Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela,

Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the programme, please visit BBC.co.com.ukes slash Radio 4. My castaway this week is Emma Thompson.

A study in overachievement.

She is a world-class writer and actress, who

appears to have pulled off that rare trick of being both a star and one of us. Despite both her parents

and her sister being in the business, theirs was not an actory home. We didn't perform at dinner,

she says. We just talked. It was a normal family in that sense.

And these days, she famously keeps her brace of Oscars in the downstairs Lou, still lives across the

road from her mum and holidays in a wee cottage in Scotland, where she and her husband spend a third of

the year, digging in like a pair of old potatoes, she says, whilst she basically

grows a beard. Emma Thomas, it is basically grows a beard. It's very unusual to hear any women

admit to that, but certainly somebody who is a beauty and an actress and somebody who trades to a large

extent on the way that they look on screen. How much do you try not to be preoccupied by how you look?

I try hard not to be. I do.

And indeed, I don't think I am considered a beauty in that sense.

I've always thought of myself as a character actress.

So in a sense, I've got much less to lose.

The one of us thing, certainly the press and even some normal people in the public are

suspicious of that because they think that somebody who is as accomplished and as creative

...