Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.
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My cast away this week is Emily Watson, one of the most respected character actors of her generation. She began her career on stage, joining the RSC in 1992. Her breakthrough film roles in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and as Jacqueline Dupre in Hilary and Jackie followed a few years later. She was nominated for Academy Awards for both. The Billion Dollar TV Franchise Dune.
If there is a common thread in her work, it might be exploring ideology, hierarchies and power. Her own story starts in London, where during her strict upbringing, she found refuge in books. She refers to herself as a storyteller to this day. She says, I love the sense of creating and inhabiting something. That feeling of making it feel magically real. That's the addiction.
Emily Watson, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
Thank you very much. Very nice to be here.
Well, how wonderful to have you. And a job, that's an addiction. I mean, that's quite a lucky thing to have, isn't it?
So lucky.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Emily Watson to become an actor?
There was a part of me that had grown up in this way and was just always felt like I was on the outside looking in. And he gave me this mixtape. And I just remember being utterly baffled by the idea of that this was a sort of pleasurable leisure activity that would contribute to the creative work that we were doing. And then slowly kind of listening to it.
And, you know, then over the years, directors have done that. Like Paul Thomas Anderson had this fabulous collection of music. Major music nerd, isn't it? Yeah, for Punch Drunk Love. And I think I've, over the years, become, you know, through the people I've met, through my husband who listens to a lot of music, through my kids, I've come to a realisation of how important it is in my imagination.
But I think, you know, that's been quite a journey for me.
Yes, to take it from it being a kind of illicit activity at the beginning and right the way through to being free to kind of enjoy it. To be fair, though, if you're going to get your first mixtape from anyone, Ian Jewley, he's got to be top of the list, Emily. Yeah, no, he was. It was pretty cool.
Well, of course, you're sharing your discs with us today, so I think we should get started with your first.
OK, my first disc is My Curly-Headed Baby, sung by Paul Robeson. And this is a song my granny sang to me when I was a baby. I kind of wondered why am I drawn to this song to talk about it now? And I think that when I was very small, I had such a strong feeling of being utterly loved. And the lyric that stays with me from this song is, do you want the stars to play with?
Do you want the moon to run away with? And that idea of being a dreamer and being free and having your imagination set on fire by the imaginative world, by the dream world, is very, very powerful. Then sort of later in my upbringing, I was... very strongly given the impression that dreaming was bad, and it was an activity that would lead to my destruction, that dreaming wasn't allowed.
But I think I had this very, very early connection to dreaming and how powerful it was, and I've always had wild dreams all my life.
Sure. Bye. Bye. Bye.
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Chapter 3: How did Emily Watson's upbringing influence her career?
He was an architect. Where did he practice? As a young man, I think he was an artist and he was a brilliant mathematician and a poet. And then everyone said to him, oh, you're good at maths, you're good at art, go be an architect. And he went off to study architecture. He and my mum got married while he was still a student. They had my sister really young on a train. Yeah, we met on a train.
Most of his work, he was doing design for assisted living, converting places and designing apartments for people with disabilities, wheelchairs, that kind of thing. He worked for local councils. He did a lot of that kind of stuff.
A lot of municipal architecture.
And your mum was an English teacher? She was an English teacher, yeah. She was a very good English teacher, actually. I have occasionally people come up to me on the tube and say, excuse me. And I think they want to say, oh, I saw you in blah, blah, blah. And they say, your mum was my English teacher. And I still remember her and she was amazing.
So she was one of those special teachers that lit people up. Did she do that for you with the subject with Shakespeare?
Yeah, no, I mean, we had because of the way we were brought up, we weren't supposed to engage with popular culture so much. We didn't have a television, but I read a lot of books and my mum really fed that. She didn't, you know, they didn't sort of buy into the sort of strictest version of what our lives were supposed to be.
She used to go to the secondhand bookshop at the end of the road and come home at the end of the week with just a big pile of books and I would devour them. I read War and Peace when I was 11.
Blimey.
I think I had a race with a friend at school because we had to entertain ourselves in those days. My mum was very much a wordsmith, loved Shakespeare and introduced me to Shakespeare at a young age. We went to see the RSC when I was seven, I think. I saw a production of As You Like It and Much About Nothing. I remember sort of practically stopping the show because I was laughing so much.
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Chapter 4: What was Emily Watson's breakthrough role in film?
part of the film soundtrack to Moulin Clef performed by Georges Durbin and his orchestra. Emily, your family were members of an organisation called the School of Economic Science. How would you describe it exactly?
It's a religious organisation. It has a belief system that is very devotional and full and people give their lives to it. And, you know, I think at the centre of it is a philosophy that is
a beautiful thing it's sort of spiritual communism that everybody is the same but in practice well for us as children it wasn't like that it was very restrictive and just very very strict but also very repressive to women and young girls and destructive in in some ways so very mixed um
Okay. So, I mean, it's been described as controversial. Some people have likened it to a cult. And as you say, among the very strict expectations that you grew up with were these ideas around gender roles. So what did that mean for you as a little girl?
Well, my sort of instinct to be, you know, a sort of dreamer and allowing your imagination to take you further. And elsewhere and all over the place was my salvation in that because it sort of kept that part of me alive. And my parents really fed that. They didn't enforce a lot of the strictness.
But I think there was very much an expectation for women that you would become a wife and a mother, maybe a teacher, but that... The idea of having a career and being ambitious and all of those things was, I'm sure things have changed now, but it was very much the idea of being independent was very frowned on.
And some former pupils at SES schools have talked about violence and intimidation. And there was an independent inquiry that found some pupils had been subjected to criminal levels of violence. The school apologised. How did you navigate your own school days?
And did you see any of that? I did see some of it and I think I navigated it by keeping my head down and being a good girl for as long as I could stomach that.
Certainly while I was at school, as I got older, then I just sort of questioned it more and more and more and when the logic of life is staring you in the face, you go, well, hang on a minute, that doesn't make sense and that doesn't make sense.
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Chapter 5: How did Emily prepare for her role as Jacqueline du Pré?
And I was a very, very devotional and loving child, as many, many children are. And I sort of embraced it all and believed in it all. And so the journey from there to finding myself, ironically, which is what the whole thing was supposed to be about, was finding yourself. But just being myself, being my authentic, natural self was a long journey.
And, you know, obviously we're all still on that journey now.
I wonder about your parents as well. I mean, you know, it sounds like life at home was less strict than life at school, certainly. How do you now as an adult look back at, you know, their choice to be part of the SES and the appeal of the central tenets of the organisation for them?
It will always be confusing that because they obviously loved us so much, but they did, I think, unwittingly put us potentially in harm's way. We were okay because we had them, but other people maybe were not.
And looking back at yourself as that little girl who was, you know, it sounds eager to please, eager to do well, but also have this spirit of a dreamer inside yourself. How did you nurture that? How did that stay alive through those years?
Reading, really reading. My parents always took us to cinema and we went to see amazing films.
i don't know he just kind of chose me in a way i kind of thought i will i'll try and be an actor and then i got a job at the rsc and that was like a you know i always you know that's a tv series that i discovered when my children were little mr ben oh yeah it's like changing you go into the changing room there's a costume and there you're suddenly you're off in this world i often think that on set it's like that it's like and then as if by magic the shopkeeper appeared
It's time for some more music, I think. Emily Watson, disc number three, please.
What have you got for us? This is part of the Adagio from Mozart's Serenade in B flat for 13 wind instruments. Interestingly, part of the culture of this SES was that music that we were allowed to listen to was Mozart. Mozart was conscious music. We did listen to other things, but that was sort of the guidance. And so we had in our very thin record collection, we had this and my father loved it.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Emily face while transitioning to film?
Dreams, they're like, you know, very strong memories. But you have to put a distance. You can't let them dictate your responses to your real life. You know, you have to let them go and put them on the shelf and get a distance from them.
Emily, you talked earlier about, you know, the beginning of your career, the pressure you put on yourself not to have... people at the SES proved right, you know, they said, off you go on your immoral way to kind of, you know, pursue this flibbertigibbet career and you wanted to, you know, be a person of substance and prove them wrong. How have you continued to make the right choices as an actor?
Because, you know, you have had critical acclaim throughout your career. You haven't had the missteps that many other actors make.
Well, I think there's been one or two, but thankfully they've... They sink pretty quickly. You've executed them at... Elegantly, if there have been. Not visible to my keen eye when I was looking back over your CV.
I'd like to take credit for that path, but I get less and less sure of my kind of moral rectitude as I get older. I just think I've been lucky. You do something that gets noticed in that way early on. And there are still to this day, I meet people, filmmakers who say, Breaking the Waves is the reason I'm a director. It made me. And that has a currency that's just lasted.
It's kept me in knickers, you know, for a very long time.
Long may that continue. Let's have some more music, shall we?
What's next? Your seventh choice today. My husband said to me, Emily, you cannot have Lee Morgan playing Sidewinder because it's like asking Mozart to play Happy Birthday.
Oh.
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Chapter 7: How did Emily Watson navigate her success after Breaking the Waves?
The studio managers for today's programme were Sarah Hockley and Jackie Marjoram. The executive production coordinator was Susie Roilands. The content editor was Mugabe Turia and the producer was Sarah Taylor. Join me next time where my guest will be the motorcyclist and presenter Guy Martin.
MUSIC PLAYS I'm Noel Titheridge and for BBC Radio 4 from Shadow World, this is Impulsive. What happens when someone's personality changes completely? It was completely out of character. Never done it before, never done it since. And it's because of a prescription drug. I asked myself, why would you do such a thing? What were you thinking?
I've been uncovering the shocking side effects linked to medications called dopamine agonists. For BBC Radio 4, from Shadow World, this is Impulsive. Subscribe to Shadow World Impulsive now on BBC Sounds.