Penelope Wilton

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2008

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Penelope Wilton. Her first love is the theatre and she's been highly acclaimed for her stage work in plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare, Beckett - she relishes and shines in the difficult roles. Yet as one of our leading classical actresses she has no qualms about turning her talents to TV and film - Calendar Girls, Shaun of the Dead and Dr Who are among her more recent on screen appearances.

In-spite of being one of our best regarded actresses she is intensely private, intent upon disappearing into the lives of her characters. Penelope says that thing about being an actor is that you turn into other people, you have to hide yourself a bit in order to let that other person come out. People should see the character on the stage, not the actor.

Penelope grew up the middle of three girls and says that her mother was frail and often ill - she says this taught her to be self contained: "I was always worried that I would hurt her by taking a different view so one was sort of being terribly amenable - well of course that’s not in one's nature, I’m quite sharp and rather argumentative."

Favourite track: The 2nd movement of String Quintet in C Major by Franz Schubert Book: An anthology of 20th Century European poetry Luxury: An open-air cinema with a selection of films

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 the actress Penelope Wilton. Her first love is the
0:31.3	theatre.
0:32.3	Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare, Beckett, the difficult roles,
0:35.6	are the ones she relishes and shines in.
0:38.2	Yet as one of our leading classical actresses she has no qualms about turning her talents to TV and film.
0:43.0	Calendar girls, Sean of the Dead, and Doctor Who are among her more recent on-screen appearances.
0:49.0	And in spite of being one of our best regarded performers, she is intensely private, intent upon disappearing into the lives of her characters.
0:57.0	She says the thing about being an actor is that you turn into other people.
1:01.0	You have to hide yourself a bit in order to let that other person come out.
1:06.0	Hide yourself then because too much knowledge about you gets in the way of people understanding the part or because you rather prefer this veil of privacy?
1:15.0	Well I suppose it's a bit of both really but professionally I think if people know your inside leg
1:22.0	measurement they're going to say, when they see you, they say, oh, look, there's
1:25.5	Penelope Wilton in that part. I think it's more interesting if they see the play first rather than me. That's one of the reasons and the other reason is I don't
1:35.2	make a great thing of being private, it's just that's how I am and it has its difficulties sometimes doing
1:41.4	something where you get up on a stage and act, or you're in front of a
1:45.9	camera and you're being photographed, and you're not really like that as a person particularly.
1:51.7	So it's obviously something funny in me. I have these two things
1:56.0	going along side by side. The basic belief that people have at a very crude level of
2:01.2	acting is that it is a bit of showing off and if you quite like showing off and getting up on a stage
2:05.8	Why in house would you be private? I suppose that's the thing that that people
	...

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