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Can you remember the last time you blushed?

Cast your mind back to that embarrassing moment

when you felt the heat spread across your face and you wish the ground would swallow

you up? Do you think you could fake it? Could you force a blush on command? In an 1895 review, the playwright George Bernard Shaw describes witnessing the performance

of an actress who had just mesmerized him.

He wrote, she began to blush, and in another moment she was conscious of it and the blush was slowly spreading and deepening

until she gave up and hid the blush in her hands.

It sounds as Shaw describes it almost like a creeping self-hypnosis and that remarkable

display of getting right inside a character and a moment was by the Italian actress

Eleanor Adduce. A name and she was the first woman ever to appear

on the cover of Time magazine a name that few of us today may recognize and I love

that I love it when we can bring into the light a life

that has been hidden from us. My guest joining me to discuss Dusa's life has

directed operas at Glinebourne, won two Olivia awards for her theatrical performances,

starred as the ghastly Mrs. Dursley and Harry Potter, and more recently won a Bafter for her portrayal of the MI6 agent Carolyn Martins in

Killing Eve the actress Fiona Shaw. Fiona why do so? Well I think you've touched on it actually.

Your acting is the most nebulous, precarious job, but it's also the most dubious art

because there have been two strands of it I suppose have come down in the

20th century and the far more famous Bernhardt has a life that went way past her death like Mary Monroe. She was a very

very famous person in death. But I think the greater actress was Eleanor

Duthier and I think it's because she had built into her own greatness, her own

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