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 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is an actor, the son of a New York lawyer, he says he knew early on he was a good actor and thought he might be a great one.

Success, if not quite greatness, followed fast, and before the age of 30 he'd starred in

Jaws, close encounters of the third kind, and won an Oscar for the Goodbye Girl.

Five years later he was out of work, broke and on a drugs charge.

He made his comeback with the hit film Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

Since then, films such as Stakeout, Tin Men and more recently Mr Holland's opus have proved that real stars never die

they just sometimes fade a bit currently fulfilling a lifelong dream starring on

the West End stage he is Richard Dreyfus. Is the reality as enchanting as the dream, Richard, or has the gloss worn off with this long run?

Actually, it's still very present as a fantasy, you know. I go to work every day in this extraordinary theater.

I talk to some ghosts. We put on a show. We look out into this truly magnificent hall and I have no desire to be anywhere else.

Do you look out?

I've noticed at the end of the curtain call somebody brings your glasses on and you shove them on and you

make as if you're just seeing us for the

first time. Yeah I don't do that every night but either something that the audience

does or my own sense of curiosity about their reaction I want to see them because I can't see anything without my

glasses and when I put the glasses on it really is a it's like a Dutch treat

because all of a sudden instead of being blurred figures I see all of these smiles I mean

hundreds of them and there are very few places in the world where you can go these

days to find hundreds of people smiling at you.

It's not as if you've not had the experience before because you've done theatre in the

...