Hello, I'm Christy 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 1978, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Our castaway this week is an actress, a Hollywood star in the great days of the film city.

It's Joan Fontaine. Joan, you're no stranger to London, of course.

In fact, you are half English, aren't you?

I want you to take that whole thing back, a Hollywood star.

I was at actress in the theatre first, and I resent being called a movie queen,

and I'm now an author. I am English, I'm all English.

Your father was a Cambridge Rowan Blue.

He wasn't he, no clever of you to know.

Harold, all that, my mother was Royal Academy of Dramatic Art,

and she taught music at the Reading University.

Yes, she had a beautiful, contralto voice,

and so when I was a child, I heard his singing, all kinds of lovely things.

So I'm musical in respect and devotion to my mother,

and I inherited my father's tin ear.

What's the first record you've chosen to take to this island?

Well, I've chosen because I grew up in a part of Northern California,

where you who'd even anyone was a child,

and I vaguely remember meeting him.

He lived very close to us, and the first time I ever saw him,

...