YouSaid · the spoken record

Joanna Lumley

lines on the record: 59
first: 2007-05-13
most recent: 2007-05-13
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

“Am I Film camera because I'd like I'd just like to take the film Monsieur Foulau's holiday with Jack Tatty in it because it's so funny and so charming and as most of my life I've wanted to be mistaken to be a French woman a Parisian woman this could just make me think about France when everything was gentle and everything is very very funny and Jacques Tati is a genius.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I have a really huge atlas? Because Shakespeare is the man for me, he's the man, he's the one who I've asked will be at the other side of the Parley Gates to let me in. The Bible has got an immense amount of stories and fabulous things, so I've got enough reading material there. But I would like this atlas because then I can remember the mountain ranges, see the rivers, and speculate on journeys I'm about to make.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I've dreamt of forever is seeing with my own eyes the northern lights, and the idea of listening to Sibelius too, this phenomenal piece written by this gorgeous, grim Finnish man who is so noble and so locked up, I shall step not at his side but behind him steadily with my snowshoes going shush on snow, and above me rippling, blazing, falling like silk curtains, the northern lights with Sabelius too.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where he is music, he's like Mr Music, his head seems to kind of contain more music than anybody I've ever met. He's just totally brilliant. He's just totally brilliant. I love being with him. I'm as lucky as the days long.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a bit disgraceful, isn't it? We won't. I mean, for somebody who's so jolly, I've got to sort of, I know, I've got to sort of wreath of flowers around my hair now, you know, some old spliff in my fingers fantastic. No, it does sound a bit, I am practical, but I'm also a dreamer.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I heard that he also got married, but I was terribly shocked that I thought something's gone wrong because I knew there was a pattern I had precognition of something, and I don't know what it was, but I recognised that he would be in my life. And then when we met again and we just talked for hours, and it all fell into place. It's just so strange. I sometimes do get these things about knowing things, you know what I mean? Precognition, I think. It sounds a little bit”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“had actually heard his name a long time before when I was about twenty one, and he was thirteen and at school. Isn't it extraordinary? He was a boy at school with the son of some friends of mine. and I then didn't meet him for another ten years, and I met him there and it was very strange, like literally like getting an electric shock or being struck by lightning or being shocked in some way, and then we always went apart again.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think napkin Cole was one of the greatest singers who ever lived the beauty of this song by Hogie Carmichael is The Perfect Desert Island song. It is the song. The sun is gone, it's dark, the fruit bats have flown into the trees. There are night sounds, a little bit of clicking. You can just see the crabs running in the moonlight on the beach, the sea covered with phosphorus is sucking and sighing. And then this voice and this extraordinary extenuated lovely melody with Nat King Cole singing about Stardust I'm on his arm.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get a baft which is voted for by your peers, for them to say we think that was great was just stupendous, it was wonderful”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm afraid I have, and they are terribly fun. I mean, they do laugh at themselves, but there's an awful lot of wiffle wuffle. There's a fabulous character played by Helen Lederer, one of the girls in the magazine. Who is frightfully frightfully stupid? And I can remember her saying, I've got a friend who's got some chairs. You could take photos of chairs, and I think that when you look at magazines now, you know, you're not But actually that's just about what they've got But it was funny and everybody laughed. That was the best thing everybody just laughed. They laughed till they cried. They would play them again and again and laugh.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, she did with an inching needle, she said I'd have done a knitting needle. I'd have got rid of you. You know, I mean, this is dark stuff.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I told you we loved each other dearly, but the cruelty on screen of somebody who hates a child so much she would have aborted it is quite strong stuff, and it had never been done in a comedy before.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this is Jennifer, you see she wrote it all, I just did it. Some of the things I used to just go We can't do that, you know, my prim convent girl would go we can't do that, but of course we could Like what? What did you like? Oh, I can't remember some of the remarks they'd make the cruel the cruelty The cruelty to Sapphie was just incredible, you know.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I just may have been Iran McShane's squeeze in Lovejoy. I'd been doing quite a lot of theatre. I'd done Blythe Spirit in the West End and I'd done vanilla for Harold Pinter in the West End. So I was doing sort of theatre bits then.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't think I never really thought I couldn't do anything actually. That's not being vain. I mean, comedy was so much laughing hysterically was so much part of one's life.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me there, Joanna. Perhaps he never wanted to smile full face because she'd based her whole smile on Elvis' sort of Elvisley or Snooze like that, and so if she laughed she'd just go'cause she just adored Elvis, as I do, as most of the world does. It's as hard to do as Elvis as it is to do.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think music is really for, you know, pop music is kind of for the young, and I think that as you grow older you grow out of it. When I was at school with these ghastly spots and this irredeemably dreadful hair, but the heart, very light. By the time I was about twelve, thirteen, fourteen and looking at my most repellent, Elvis sang this song called The Girl of my Best Friend. I thought probably he was singing about me. Somehow I was going up with his best friend a likely tale, and that I'd overlooked Elvis in some extraordinary way. I mean, the fantasy of this is that Elvis was too shy even to speak to me, his chosen one who had lovely hair and skin most fair. This song absolutely breaks my heart that Elvis can't pluck up the courage to ask me out. I just love him for it.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't commutingly rises up in me, that creaking sounds me clipping my ancient hair clip back into my hair. It wasn't my bones as I moved, Kirsty. I must have warned you about that. Commodulally, only for a second, and then I cover commodally with utter and absolute love my job every day is smiling and loving people, and which I do, and I find that the more I smile, the more I love people, the happier I am and the happier they are.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's quite middle class of another age qualities. They are quite old-fashioned, but they were in the 60s, you see, we hadn't any money, so we all had to make our own dresses and do those things. I mean, it sounds pathetic now, but that's the way it was. I think it's so boring to talk about labels sticking off your clothes. I hate this thing of cutting yourself off from the world. Cyclists, people walking, people running are just tuned into some inner thing. They don't hear anything. They don't say good morning. I often say good morning to them when they run past. You can't even hear me.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“while I was renting a flat, so lots of people who are much richer than you go, Oh gosh, these school fees. And I thought, well, if you save up your money and just put it into a kind of bag and then take it down to the bursa, which I used to do and tip it out and we'd count it together and have a glass of sherry, that would be the next Really? Yeah, and I found it was fine and I mean we didn't have we didn't have a dishwasher or washing machine, we didn't have holidays, we didn't have all the stuff that people think you would need we did without those things.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I love it. No, I like the danger at the acting profession, the circus quality of it that you pack up and leave town, the dogs bark, the caravans move on. I love the feeling that we never know. The second out of the job stops, the curtain comes down for the last time, you clear your things out of the dressing room, you're out of work. What we do next, will it be big or small? But usually I got something, and usually I could turn it round to my advantage and enjoy it.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortune didn't come with that show because we weren't very well paid for it. But what it did mean was that nobody ever had to ask who I was anymore. Then I went into sapphire and steel and that the first time was the first time ever in my life I was out of the red and into the black on my bank pounds.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I struggled for that. I think they looked at about two hundred and something girls, and my name wasn't even on the list, and I had to beg, beg, beg to even see them, and they kind of looked at me doubtfully and I said, I just beg you to test me. And they gave me the test and gave me the part.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Procini's great peace when the terrifying crowd in China are saying perquitar de la Luna, why is the moon so late? And they want the moon to arrive so that bloodthirsty crowd, the first execution of the night can take place, which can only take place by moonlight, and every night wandering on the beach, as the sun went, the last strips of the light went, then blackness Perqueta La Luna, where is the moon?”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the island as the day progresses and you've had the intense heat and you've lain if you're lucky under a banana palm and slept a bit. And then the evening begins to come and you're anxious about your fire you want to settle into the night prepared because once it's night time you don't want to use up your torch battery because it might disappear. You've probably only got one candle and that's going to gutter out. So you want to get things prepared in the daylight and you pray for the moon. And on the island every night I think because Stephen, my husband, was conducting Turundot at the time.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they probably had much rougher home lives than I had. I had the most supportive family and friends. And to have your own baby and to know that for the rest of your life you've got something so wonderful inexplicably brilliant to look forward to and to work for. So this is just fantastic. So you then have to take any job you get. So I was everybody's girlfriend I'd kind of got my way into films and knew that I could throw myself into anything.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was put in a private room because they said it might upset the other families if they saw me on my own without being visited by a man I mean extraordinary but Jamie was in a little intensive care place because he was so ill and so tiny so I was never so I just wandered about and then eventually left hospital getting thinner and thinner and looking in at my baby where I wasn't allowed to touch so it was quite a sort of strange time and I thought this is the very minute to stop modelling and to start this is a division in my life when I could start my new career as an actress.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where my parents were absolutely brilliant, and Jamie arrived very early and wasn't detected, as it were, until very late in the pregnancy, so I had an amazingly short pregnancy about a month and a half of knowing I was pregnant.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through a variety of things. Hair was going all every colour under the sun. Gold stockings, they didn't have very many coloured eyeshadow. So I used to make red eyelids with lipstick and powder it down and many, many layers of eyelashes, two or three sets of false eyelashes, false hair pieces, cascades of hair, skirts hardly covering your pants, coloured tights, beaver boots.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in a flat chair, yes, four of us sharing a two bedroom flat, and it was the top. I looked out of my window in Earl's court from that flat, and saw Terence stamp walking in the street. I went down the steps so fast we were on the fourth floor, and I just got into the street harp banging, just like a walk past and just go hi, you know, hi. I know him now, I love him now, but I didn't then, and it was so cool, and he grinned at me and said I'm going pink even as I think of it. You are, I think.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was something an immense amount of hope trying to share things, trying to make things better, trying to have peace and love. I mean, these things are extraordinary today. In those days you had to share, you literally shared, and so people would share rooms and beds and spliffs and money and clothes. I mean, everything was shared and there was something very nice about it.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is just quite simply, I might be on the island forever, so you don't know. When Christmas time comes around, you want to celebrate it in some way. This record by wham and George Michael last Christmas is quite simply the best Christmas record ever, ever made. I'm sorry George doesn't like it because George, you're talking in a minority here, sweetheart, because the world adores it. Last Christmas, I gave you my heart.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I hung around the atrocitic pats here I sort of ligged around the edge and I got to know them a bit, and sometimes if you did you go fantastic, you know, madam, you know except of course four of us went to see a Beatles concert at the Hammersmith Odian and we screamed our lungs out we went nearly dead with screaming at the Beatles We behaved like animals we must have been about eighteen or nineteen and old enough to know better”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um it was exciting, it was exciting, it was exciting to go to a nightclub which opened and all the stones and all the beetles were there.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was huge because it was all the peace and love and it was the Beatles, it was a whole it was a hippie way of thinking, it was nobody cared about money, it was almost disgusting to be rich, reading sort of Gurgiev and being seen with a sort of book translated directly from Polish was very chic. Everybody was cool, everybody tried to be cool and clever.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to have injections, yes. Those got one every day. Goodness knows what they did. I didn't take No, no, no, you were about to go to the doctor and pay him.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You said we weren't anarchistic. There were biscuits at the time called limits. They probably still make them. They were made of cellulose or something. They blew up inside you like some ghastly airbag gradually taking up all your stomach, so you kind of felt terribly full”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, as Fash the Pig, and we all had to starve ourselves. I mean, there was no anorexia in those days. I think I knew one anorexic model. But most of us just kept on struggling into clothes. And I think the lightest ever was eight and a quarter stone. Which is quite light for somebody who's five foot eight. But I'm not eight and a quarter stone now. I'm twelve and a half. No, I'm not. That's a lie. But actually, I've also noticed people don't really mind. If you say you weigh something, they go Gosh, that's fantastic. So just make it up. Just say it.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I didn't. It was my full job, it was my solid day job for about three years. And I was in what's called the top ten in that I was used a lot.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No no I just can't bear people saying no or you're bad. I tear up bad photographs not only of me but of other people. I tear them up I don't want bad stuff around and eventually when I get to read critics who've written about performances I've done the bad ones are there rip them up so they don't exist in my mind I mean of course they do but in history I look back and it says a glorious lambent performance gleaming shining and you go well just save that one I won't have the one that said leaden wooden”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrongly chosen, well, I can't remember one was, I think, from Lady Windermere's fan, a play I'd never read, so a you know, a hint for people who are doing auditions read the play And I thought I'd try at another drama school in case they turned me down, I lose my spirit completely. So I just ran away from acting at that point.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you're so funny. Look at school I was absolutely repellent, I mean I was completely smothered with spots, and my hair was like an army blanket, really kind of rough and frizzly, and sort of lumpin', but we didn't pay very much attention to beauty. I just think we wished we were more beautiful.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't I just think I occasionally looked a bit scowly I was actually immensely happy and very good natured and when I look at pictures of me as a child apart from the odd ones where one's sort of scowling into the sun I'm grinning all the time my teeth getting bigger and bigger”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever since when all around the world wherever we were, and originally it was on wind up gramophones, we had music, and my mother was passionate about Mozart, Beethoven, Devorj, you know, the gorgeous ones, but the earliest pieces of music I can ever remember were Beethoven six and seven, and so I thought I'd like to take a piece of Beethoven seventh, the lively jumping piece. Beethoven is stitched into my heart so much that sometimes I think I must have composed the music myself”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I discovered acting actually out in malaria in Malaysia. Tales here at the Army School when I played a queen with a crown on her. I thought this is the business. It isn't that you like the centre of attention. I just sort of thought this is rather. an excellent occupation. I think it was the adrenaline rush that was quite exciting.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was extraordinary because it was a change of everything, a change away from home, away from my parents, although my sister was at the boarding school with me. I was very homesick for a bit, but homesick is like stage fright you get over it. You have to get over it, and everybody was at boarding school at the boarding school you're at, except the second, both of them had day girls. We used to like the day girls because they could sneak us in bits of food or stuff like that, and in fact, at my second boarding school which was a convent, a very decent day girl brought us in some mice which we could keep in our blazer pockets. I kept mine for a whole term she was called Reaper Cheap.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything very vivid, the extremes of temperature very, very hot, well not temperature, but very hot, very black at night, sunset coming, rather like on my desert island, exactly at six thirty, like a light being switched off, the sun set in a blaze of colour and then blackness, the sounds of night, the great sounds of birds, the torrential afternoon rainstorms, the vivid colours, the heavy smell of flowers, and intense blinding heat. And it was quite strange to come back, eventually to England when I was eight, to softness of England in the middle of summertime with cuckoos and hedges tumbled with soft flowers and roses and blossom.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was born in India in Kashmir and Suranaga, and I was born the year before partition, so I don't remember it because I was born in forty six and by forty seven all the British had to leave India. But my father was with the Gurkha regiment. Both my parents had been brought up in India. So Britain was always called home, but we didn't have a home here, and so after India we went out to Malair, and Malair is really my first sense of where home was. I felt I was I thought I was Malay and I thought I belonged there.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um because I was brought up in the first And so the sea became an immense part of one's life you're on it all the time, and I've had the greatest respect for men who go down to the sea and ships, and this piece of music I heard sung by a boy called Yesteron Edwards so beautifully and I'd never heard it before it's a lament called Tom Bowling and Charles Dibdin wrote it at the end of the eighteenth century he was a young sailor about his older brother who died out in the East Indian Ocean and it's the most beautiful lament for a sailor that I've ever heard makes me weep every time.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was brought up to be Stoke. You have moments during the day which are very reflective and pensive, sometimes gloomy, sometimes you do get sort of homesick and think I wonder how long I can take this. Other times when you feel completely jubilant and think I'm in paradise.”
2007-05-13 · Desert Island Discs · Joanna Lumley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source