Hello, I'm Kesti Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolli.

My cast away this week is an actress. She's been at the forefront of her profession for more than 30 years.

Apart from appearing in many distinguished theatre productions,

she won the Evening Standard Best Actress Award last year,

she's also written Screenplays and was the creator with her friend Jean Marsh of both upstairs downstairs and House of Elliott.

She's also famous in the United States for performances in her own adaptation of the works of Virginia Woolf.

All this from a woman whose childhood was made miserable by a mother who dressed her up as a latter-day Shirley Temple

and forced her to waggle her bottom in working men's clubs.

I am a vessel through which people speak, she says.

As long as I'm acting, I'm happy. She is Eileen Atkins.

The most recent person to speak through Eileen is Alan Bennett in talking heads.

One of his recent talking heads on BBC 2.

Who were the antique dealer who sold the scrap of Michelangelo for £100?

Are his creations easy to slip into? Are they easy to fit?

Oh yes, very.

I think the wonderful thing about Alan is that actually there's a link with Virginia Woolf because she said that men weren't interested in the thoughts of a woman in a drawing room.

And that is really what he's writing.

Exactly what he does, isn't it?

And do you have to like that person in order to be able to play?

She wasn't a particularly likeable woman.

You know the first thing he said to me was she's a horrible woman, Eileen.

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