YouSaid · the spoken record

Emma Thompson

lines on the record: 44
first: 2010-03-28
most recent: 2010-03-28
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

“I know that the thing I would miss most is cooking so I want a saucepan I've got it at home I would bring it with me you don't have to buy it for me it's a round heavy bottomed cast iron saucepan with a removable handle so you see because otherwise the handle gets too hot and you can't stir anything or take it off the heat because there's nothing on the island you can cook in you see so if I have a pot then one of the first things I can do is go around testing veg and seeing if there's anything herbal I can make something different with stark creating an island cuisine.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, this was hard as you can imagine But I finally plumped for Homer's Odyssey. When I was talking about the mythology of the island, and I thought, well, Homer will help, of course, because he wrote some of the greatest myths ever. And I loved the Greek myths. I've always loved them. I loved them when I was a little girl. So I thought, well, the Odyssey is good because as well it's about an exile. And I could learn Greek, because I'd have both the English and the Greek.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, oddly appropriate, really this is Joe Cocker and it's him singing at Woodstock with a little help from my friends, which is quite a sort of upbeat number with the Beatles, but with Joe Cocker becomes this great cry of anguish. And I thought that would be a very good thing to have on the island because at some point you're going to feel deep anguish and this will express it, I think, very well and I might be able to join in. So that's for the dark times. Joe Cocker, and with a little help from”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know I mean I think that Mom and Dad both came from the post war semi puritanical upbringings I mean my mum's Scottish so the Presbyterian thing is strong within us The force is strong I think it was a creation of my own making and was always there something to do with justice and I couldn't cope with suffering of any kind I had to put it right somehow and of course that's very arrogant to think that you can alleviate the world's suffering you can't and so one of the most important things for me to learn over this life that I've had is that I can't save the world I can do what I can do and that has to be enough in the same way as clever people say you're a good enough mother that has to be enough It's just the way I am it's never quite.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you know me the voice is in my head, the constant must do better must try harder, blush you too fat and you're not really very good mother and that punitive conscience is part of my psychiatric problem Not to put too fine a point on it listeners”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it is because it's harder. I'm not saying that acting isn't hard. It depends. I find it joyous and life giving and fun, even if it's traumatic. An escape from myself, which I'm ashamed to say I enjoy very much.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not going to be easy, but I think that I will tell stories I will probably create a mythology quite quickly and on purpose and start to see if I can't tame a seagull or something. I'll have to make relationships with the island within the island, and then within those relationships tell stories. I think that's how I'll survive it, is by creating stories.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of loud laughing. So there I was in San Francisco with Arnold, and my sister sent me this tape and said I've met this man and I think he's something special to me. So here's his music and I loved his music. I played this tape the whole time at a time when I was actually very unhappy because it was, you know, as I was thirty five and it was Is about the fact that not everything you do will succeed and that's okay.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would he's orange rather oldy worldy Prussian? She almost exposes him to click his heels, and very humble about the fact that he wasn't an actor I'm not an actor, you must tell me what you're”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is my brother in law, Richard Lumstern, who is a musician, amongst other things he's also a wonderful actor. I was in San Francisco doing junior with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito and having a fun time. What's the matter?”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Guy is so thrilled about it. Because, of course, she was two when he turned up. She's 10 now. He's been a part of her life forever. And they have a very brotherly, sisterly relationship as well. in it's fantastic to see. We're very, very lucky. Very lucky. Sometimes I think as well, you know, if I had had my other IVFs had worked and I'd had more children, perhaps there wouldn't have been room for this young man who has changed our lives so much and who we all love so much.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He decided to do an MA in human rights law which he's doing now this year at SOAS at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and this is a boy who arrived with really no English at all, and at twenty three is about to get his MA in human rights law. He's extraordinary.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“became, as it were, an organic sense part of our family within that year, and then it continued the story because the home office in all its wisdom, not, after five years, decided to challenge his leave to remain, so we had to go to court. So you consider that in relation to someone who has had a terribly difficult time anyway and has lost his family, the sense of being suspected of something is very strong and”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, I support an organisation called the Refugee Council who offer help to refugees in this country. And in fact, went India, arrived in this country, he spent the first two nights sleeping rough in Chicago Square, which is inconceivable some of this little sixteen year old which he was at the time, having come from a truly appalling story, his very difficult, which I won't go into because I think that's his story to tell, not mine. But I met him at a Christmas party that we'd give once a year. And this relationship started to develop not just with me but with Greg, with Gaia, who was too at the time my mum.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, this is Greg's song. This is something that he introduced me to that I loved immediately and continue to love 15 years later. I can't believe it's 15 years. Oh my gosh. And this is us three and it's the Cantaloupe Fantasia and it's Groovy Groovy Jazzy Funky.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes I don't mind that Not really. No, I mean I think that in relation to miscarriage and IVF and all of those subjects, I think it's very helpful for people like me to talk about that because an awful lot of women go through that and they think it's only them and it's only them that feel awful about it. You know, having had difficulties and failing to produce children and feeling that as a terrible failure which is so wrong, I feel close to other people. I feel like them if I think again it's part of the activist in me that says yes it's fine to talk about that because it's a shared problem somehow”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No No, no personality at all. Yes, he's very eccentric because he doesn't think of himself as beautiful, is absolutely happiest on the land in Scotland or in his barn building things and has changed all our lives in Scotland by introducing a Finnish sauna to the land in the”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not intelligent. He is really beautiful, and waking up and seeing that person every day is, I mean, I can't deny it. It's a great aesthetic pleasure. So yeah, it's just great, actually”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, this is Tom Wait's, and it's a song called Hold On, and this is for Gaia, this is giving birth. I loved being pregnant. I was so happy I was just Just happier than I'd ever been, and I loved getting bigger and feeling her sloshing around and doing summer sorts. And so it was just the best thing. And then giving birth to fling your head bag and let out this kind of leonine roar, and this child to come shooting out of your body in a great pile of staff and blood and the smell and the experience of it was beyond anything I could have imagined.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so very much so I can remember actually I can remember the only thing I could do was right in not being able to get dressed Ken had an old black cashmere dressing gown I'd given him one Christmas. in the bathroom, and he's gone he wasn't living at home and I used to just put it on and crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write. And then I was all right because I was not present. sense and sensibility really saved me from I think going under in a very nasty way.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think we enjoyed that time, and I think at the end of much ado, I think that was I mean I loved that time, I think Ken found it very difficult, but I loved it, and then it was started to fracture.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the set of sense and sense. And of course, I was married, so he thought it was Winslert and courted her assiduously. I remember him taking us a glass debris. which she hated because it was all hippieish, and Greg's quite hippieish, you know. And he kept on thinking this just isn't working. I think she's just got to be wrong. It was a friend of his who's quite sort of witchy. And it turned out to be me.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think my first bout of that was when I was doing me and my girl, funnily enough, when I really didn't change my clothes and couldn't answer the phone and went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk. But I think I was my first bat with an actual clinical depression. And that's very much theatre when my dad died my mum was in a farce, and went on stage You know the day he died she was on stage playing in a farce So that's what actors do and then in a sense I suppose work did save me and then Greg saved me because he picked up the pieces and put them back together again, you know after sense and sensibility”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I did stay sane actually It was tough. I think I probably should have sought professional help long before I actually did for all sorts of reasons yes divorce ghastly painful business but also fame in some ways ghastly painful business as well you become slightly more public property in a way that's not necessarily always comfortable.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all because there's a voice there that I can use if I use it properly, then it doesn't matter what anybody says. I think if you're derided because you're speaking in an area that you don't fully understand, then it probably would hurt because you would know fine well that you've been speaking somehow out of turn for a while.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, now this is in Tilimane. In nineteen seventy three when the coup happened in Chile, Victor Hara, who's a Chilean freedom songwriter, was murdered, and in Tilimani were all musicians who all knew Victora and were exiled from Chile for fifteen years, and when all around the world playing their Charangas and the Chilean instruments but also learning instruments from other parts of the world and sitting there listening to these voices and the thrang of these guitars just fills you with courage.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I just thought well maybe I should act. I mean the option was there, you see, because I think that was part of the problem was I'd won the BAFTA for Tuti fruiti and fortunes of war, it was for both of those things. So I had been recognised, if you like, for serious acting, and now I dared to try my hand at comedy, which is what I'd always intended to do yet it's the reason I got to write sense and sensibility, because Lindsay Durand watched this show which was put out in America at about three o'clock in the morning, you know, and she happened to see it and said I'd like that sketch. I think I'm going to ask this woman to try because she seems to be able to write in a vernacular that could be Austinian, but she's also funny, and that's why I got that job.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a very, very personal way as well. It was like a personal attack. You can't do this, you shouldn't be doing this. You should never have been given the money. You are awful, awful, awful it was real hatred from a knot of journalists.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. Footlights was one of those hunting grounds. And we did all of us get an agent when I was 19, I think. And he, Richard Armitage, was very good because he was the one who always said to me, you've got to do your own thing. You've got to do your own thing. He said you wanted to write that comedy series. You've got that opportunity. You must do that. And I wrote a comedy series that was torn to shreds.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know they're very welcoming They very keen on me to write because of course good writing is hard to come by and treat me well as a writer and it's nice not to just be on the end of a phone waiting. So I'm quite lucky, I think.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh well, this is the point at which I had to say to Greg, my husband, to switch off the radio because he hates this so much he's heard it so many times. It's Benjamin Britton's ceremony of carols. This is Christmas, really, and I'm not religious at all. Yet this piece of music it speaks to me about my childhood and the time before my father was ill, and Christmas time was the best.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because Robical Train had in Alfresco with us, and they were casting Tutifru, and they said we need a girl to play kettles, and Robbie said, you know, you should see M.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think I did. It was all very accidental because I wasn't going to be an actress, I wasn't. It didn't occur to me really. I mean both my mum and I loved the thing we loved best was to make my father laugh because he didn't laugh easily and when he laughed it was such a pleasure. And it's the same with Stephen if I can make Stephen and you laugh now, I feel thrilled.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And that beautiful timbre to his voice. And he directed two plays before he died, one of which I was I crooded on at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, and then he just had a huge pulmonary embolism one morning when I was up in Manchester making sketch shows with Stephen and Hugh, and died and actually Hugh read Hugh Lorry read a magic roundabout story at his funeral, which was so nice.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is my dad, Eric, who wrote the magic roundabout and was very much known for that, and by the time he was my age he'd had a terrible stroke and couldn't speak any more, and I would at eighteen and nineteen and my sister we would help him to learn how to speak again literally with cards I am he is and it was very humiliating for this working class man who'd absolutely taught himself everything about language and who was passionate about the spoken word and spoke very well and with a beautiful voice to have all that taken away from him at the age of forty eight was really tough and losing him when he was fifty two tore us to pieces so dad's always been very close very important part of our lives and this is him talking and singing in his capacity the magic roundabout man.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just sheer bliss because we lived in a wee flat in London which had no garden, and I can literally remember having dreams about Scotland and dreaming that I would be there and then waking up in London and being sad. For me as a child, Scotland was everything, everything it was like a paradise to me.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was less hurtful than what they said about my first performance in the past. and they both started to laugh because at the end of this line of lovely teeny wee gorgeous delicate things there was this great queen mother of a snowflaking was bossing everyone around and I said you mean you laughed they told me that when I was nineteen and I remember feeling quite hurt Anyway my dad just rang my mum's family and said can I borrow three hundred quid which is what it cost”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely it began when I was three months old my mum and dad my mum's Gazwegian and we were staying in a little boarding house in Strone on the shores of Loch Long I mean obviously I can't remember this but mum tells me the story and we got to a beach where they found this little cottage that's built in seventeen twenty this exquisite little pearl of a cottage and there was a for sale sign and mum said oh you know wouldn't it be like they had no money at all I mean literally to the extent that dad had had to get help from equity because he was only 300 quid a year and it just couldn't do us you know I was a mistake incidentally because they didn't think they had enough money to start a family when did they do”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I am, but I'm going to do it next year. I just took me a while to sort of slow everything down. So next year the plan is to take a sort of sabbatical, really, of pretty much the whole year, but certainly the six months between February and August.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and had written music for loads of films that I've been in he wrote for Ken's movies for much ado for Henry V and then for sense and sensibility and animate fee and when I turned fifty he wrote this piece of music which is about the land surrounding our house inspired by him walking along a little walk that Greg had built for my mum so that my mum can always walk through the land so it's safe for her to walk because it's you know it's rocky and all of that and which we called laughingly the P Law Memorial Walk she's very much alive my mother and probably listening as we speak so hello mum don't slip on an Argos catalogue or anything now and he wrote this and presented it to me as we were roasting a large pig on my fiftieth birthday last year.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a piece called Corassic, which is the name of our house in Scotland, which was bought for about three and six by my parents when I was fifteen years old, and it's surrounded by a river and hills, and I grew up there, and now my daughter and son are growing up there, and this piece of music was composed by the Scottish film composer Patrick Doyle, who I've known since I was twenty three.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was John Ruskin said he was talking about capitalism and he said, you know, the acquisition of each new thing just engenders a new form of weariness. And I thought it's the most brilliant way of describing stuff, the stuff that we accrete during our lifetimes. Greg and I certainly have got to the point where we say, can we get rid of this? Yes, come on, let's chuck it. It's like you're going along in your boat and you just want to make it lighter so you can travel faster and you can go with the wind a wee bit more. Remember going into Barbara Streizan's house once and she had she got about fifteen homes and her rooms each room was done in a different style like there was a Japanese lacquered style and there was a Victorian bedroom. I mean we feel guilty about inhabiting two houses, one in London and one in Scotland, but we do live in them. We really do live in them.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I encountered the possibility earlier on, you know, when all the Oscar Hoo Ha was happening of living in another way, shall we say, you know, people would say Well, why don't you come out to Los Angeles and have your own company and things like that? And I thought, but then who would I know where would all my friends be have this habit of continuity and I love continuity and the continuum of life, knowing people for a long, long, long time gives me great pleasure? And if you do that, of course you haven't got any chance of changing because they'll be the first ones to turn round and say to you What do you think you're doing? You're being an arth. You allowed to say ars on death at I times have changed”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try hard not to be, I do, and indeed was I don't think I am considered a beauty in that sense I've always thought of myself as a character actress. So I'm in a sense I've got much less to lose.”
2010-03-28 · Desert Island Discs · Emma Thompson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source