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.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. the My castaway this week is the director, producer and writer Louis Gilbert.

He has spent 70 odd years in the movie business with his credit rolling on no less than 38 feature films,

but it's the quality as much as the quantity that's striking.

Reach for the sky, Alfie, the spy who Loved Me, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, are some of his most notable hits.

It all began way back in silent films when he was a child actor. The fact is since the age of four I've been in the business of entertainment he says and I knew that entertainment was where I belonged.

I'm wondering Lewis Gilbert how you knew that you belonged in entertainment.

What was it about the business that spoke to you?

Well I never knew anything else from birth.

For the first four years of my life I toured around

England with my father's Vaudeville Act and I stood at the side of the stage. My grandmother

had ten children and she put every one of them into Vaudeville.

They're all different acts.

It made me very conscious of being in show business. Can you remember the first time that you stepped

out yourself in front of a live audience? Yes I can remember very very well, because in a way it changed my life.

I used to stand at the side of the stage and watch other acts.

And one day the trick cyclist said to me, you see that little car over there,

would you like to drive it around the stage? And I said, oh, I would love that. I was only

about five, but I thought that would be wonderful and he said

okay well when I come off you go on and I did that well the audience went mad they

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