Monica Dolan, actor

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Monica Dolan is a BAFTA and Olivier award winning actor. She is equally at home playing a wrongfully accused postmistress in Mr Bates Vs the Post Office as she is playing the serial killer Rosemary West. Alongside her many roles in TV, stage and screen, Monica has also written and performed in her award winning one woman play B*easts.

Born in 1969, Monica was the youngest of four children and was brought up in Woking. Her parents were Irish and had studied science and came to the UK in the early sixties. It was a very academic family and Monica found her passion for drama when she joined a teenage acting group. She went on to study drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Since leaving drama school, she has had a very successful career and is known for her ability to master different accents and dialects. When she played the press officer, Tracy Pritchard in the comedyW1A, her Welsh accent was so convincing viewers thought she really was Welsh.

Her critically acclaimed career on TV stage and screen has seen her portray the fictional evil Anne Branson in BBC 1’s Sherwood, which earned her another BAFTA nomination. During the COVID pandemic, she gave a mesmeric performance as a grieving widow in The Shrine by Alan Bennett and because of restrictions at the time was her own makeup artist and costume designer.

Monica lives in London with her beloved husky, Velma.

DISC ONE: The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana) - The Banana Splits DISC TWO: That's Entertainment - The Jam DISC THREE: Nothing - Priscilla Lopez (as Diana Morales), A Chorus Line Orchestra, conducted by Don Pippin DISC FOUR: Love and Affection - Joan Armatrading DISC FIVE: MacArthur Park - Richard Harris DISC SIX: The Night - Diane Chorley DISC SEVEN: Us Amazonians - Kirsty MacColl DISC EIGHT: South American Getaway (From "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid") - Burt Bacharach BOOK CHOICE: Encyclopedia of Flora and Fauna LUXURY ITEM: A walk-in wardrobe CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Love and Affection - Joan Armatrading

Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Sarah Taylor

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.
0:09.0	In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?
0:16.0	Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.
0:20.0	A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by
0:23.1	their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,
0:28.6	Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Nvern, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4.
0:41.6	Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:49.0	For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
0:56.5	Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
1:00.9	I hope you enjoy listening. My castaway this week is the actor Monica Dolan.
1:25.6	A BAFTA and Olivier Award winner, who is equally at home,
1:28.7	playing a wrongfully convicted postmistress in Mr Bates v. The Post Office, as she is navigating
1:34.0	the court of Henry VIII in Wolf Hall. She's written and performed a critically acclaimed one-woman
1:39.2	show at Edinburgh Festival and brought menacing gangland matriarch Anne Branson in Sherwood chillingly to life.
1:46.5	She's especially good at characters whose apparently ordinary exteriors belie a deeper inner turmoil.
1:52.7	She calls them her cardigan roles, women with cosy knitwear and sensible haircuts who, beneath the surface,
1:58.6	are a seething mass of drama, intrigue, vulnerability and
2:02.1	sometimes pure evil. She was born to Irish parents who'd come to Britain to pursue their work
2:07.2	as scientists and grew up in Surrey, where she dreamed of becoming an actor, secretly withdrawing
2:12.2	her university application to ensure she followed that path. She says, I think imagination is an actor's most useful tool
2:19.7	and truth and authenticity are different things.
2:23.1	Truth is more important.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 24 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

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.