Truthfully not a hope in hell. Not a hope in health, and I'm told that nobody knows beforehand anyway, so okay, so we arrived in New York. We go into the big ballroom at the Hilton, and I am sitting at a table with a So far away from the podium, I said to Sheila Relax I said you can relax. We can hardly see it. We were watching the whole thing on big screens near the table.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in my car, driving to the Barbican Theatre. and a piece of music came on the radio that as I listened to it. I've found myself weeping at the wheel, literally weeping, and I had to pull off. I couldn't drive. It affected me that much, so much so that I suddenly had an urge to play the instrument that I heard. And it was the clarinet. But it all began in the car, listening to Mozart's clarinet concerto beginning of the slow movement.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I possibly as a fault I possibly overcompensated with having a very dow father, to being a father who wanted to be more a friend to their children, but I've always hopefully been accessible to the”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a wonderful relationship she made the ultimate sacrifice for me, in other words she gave up her career when children were born to allow me mine. We didn't have anything, we didn't have a penny. So one of us had to And it couldn't be the one who was earning more money but that quote was really my idea of if you like how does one recognise the partner you choose that you want to spend the rest of your life with and that quote was actually me saying you can possibly live with a lot of people, but there are very few you can't live without”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we do together. Yeah, but we designed it ourselves, and we managed to make the bedroom became a study with double doors. We used to close the wardrobe door and close the Lew door together, and it became almost soundproof, and she could listen to the television or I could listen to the television of one end of the boat, and we could learn lines at the other end of the boat. You know, we didn't know then, but it was great. It really was a wonderful time.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started in nineteen seventy four when my girlfriend, Sheila, and myself decided to live together. we couldn't afford anything. So we got together six thousand pounds and had built for us a narrow boat. for seven years we travelled round the waterways of Great Britain to the different reps in which we were performing.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She says she felt exactly the same, and it took me ages to manage to get her to come out for even a drink with me, though the first dinner we saved up for in REP when I took her to a Chinese restaurant, and about two or three o'clock in the morning we were sitting on a bench in the middle of the shopping precinct. How romantic and I launched into napkin coals when I fall in love.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it was absolutely I looked at her and my heart literally dropped. It sounds theatrical, but I'm telling the honest truth. Listen, it's happened before in Romeo and Julia.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, this is my romantic phase nineteen seventy two Walking In to the Belgrade Theatre Coventry to start a season. I was told there was a young actress that had a message to give me from a mutual friend. Her name was Sheila Ferris, and I came downstairs, saw this actress immediately fell in love. Immediately, totally love at first sight.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, hadn't moved on at all by then, I was thrilled to bits that he was coming into my dressing room and shaking me by the hand, and very quietly saying Well done”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I stood up in the whole of the stage started to go around. Anyway, I managed to keep going to the interval, and I remember now a doctor came to see me, opened his bag, and took out a great big syringe with it looked like a vet in one of these big veterinary synthesis. He filled it with cortisone, plunged it into my shoulder. Oh my God, I can remember, plunged it into my shoulder, and the whole thing went numb.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tell you exactly, very early on in As You Like It's a scene, a wrestling scene, and I had to wrestle, and I had very few rehearsals The person who was playing the wrestler was a wonderful professional wrestler and actor called Brian Glover, and the wrestling match came and we were going through our moves, and he was very nervous, as was I, but he was incredibly nervous, and he threw me. And I broke my right shoulder. Something went snap. I can to this moment, as I'm saying, I remember it. in my ear”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my next piece of music takes me right back to my brother, John again. When we were growing up he was fanatical about Tsaikovsky, and he got his first stereo record player. It was brown, and it was sort of fake leather. But this piece of music was the only one he ever played, and it drove me bananas. I used to say to him Shut it up. He kept her every time I hear it to this day, I go right back into our bedroom that we shared and this piece of music. I have to say I've grown to love it, but not then it is Tsaikovsky's concerto for violin and orchestra in D. Just listen to this violin.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were young. Oh, I was my jaw just dropped, I was so nervous walking into the stage door. I was understudying a wonderful actical Bernard Lloyd, I was understudying Mercutio, I was understudying Orlando, it was him doing both roles. All these great roles. Bernard got a very bad back injury. Just before the press night this was, and I had to learn Orlando and open to the press in four days. So I took over that role, and I kept it for the whole of the first year I was there. I also played Macut because he was playing Micutio. I also played hotspur. This is in my first season, and I move from dressing room twelve to dressing room one A and I never left there and I was there for the best part from nineteen seventy two seventy three to nineteen eighty six off and on, and I think I think”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dad didn't want to know he was very serious, as I've said, very serious surgeon, and didn't want his boy, one of his boys, to go into show biz. But mum loved it, and she was so excited, and she really pushed me on. But the moment I joined the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, I got credibility, you see, because it was the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in one of our great national theatres in this country. So he came round at that point and then started coming to see me on a more regular basis.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't actually play the drums anymore. I have a little set of bongos that I bang with my hands, but I don't play the drums anymore.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I learned to do was to play the drums because I loved jazz, but the piece of music that I've chosen actually changed everything for me. It was like I heard drumming that I had never heard before in modern jazz, and it just blew me away, but it's take five by Dave Brubeck, and it's the drum solo played by Joe Morello.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, well there was a moment of epiphany, but I think it was the first time I got approval. At the moment of epiphany, knowing that I wanted to become an actor actually happened on the side of the stage at the Royal Court Theatre when I was eighteen, we did a performance in the National Theatre called Bartholomew Fair, and I wanted at the end of the whole performance to see all the scenery coming down. I saw all the lights coming down and the flats coming down, the scenery coming down, and I was watching this and I thought Fifteen minutes ago there were people there applauding, laughing having the time of their life, and we were on stage thinking this is the most important thing we've ever done and let's get it right. And now if all that was make believe and it was magic and I thought this is where I want to spend my life”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're absolutely right. I'm sure that's right. I've always regarded myself as a sort of outsider even though I was born in Paddington. I didn't fit into the classic English Brit mode of boys with blonde hair and all the rest of it, and then my roles in my career would sort of reflect that.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was sport. It was sport, and my first drama was Alice through the looking glass, and I played an oyster. I remember that first role, actually.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it was awful saying goodbye, Victoria Station, and from then we would get on the train, the steam train to take us to Burchington, which seemed the other end of the world. It's just in Kent. I mean we got beaten so often for minor offences, even for having Mars bars in our locker that mum would bring at quarter term half term. I got six of the best for having a Mars bar.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You Oh, literally rising up all those nether regions and taking deep breaths right up to the chest and right up to the chin and just going right under.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's Frankie Vaughn singing you'll never walk alone at Granham House Boarding School in the early fifties when John, my brother and I were there, we had to go swimming in the sea every Sunday, and we used to walk down to Minnes Bay from the school, and the headmaster would be in the front of us boys, and he would walk into the sea, and no one was allowed to pause, however freezing the sea was, you had to walk in, and we used to hold hands and sing You'll never walk alone as we walked in.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't very, very serious, little boy. I think I'll become more serious as I've grown older. I loved fun, and I loved sport. I was not a swat I had very little class room ability, not like John my elder brother, but very little. Moreover.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and he tested panicillin on some sick greyhounds at the white city dog stadium because the dog derby was coming on and all the dogs got ill, and he was made a life member of the White City Dog track, and we used to go there for the dog Derby every year in black tie, only because he saved all the dogs.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, I mean he had nothing. He came from South Africa. Once again his family was from Russia, and he came over had to finance himself, became a young houseman, and went into pathology, and actually was with Alexander Fleming. He was the unnamed doctor in the discovery of penicillin. Extraordinary. He also was the first pathologist to test penicillin.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Edward and Mrs. Simpson. That was the big scoop of his. He was actually in the nightclub and got the first picture of Edward and Mrs. Simpson together for the first time ever in print in the tabloids.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So cracking scoops he did Bleria's landing, Churchill brick laying. He was just amazing and gave me my love for photography.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether it was the fashion at that time, but there was he wanted to move away from Russian, Jewish background, and came as a refugee to Paris, and then came to London and said that he was from France and he was a French photographer, and I will take your portrait and all this, you know. I'd buy what I would buy it too. And he was quite a character, so he changed name to Josh Shay.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me about your mother. Well, my mum, she was a great influence on my life. She loved show business. At a young age she was a hoofer, a dancer. She tried to audition for Cleopatra, the film Cleopatra, and she didn't get it, and she was in floods of tears, and she told me she said that her dad, my grandfather James Jauchay, said, If you can't take the knocks in this business, Joan, get out, and she did get out, but she did amateur dramatics after that, and she was very thrilled when I wanted to be an actor.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well the first piece has to be, I suppose, the piece that represents the character that really changed my fortunes as an actor because it suddenly elevated me from being an ordinary character actor to being a leading character, and of course it's Hercu Poirot and it's the theme tune by Chris Gunning.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's Robert your son's birthday? Catherine's birthday, what's your address? Come on, watch your telephone number. Come on, watch your watch, watch your bank account, watch your bank. I couldn't remember anything. I just couldn't remember them, and he said there you are, you're not there, you're not present. Now look in the mirror. Get back to yourself. Say who you are, go through your details, and come back to you. Practice that because in time you can do it very quickly and get out, and I can now, and that's what I do. At the end of every performance I just look in the mirror and in twenty seconds I'm back to me now, but in those days it would take two or three minutes to actually come back.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, say goodbye to them and come back to one's own self. I remember doing production at the young vic. Tyman of Athens, and I was playing Tyman, which is a very, very difficult and complex role. He actually goes mad. And dear friend of mine who is a psychologist, came to see the show and he came back stage after him and says, you can't do that. You can't do that every night. I said, what do you mean? He said, you can't do that every night and not get out of character. He said you'll drive yourself crazy. I said, I am out of character. What are you talking about? He said you're not. He said, What's your birth What's your wife's birth”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I'm in a theatre play, you have to lose them every night, you have to say goodbye to them every night, and you have to go home as yourself. Literally say goodbye.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well it's almost true. I won't say I've read every single one, but I read I would suppose very close to the complete canon, and I literally set out to create only the character that Agatha Christie created, nothing else, and then spent many, many, many weeks practising, practicing, practising, practising.”
2009-02-08 · Desert Island Discs · David Suchet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source