BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Deser Island Disks Podcast.

Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them

if they were cast away to a desert island.

And for right reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.

I hope you enjoy listening.

My cast away this week is the actor Richard E. Grant.

He took his first steps into the limelight in school plays while growing up in Eswatini,

then called Swaziland during the dying days of colonial rule.

Opportunities to pursue his vocation there were limited, so he moved to London, rented a bedset

and took a job in a restaurant. After waiting tables and biting his time, he bagged the part

of a lifetime. The title role in With nail and eye. His big screen debut began a wave of success

that continues to this day. In the last few years alone, he's been Oscar nominated for his

performance in the Black Comedy Can You Ever Give Me, played a dastardly sith general in Star Wars,

the Rise of Skywalker and Drag Queen Local Chanel, in everybody's talking about Jamie.

Offscreen, here's a lifelong diarist, but dislikes keeping secrets, which may explain both why

three collections of his writing have been published and their critical acclaim.

He is as frank about the depth of his grief after the loss of his beloved wife,

John, as he is about his enduring appetite for the acting life. He says,

I'm always excited by a new job. That's never gone away, and I think the day it does is the day

you have to hang up your tights and put away your makeup. Richard E. Grant, welcome to Desert Islanders.

Thank you very much. What a privilege to be on here. Honestly, I've listened to it ever since

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