Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a singer at the age of 14 she defied her father and forsook the pleasures of the local church choir in Manhattan for a career on the stage.

It's a career that's lasted more than 60 years and made her the toast of Paris, London and New York.

She's made famous such songs as Love for Sale, Solomon and Stormy Weather

in Cabaret musicals and one woman shows.

She's acted in film and stage plays too.

Exotic in looks, precise and polished in her musical phrasing,

she can at the age of 81 look back on a life in which new audiences have always

come to love her as the old ones died away. She is Elizabeth Welsh. Elizabeth that

makes you sound something like a survivor anyway. Is that how you feel?

A veteran as they put it sometimes which really ages you. But it's amazing the people

that you've known that the list is very impressive isn't it from Picasso and Cocto to Paul Robeson and

Noel Coward. Do you feel as if they were all of another age or are they still very much part of

Oh no they're part of me. They're part of me. My life is all one sort of thing.

Do you sometimes feel you're the only one of them left as you were?

Well I'd, with a laugh. I mean I don't do it seriously. I like to laugh, you know, and and everything I mean even at my age everybody

says why do you tell them I said well everybody knows so what's it you can't lie

unfortunate so age is kind of irrelevant to you? Absolutely.

Why?

Why doesn't it bother you?

I don't know, it never has.

...