Miriam Margolyes

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2008

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's guest on Desert Island Discs this week is the actress Miriam Margolyes. Her rich career has seen her work with directors such as Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann and she's won awards and acclaim for her film work, her theatre performances and her book readings. She made the leap from the Cambridge Footlights to become one of our most successful and popular character actresses. Yet, despite having one of the most sought after voices in the business, she says she hasn't had the career that she aspired to. She yearned to be taken more seriously and given meatier roles but, she jokes, Joan Plowright always stood in her way. On stage she seems to have the confidence and chutzpah of someone who is beyond embarrassment - but in reality, she says, for most of her life she has simply been a 'frightened little muffin'.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The opening of the Fourth movement of the Trout Quintet by Franz Schubert Book: Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens Luxury: A flush toilet.

Transcript

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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 2008. My castaway this week is Miriam Margulies. The term character actress could well have been coined just for her.
0:34.0	She has spent a career bringing fruity, rich, full-bodied individuals to our screens,
0:39.0	with more than 40 movie credits to her name,
0:42.0	and her extraordinary ear for dialect and dialogue
0:45.1	has earned her a place as the busiest voice in the business. She has spent a
0:49.4	lifetime not just working hard but dealing too with the disappointment that she's not the most
0:54.2	important person on earth. She has her doting parents to blame for that particular
0:58.5	delusion. They were a family so wrapped up in each other, she says, that the outside world had almost no emotional significance for me.
1:07.0	Miriam Marglies, I'm wondering then if you're over that, not being the most important person in the world.
1:12.0	I hope I am because I'd be a really damaged
1:14.2	creature if I weren't, but I do still think sometimes that I should be treated
1:20.0	better. I mean it's taken a jolly long time to get onto Desert Island discs, so I'm really
1:25.4	glad to be here because it is a mark of having arrived at something.
1:28.4	Indeed, well you're here now, so let's enjoy it. And what about this volume of work that you turn out?
1:33.0	Are you just a girl who can't say no to work?
1:35.0	Well, under certain circumstances.
1:40.0	I don't know.
1:41.0	I, it never seems to me that I have the career that I want but I think all
1:45.6	actors say that I'm not I'm not happy with with what I've given to the world I'm so
1:50.7	surprised that you say that no honestly I I think I'm so surprised that you say that. No, honestly, I think I'm underused and undervalued and and perhaps slightly despised.
	...

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