Bill Nighy

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2004

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

This week Sue's castaway is the award winning actor Bill Nighy. Originally from Caterham in Surrey, he left school at 15 without any qualifications and ended up working at his local employment office. He hoped to become an author and began work on The Field magazine as a messenger boy, but then ran away to Paris at seventeen to write a novel. This venture failed and he ended up begging on the streets before returning to Britain and the Guildford School of Drama and Dance.

His first film role was as a delivery boy in Joan Collins' steamy film The Bitch. He's featured in numerous stage, TV, and radio dramas including the acclaimed Men's Room in 1991 and, more recently, in State of Play, where he played a newspaper editor. His career has been described by some critics as a slow burn rather than a beacon, although he's now widely recognised as achieving the acclaim he deserves. In February he won Best Supporting Actor at the Baftas for his role as Billy Mack, a washed up singer in the film Love Actually.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Winter by The Rolling Stones Book: 1st edition of 49 Stories by Ernest Hemingway Luxury: Boxed set of blues harps (harmonicas) and instruction book

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an actor, his laconic world-weary style has been most recently on view in the film Love,
0:37.0	actually, where his performance as an aging rock star carried off several awards.
0:41.0	It's a success born of a long career. He learned his
0:44.5	trade at the Liverpool every man, made his first film 25 years ago and has played a
0:49.6	succession of distinguished roles on the television and stage, particularly at the
0:54.0	National Theatre. This thoroughly exemplary CV comes with a running commentary
0:59.2	from its self-deprecating owner. Acting, he once said, is a kind of legitimised loafing.
1:05.0	He sums it all up with the view that he has a nice relationship with the world.
1:08.8	I've been vaguely familiar for some time, he says, and it's gone up a notch or two in the past 12 months.
1:14.0	What's wrong with that?
1:16.0	He is Bill Nye.
1:17.0	Nothing wrong with that at all, Bill.
1:19.0	Indeed, I mean, your role as Billy Mack in the tight trousers and the aging rock star in
1:25.1	Love Actually has been a delight to us or it was a gift of a park wasn't it?
1:29.1	Yeah it was a great day when you get a Richard Curtis script through the door you know you're in
1:33.4	business and then when you discover that that particular part belongs to you it's a
1:37.1	red letter day. But you stole the show I mean you won all these awards including
1:41.2	a BAFSA and and all those other people starring alongside you and Alan Rickman Hugh Grant indeed
1:46.2	you eclipsed even Hugh Grant.
1:48.4	I don't quite think of it in that way myself but I did have a very good part with some
	...

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