YouSaid · the spoken record

Penelope Wilton

lines on the record: 51
first: 2008-03-30
most recent: 2008-03-30
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

“Well, in the end, I would choose the Schubert String Quartet and C major because we only heard one little movement of that, but it is something that I have never ever got tired of.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The stars. Yes, I just go out in the evenings, and I don't have to, I can pretend to have, but I could go and sit in quite a nice cinema chair, and watch these films it would take me away from the island because I think I'm going to get pretty bored on that island. So if I can be in the mean streets in San Francisco, and then I can be somewhere in Rome, you know, I'd get about a bit, wouldn't I?”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like a small, open air cinema for one person. I doesn't have to be, you know, air conditioning or anything, just me so I'd have somewhere to go in the evening.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would like an anthology of poetry of the twentieth century, and I would also like not just English poetry, I want Spanish poets and French poets, and Irish poets, and I would like the original language, the language they write in, to be on the opposite side of the page so that I can learn how it sounds in the original.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very happy, and there are days, and there were days when I was just beginning, where I everything was just so wonderful, and this reminds me of that time.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it probably has illuminated because you put into other people things that you don't like to address in yourself, and once you start to own yourself, then you're a much rounder person. That's sort of what I'm getting out of it, I think. I'm of an age now, but I never stop learning things all the time and learning to be better at what I do, hopefully. I've got to do it better not in a sort of competitive way, but with me and the piece. I've got to Give it my best.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll certainly miss them. I'll miss my family of a very big family, and I've got twenty five first cousins. I don't see all of them, but some of them I see a lot of, and my sisters particularly, yes.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Piece of music My next piece of music is Shostakovich's fifth symphony. I heard this piece conducted by Rostovich, who is a great friend of Shostakovich, and at the end of the piece he picked up the score and he kissed it. And it was one of his last concerts at the Barbican, and I felt like doing the same it's the human spirit and the battle. I think it's a wonderful piece, it's also a complicated piece, and I would get to know it very well on this desert island.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he's taught me an enormous amount. He's taught me Great compassion, and also he doesn't tell you how to think. He doesn't take a moral stand. He displays everyone and you make up your own mind, and that's what great writing does. It's been a wonderful career, as far as that goes.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't say oh you've done ever decreasing circles let's write a wonderful series for you, Penelope. I did the work that came along sometimes I didn't actually. In fact I was asked to do a film by Stanley Kubrick in a not a very big part, but I was also asked to play Sonya in Uncle Vanya I preferred you know something to get your teeth into and also the journeys.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't recognised that often, you know. Occasionally I used to be recognised. I was once recognised in budgeons, I think, with my sister, and they came up people come up and touch you, and Linda said to me, Oh, I had no idea so many people had seen Andromache. I don't mind at all people who come across and say how much they'd enjoy your dominion and how flattering is that”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a big hit was that Richard Brown. No, not in the least, I had the best time in the world. I loved doing ever decreasing circles, and I love Richard Briars, and I'm not saying that in I truly love him. He's of one of the goodest people I know, and he's got the best timing, comic timing of any actor I've ever worked with.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it sort of looks like that from the outside, and I suppose indeed it is true I've been working forty years. But within that time there have been little where you thought the phone's never going to ring, and I'm never ever going to work again, so I might as well. think about something else Now, of course, I've been doing it a long time, so if people want what I can offer them, they ask me, and that's what they do.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well no, I really liked working with both of them. They are both wonderful actors, so course I should be so lucky they were both wonderful actors.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is Stevie Wonder singing, isn't she lovely? Because Stevie Wonder had a little girl when Alice was about three The song is for Alice, actually, that's all I can say it's for Alice.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh amazing absolutely amazing and she was beautiful. In fact, she wasn't really, but I thought she was beautiful. When she came out I used to linger outside boots sometimes, thinking people are going to say when she was in the pram, look in and say that is the most beautiful baby I'd ever seen. And nobody did actually”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The entirety of the rest for the rest of the time. And at 30 weeks things started to go wrong, and they said, look, we're going to have to deliver this baby. I thought I can't believe this is happening again,'cause I just got over twenty nine weeks I was really feeling good about it. Alice arrived two pounds nine she's never looked back She had to course stay there for a long time, and I stayed there with her and I went out with my baby at five she was five pounds then”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, Alice Well, I had a little boy actually before, Alice, the little boy was twenty nine weeks and didn't survive. Five months later I was pregnant again, and then of course at twelve weeks I started to have problems, so I had to go into hospital, so I lay there, and I”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes I find very jolly music, very depressing, and extremely sad music, which I think this is very uplifting. I don't know what that says, but that's what I feel about this piece.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't really compare the two in my opinion, because there are great film scripts I know and great films, but it's a director's medium. In the theatre it's the playwright and the actor, and you choose what is seen. You and the writer are there, what he's created. It demands of you, I'm not saying that at the others don't demand of me, but theatre demands of you, and it demands of the people watching you, and it is the most exquisite thing when it works well. It's also the most disappointing thing when it doesn't work well because you put so much into it.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went from Notting Playhouse to the Royal Court with a play by Bernard Shaw called Widowers Houses, Playing Aid, and then I did auditions, and I did a play by Christopher Hampton called The Philanthropist, and then I went on to do another play there west of Sueism, Ralph Richardson.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, he was terribly nice about it when I think, of course, of course I was devastated. I'd practically fainted with the worry of it.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh very wonderful years well because you did a lot of plays, and I was at Nottingham Playhouse run by Stuart Burge, who was the most wonderful man and gave me this job he'd been forced to come and see me at the drama centre playing quite a lot of old ladies by John Blatchley, and I wrote to him every week'cause he'd expressed an interest and no one else had, and finally he gave me a job. I was an assistant stage manager too, which means that you know, make sure all the props are correct and make sure everything's in the right place, and then you walk on as the maid or sometimes you don't, you just on the ASM, so I was an ASM for the entertainer. But Dennis Quilly did it, and I forgot to put the gin in the bottle in the scene when he was supposed to get drunk at the end with his daughter. I mean can you imagine? He had to mime drinking the whole way you did learn enormous about responsibility.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I love jazz, the jazz I can understand, and I love Aragan, I love the way he sings along. Like this while you're playing. And the father of my daughter, Dan Massy, introduced me to Errogana. I'll always be grateful to him for it.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be quite honest with you, Kirsty, that's what we did. We used to draw enormous eyelashes on ourselves. I must have looked extraordinary, but it was great fun.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was, yes. We were all walking around with no shoes on, and throwing flowers at each other, and there was places like Bieber where you went and bought boots up to the top of your thigh, in bright pink and shorts and were”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't get anything from that audition. But actually I did work at the Royal Court a few years later, yes I did. But John Blatchley had said Go out and you do what you want, and I thought yes I'm going to do this. So when I joined Nottingham Playhouse, I I was forever putting false noses on and sort of pot marks, and there was nothing about being glamorous it was all to do with acting and thinking.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and I'd bought a chicken down the King's Road and had a pipe with tobacco in it and my practice skirt, and I plucked a chicken, smoked a pipe, and sang this inordinately long song it has about fifteen verses that goes long, long ago anyhow they allowed me to do it, and at the end there was silence. And then I heard the odd And then I said, and now I'm going to do Peace I wrote myself can you imagine And it's called appreciating Henry Moore I mean how I dared I have not but this school”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is it tough? I was there very early on, I think I was the fourth here, as a break away from the central and it was started by John Blatchley and Yat Malgram, and John Blatchley was a wonderful teacher, but it was also somewhere that wasn't too interested in how you stood in Elizabethan dress, and how you got work, which was a bit of a downer when you came out of drama school, because that's what you wanted was work, and if all you'd been allowed to do was play older ladies, because Penelope you need to have a lower voice and you need to have gravitas. When I came out of drama school, no one had seen me at my own age. But of course I didn't mind that really. It did make you wonderfully brave. I did an audition for the royal court. It was a general audition, it was five minutes, and I said I'm going to do some from Mother Courage, and I'm going to do the great capitulation song.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, it wasn't terribly glamorous. My father had a perfectly ordinary job, and we had a very normal upbringing, but I was aware that it wasn't always easy. It wasn't the glamour of it. I was interested actually, when it finally came in because I suppose I wasn't a very good reader by the hearing things, and I love the spoken word. I found the menace that you find in a lot of plays and the confrontation, and the difficulty of it. I like the difficulty of it.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I always wanted to act really. I remember sitting even at pantomime and younger than that when I was taken by my grandparents, and there was a whoosh of warm air came out at you, and I used to sit in the dark thinking I don't want to be sitting here, I want to be up there. It seemed very warm and very tantalizing up there.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need to do that exactly. My next piece of music is Charles Trenet singing Carestill de Nous Amour. This is really for my mother and by way my father who adored my mother, so she was a great Francophile, and it's rather her time, I think.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not particularly no. I enjoy all the ritual, I'm not sure quite what I believe, but I was brought up with it, so it's sort of very familiar, and rather comforting.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I liked them actually. I was very taken with all people dressing up, of course that's probably why I'm an actor, and I like all the ritual, the incense and the seriousness it all, and those weeping statues and all the sort of mystery which I”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, my mother had been to La Sages, we all had our periods in convents when we were our education, which were the happiest times the nuns always liked, and we're not Catholic, but we went to La Sergees'cause she'd been as a girl, from the convent in Newcastle, to teach English and piano, which she really couldn't play, but she used to learn the lesson before there were only little children she was teaching, and that was before the war, and she'd made friends with a lot of the girls. By the time we came along, Rosemary and myself and Linda, they were all sisters, and it was a quite a strict order, so there was Jessa Marie Elizabeth and all these people, and all been her friends, so we went, and we were au pairs during the day, and we went and learnt French, and we learnt all sorts of things”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I find it really difficult. Its authority really, like doctors or school head mistresses, or someone like that who is going to take you over and over.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I've said that a few times when I was in hospital my mother said to my elder sister Oh do come with me because Penelope gets so cross with me'cause it doesn't suit her to be in hospital. I hate being at a disadvantage like that, you know”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he didn't really know, I didn't know she wasn't very well, but we went for a term to this boarding school, and was an awful place. My sisters laughed, but I'm going to say it didn't suit me to go to boarding school. I didn't like being away, I liked being at home. So”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, oh I was very good at poetry and learning things I liked that and I was sent up for this lambda poetry competition to London. My mother said well we'll get the train back at lunchtime'cause you know. I got through the first one. She was amazed. Then I was sent into another room and did it again and got through that, and they said you've got to come back for the final. So she was astounded and so was I, actually, so in front of all these hundreds of children and schools and people, I got up and said the ship by JC Squire, and won this cup. And then we were going to school the next day, and there were these awful headmistresses, the two of them, Miss Bowen and Miss Bannister, and my mother jumped out of the car and said Here, you see, she can do something.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very badly. I wasn't good at school. I mean I wasn't naughty or anything I just wasn't very good at anything much I was a very late reader and I don't think that the schools I went to quite catered for people who needed help, really.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I've chosen it because it comes from that northern climb and it's those enormous mountains and that enormous scenery. It is deeply romantic. I love it.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were. I mean, she used to lose his temper with him, and he used to laugh. I mean all the time he laughed a lot. I was very, very lucky we had a very happy childhood, apart from mummy being, not terribly strong, but she'd say things to him like, you know, you can't carve the joint in those trousers. And he said And you'd come in and he'd put his swimming trunks on, with his suit on the top, and she hadn't noticed, and she'd suddenly notice, we, of course, hadn't noticed you'd be bringing in whatever through the hatch, you know. And there he was with his swimming trunks on. I mean, he did make us laugh. They were good fun.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, ours lying on a bed as you do as a teenager while she made up and seeing my father, who is a very straightforward, rather sort of sensible businessman who liked rugby football and, you know, all that sort of thing, and I was lying there one day, and she was making up, and I I looked at the bookshelf by my mother's father's side of the bed and it has salar salmon and fly fishing in the south west of Scotland. And then I suddenly saw a book that said Sex and the older woman I was absolutely astounded I said mum, look at that book she said yes, it's no good at all I said Why? She said the older woman is thirty eight So I thought oh well anyhow it was all an astonishment to me we had a lot of laughs at home”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They did, and my mother and her sisters they were all of them very glamorous, and they cared about what they looked like. Do you remember what?”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Type of business That's right. Well, my great-grandfather was a sacred recitalist, and then my grandfather was a film distributor in the northeast, and they went into first of all into the theatre, local theatre in Newcastle, and then some of them went into the films. They were a very good looking, glamorous family, all of them.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To tell you the truth, I've imagined it as a very, very hot place. I don't know why I have to put myself through this, but it's not very comfortable this island. I seem to have been put there as a bit of a punishment. This might fail a great deal about me, who knows. Would you?”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrific walk with your younger sister. I learned it every day. I mean, even in London, we walk around London's parks. The English countryside is unlike any other, I think, and I love it.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music is Elgar's serenade I love walking, and my younger sister and I Linda and I walk a great deal we went up to Northumberland last year and walked all the way down the coast round Bamborough Castle down to sea houses and on English countryside is the most wonderful and Elga's serenade reminds me of England.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was unwell, finally, and died quite young, but I think the feeling we had about her was that she was very delicate. I mean there was something fragile about her. She was a wonderfully amusing woman and full of life, but she used to have to rest a lot. You came home from school and she was having to lie down, you know. There were things like that, so I've always been slightly worried about confrontation. I've been in therapy for a while, so I understand how I was always worried that I would hurt her by taking a different view. So one was sort of being terribly amenable. Well, of course, that's not in one's nature, I'm quite sharp and rather argumentative and rather temperamental, so I had to deal with those things rather quietly to myself. But now as I've got older it's got much easier.”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes I can see that absolutely, but it is a way of expressing itself oneself, I mean like a painter luckily can put everything on a canvas and a writer can write it on in a book or a novel or a play. The only instrument I have is me, my physical body, and my voice and my personality. So that is my instrument, so”
2008-03-30 · Desert Island Discs · Penelope Wilton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source