Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela,

Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.com.ukes slash Radio 4. My castaway this week is the Oscar-winning actor, writer and director Tim Robbins.

His film credits include the Shawshank Redemption,

Dead Man Walking, the Hudsucker proxy and Mystic River. Brought up in an artistic and

creative household in New York's Greenwich Village, he was always encouraged to sing and perform, and after

talking politics around the dinner table as a teenager, he would on occasion spend his evenings working the lights for the local drag act.

Indeed, it was on stage rather than in front of the camera that Tim Robbins developed his own acting style.

It gave me a discipline to still the anarchic energy I had, he says.

A rigid discipline to an emotional truth and the ability to have that at my

fingertips. What a very interesting quote that is, Tim Robbins. Can you unpack it a little bit

for us? To have it at your fingertips, you can sort of call it up, can you, when you wish, on

camera, this emotional truth? Well, it has to do with the specific training I got from a man named

George Begoe, who was an actor from the Teatro de Soleil in Paris. And I took a workshop with him in

1984, and I was already a working actor at that time, and I couldn't get on stage. He would throw me off stage every time I tried

to enter and he would not suffer any kind of insincerity. What were you doing then that encouraged

him to throw you off stage? Well, I would be entering without a full image and a full commitment to

an emotion. How tricky is that in, given that as I understand it,

the nature of movie making is that you stop and you start

and the lights right and then the director of photography

...