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 Krista 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 2009.

Music My castaway this week is Whoopi Goldberg, a successful actor, comic and producer.

She made her name in the colour purple and won her Oscar for Ghost.

It was bound to happen.

Even as a child, she used to practice making acceptance speeches,

and today she's one of only a handful of people to have won an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony and Emmy awards. Yet despite her success, she is perhaps an uncomfortable role model. The only person

she wants to please, she says, is herself. An observant and quick child, she was also headstrong. She married young, had a child early. Then she wrote her own sketch show. It found its way onto Broadway and her career was launched. I was in the right place at the right time, seen by the right person, she says. And spectacular things happened. Well, they surely did, with you, Goldberg.

You were seen by the right person back in, what was it, the 1980s,

and that right person was Stephen Spielberg.

Is it right?

Did you do a sort of private performance for him?

Yes.

What was that?

Tell me about that.

I'm intrigued.

He asked if I would mind bring in the Broadway show to him, and since it was just me, it felt like it would be

all right. So I went and before I went in, they said to me, now we want you to do whatever you

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