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

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

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Radio 4. the My castaway this week is Emma Thompson, a study and 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 Thompson it is basically grows a beard. It's very unusual to hear

any woman 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 was, I don't think I am considered a beauty in that sense.

I've always thought of myself as a character actress

so I'm 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 and is able to do all the things that

the rest of us can't be one of us really.

I think that I encountered the possibility earlier

on you know when all the Oscar Huhar was happening of living in another way, should we say, you know, people would say,

well why don't you come out to Los Angeles and have your own company and things like that.

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