Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1992 and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cast away this week is an actress. At the age of nine, she was asked to recite a sonnet

in front of her school audience. She felt she says as though a light had been switched on.

Twenty-six years later, she's now thirty-five, the light is burning at full power.

She's one of the leading actresses of her generation with a stint at the RSC behind her,

some major roles including Hedgarbler at the National and two other performances which have

brought her greater claim. One is the lead in the film Truly Madly deeply, the other the part of

Paulina in the play Death and the Maiden. She won best actress awards for both. She is Juliet

Stevenson. Juliet, what was that sonnet that turned on the light all those years ago?

What actually happened was that I was, they were deciding who should read what at this event,

some sort of speech day and I think I was being encouraged to read something from Winnie the Poo

or something more appropriate for a nine-year-old but I found this piece of paper picked it up and

I read this poem and it had this last line of every verse which was if I could tell you I would let

you know that was the line it's the only thing I remember and it was it was a poem of such sort

of sadness and sweetness and great maturity I suppose and great passion and I persuaded them to

let me do it. I think that that's all it's always important later on in life when things get so

confused to go back to your very early instincts and that was an early instinct I had born when I

first read that poem that although although I hadn't experienced it although I didn't know

what was involved what the sort of the extent and range of the feelings involved that I could

communicate it and could make other people feel that they had. So was it a case of then from that

...