Jane Horrocks
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 October 2006
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Jane Horrocks. She specialises in unconventional, complex roles - from the eccentric secretary Bubble in the cult sit-com Absolutely Fabulous to a bulimic teenager in Mike Leigh's film Life is Sweet. But the role that brought her the greatest public recognition and critical acclaim was Little Voice. Written especially for her, it told the story of a cripplingly shy girl who only finds liberation and expression when she takes on the voices of musical legends. Jane Horrocks's ability to sing like Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe, among others, was so convincing that the film's credits had to make it clear she had sung every note and not been dubbed by the originals.
The film had parallels with Jane's own life - as a shy school-girl, she too had discovered her facility for copying voices and would entertain family and friends with her portrayals of Shirley Bassey and Julie Andrews. She says that as soon as she found her gift she used it to win friends - and knew she had discovered her niche in life.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: I Miss You by Björk Book: Jamie's Dinners by Jamie Oliver Luxury: The Essential Family Cookbook
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006. My cast away this week is actress Jane Horrocks. In the film The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, her on-screen transformation |
| 0:35.5 | from cripplingly shy northern teenager to a succession of show-stopping Hollywood divas, transfixed both audiences and critics. Her ability to metamorphose into Dietrich, |
| 0:46.4 | Garland, Monroe and the rest were so entire that the movie's credits had to make it clear that she |
| 0:51.6 | had sung every note and hadn't been dubbed by the originals. |
| 0:55.8 | She seems to specialise in the quirky and complex. |
| 0:59.5 | For ten years she was the brainless bubble in the cult sitcom Absolutely Fabulous and her |
| 1:04.5 | experience playing an unconventional Lady Macbeth on stage left her so drained that |
| 1:09.2 | she's vowed to never do Shakespeare again. Jane Horrocks, what is it about these larger than life, |
| 1:15.0 | pretty extreme characters that so appeals to you? |
| 1:18.0 | I think I've always been attracted to quirky people in general actually. It's more interesting as an actor to play |
| 1:25.3 | somebody who's a bit larger than life or who's a bit different or off the wall. I've |
| 1:31.2 | never felt comfortable just plain a sort of ordinary |
| 1:34.9 | an inverted commas person or anything particularly close to me. |
| 1:39.4 | Would that be because you relate to Qu? I mean, are you quirky? |
| 1:43.2 | I think I am quite quirky to a certain extent, |
| 1:46.4 | although I've probably got less or as I've got older. |
| 1:49.6 | I just enjoy playing though. |
| 1:50.8 | I think you can invest such a lot in those characters and I think it's nice to give |
| 1:54.8 | them a voice as well. It seems in Little Voice that you almost become the legend |
| 2:00.9 | when you're doing these great divas on screen. How do you manage that? What's the process? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.