Hello I'm Krestey 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 2007. My cast away this week is the actor Simon Russell Beel.

Critics are torn over their descriptions of him. To some he is the greatest

stage actor in Britain today, to others merely the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation.

Whichever it is, when he's cast in a play it invariably

sells out, the audience is spellbound, and the reviewers smitten.

Yet it initially seemed as if music was his calling,

a choir boy at St Paul's, he won a singing scholarship to Cambridge and went on to study at the Guild Hall School of Music.

A collaborator by nature he seems happiest when pushed to new heights by others who are already confident of his talents.

Sam Mendez is his great stage mentor.

So Simon Russell Beel initially was an English teacher who spotted your talent.

What happened? Brian Worthington was a great spotted your talent. talent. Yes.

Brian Worthington, who was a great teacher and a very strict teacher and a very puritanical intellect.

And in fact not a great level of the theatre, actually, a a professional theatre I think he'd forgive me for saying that

I met him when I went to senior school when I was 13 and he cast me his Desdemona and

started the whole thing of I didn't start the whole thing about Shakespeare, but he got me to fall in love with Shakespeare.

How did you look as Desdemona? Oh, gosh, I should, I should, I should think. Unwatchable. I think I had there was a review in the school paper that said he makes

up in clarity what he lacks in feminine charm or something I can't remember what it was

something like that and he realized then that that was where your future lay.

Did he sort of spot the talent from the very beginning?

Well, as I said, he wasn't a great fan of professional theatre, so it was a bit of a surprise when I did my own levels as they were in those

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