Anne-Marie Duff

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Anne-Marie Duff is a stage and screen actor. Born in 1970 to Irish parents, she grew up in a working class household in west London. A shy child and a voracious reader, she took acting classes from the age of 11, but failed to get into drama school on her first attempt. Her second application to the Drama Centre in London was successful and she's barely been out of work since. She started off on stage, but gained more widespread recognition when she took the role of Fiona Gallagher in Shameless, the acclaimed Channel 4 comedy drama. She has since played dozens of roles, both in the theatre and on screen, which range from Queen Elizabeth I to John Lennon's mother, from a penniless suffragette to a retired police officer with skeletons in the cupboard, and from Joan of Arc to Lady Macbeth on Broadway and at the National Theatre. Her performances have been described as having a "multi-faceted, diamond-hard intensity". Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.6	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.2	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
0:10.5	the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert
0:15.7	island. For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original
0:22.0	broadcast. You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs
0:28.4	website.
0:49.9	My cast away this week is the actor and Marie Duff. Most people in her profession spend a lot of
0:54.9	time out of work. She is very clearly not most people. Her role call of parts is abundant and
1:01.1	anguish-laden, whether it's playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway, Elizabeth I on the BBC or
1:06.0	Joan of Arc at the National Theatre. Her work rate and the characters she inhabits are formidable.
1:12.5	The seeds of her ambition took root in what appears at first glance to be unlikely soil,
1:17.0	a grey breeze block councillor state in suburban West London, where her Irish parents had
1:22.0	settled to try to make a living and a life. Then again, maybe it was her upbringing, which she
1:27.4	describes as rich in fun and love that gave her the confidence to pursue the precarious ambition
1:33.2	of pretending to be other people. She says, I came from a very working class background
1:38.7	and the idea that you could make more of yourself through culture that it could give you wings
1:44.0	was just phenomenal to me. I love that expression that it could give you wings. And do you feel changed
1:49.2	when you've been through especially a part that does require so many of your parts seem to
1:53.4	plumbing those emotional depths? Yeah, I guess you do. You come out feeling like you'd
1:56.8	had a sort of Turkish massage. Do you? Are you a superstitious person? Do you have rituals before
2:02.1	you go on stage? I am fantastically superstitious. I know it's not fashionable to say it, but I am
	...

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