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 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is one of Britain's great character actresses.

She's been in the business for as long as she's lived, having first appeared on the stage at the age of eight weeks.

She's appeared in a hundred films and played in countless theatres from the Royalty

Morecombe to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. In recent years her talent has come to be

enjoyed by an even wider audience. This year Bafter voted her best television actress for her performance in the

Alan Bennett play A Cream Cracker Under the Satie. She comes from Lancashire, but you can find

her characters everywhere.

She is Thora Heard.

A member of equity at eight weeks were you Thora?

Oh no, not really.

No, my mother was in a play that was being directed or they called it produced in those days far back by my father

and she was playing the village maid who had been done wrong by the squire's son so I suppose

I played the unfortunate result, but I was eight weeks old and

my dad was about 40 years ahead in the business truthfully so he was and he wouldn't have a baby

with a wooden head in a shawl that might knock on the scenery anything like that you know and he just said to my mother take her on and I can honestly say it was the first and only job I've ever got through influence.

We'll talk more about your life in a second, but tell me first about you,

Thora, on a desert island, because I have this vision of you being a bit like

Doris in a cream cracker under the city sitting there kind of bemoaning your

fate? Well I wouldn't bemoan with fate because that was Doris and I'm not a bemoan but I would really hate it so because I don't I'm not very fond of my own company and I'm usually surrounded anyway so if there were flowers on this famous island or nice pebbles I would

...