Desert Island Discs

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Paula Rego. Born in Portugal, she was an only child, and spent her days sitting with the maids as they told tales around the kitchen table. Now she makes up stories about the people she knows and weaves them into her pictures. Like those early fairytales, her portraits always have a touch of danger about them. If you look the devil in the face, she says, face your fears and paint them - then they lose the power to scare you.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Da Me O Braco Anda Dai by Blanc/Barbosa Book: Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Luxury: Pencil and paper

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the television presenter Loyd Grossman. His career has allowed him to peer through the keyholes of the rich and famous and comment on their homes. He once described Tony Blackburn's house as like that of a maiden aunt in Eastbourne. It's a formula which has lasted 14 years. Although he was well into his 20s before he learnt to cook, some 20 million viewers watch him as he deliberates, cogitates and digests the culinary efforts of his would-be masterchefs. As a boy his dream was to be a rock star or a historian. In the end, he gave up both, forsaking his study of the gin-drinking experiences of 18th-century Londoners and forgoing his evenings spent dodging beer cans thrown on stage. He turned instead to journalism and Harpers & Queen. It was by accident that he was picked out to present for the new fledgling television station, TVAM, but by the time they realised their mistake his TV career was launched.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper Book: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Luxury: Fishing rod

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the theatre producer Thelma Holt. Famed for introducing some of the best international productions to this country, she persuaded Dustin Hoffman to London's West End, brought Ingmar Bergman's Hamlet to the South Bank and premiered the work of the Japanese director Ninagawa in Britain.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Lazy Bones by Paul Robeson Book: Utopia by Thomas Moore Luxury: Rosary beads

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the playwright and film director Anthony Minghella. He grew up on the Isle of Wight in a close-knit family of Italian descent, and says that he has never felt truly English. It is not surprising therefore that his most successful film explores questions of identity and nationality. That film, The English Patient, won nine Oscars. It is, he admits, unashamedly moving, since for him the purpose of fiction is to "exercise the emotional muscle". Music, too, plays an important part in his life. He listens to music as he writes and the structure of many of his plays and film scripts are influenced by it. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Mache Dich, Mein Herze, Rein by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Collected Piano Works by Bach Luxury: Piano

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the broadcaster and popular historian, John Julius Norwich. Closely associated with Venice, he talks about his love for the city and his battle to protect it from the rising waters of the Mediterranean. It's a passion he learnt from his parents - the diplomat and politician Duff Cooper and the beautiful socialite Lady Diana. As a boy he grew up surrounded by his mother's friends - artists and writers like Jean Cocteau and Noel Coward. Evelyn Waugh, too, frequently visited. But he was someone who his mother adored and his father barely tolerated.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Bassoon Concerto in B by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Luxury: Laptop Computer

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the naturalist and writer Richard Mabey. A romantic at heart, he regrets that so much written about nature these days concentrates on the scientific. Unlike past writers like WH Hudson or Gilbert White, he says we rarely confess our feelings and emotions about the countryside. What interests him is our relationship with nature; how we name our streets and houses after flowers, why children still whack conkers, and the reasons we bring holly and mistletoe into our homes at Christmas. He himself has a special relationship with the nightingale - he describes how, in times of distress and depression, he can always find comfort in its song.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: La Delaissado (The Abandoned) by Joseph Canteloube Book: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Luxury: Guitar

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer and performer Richard Rodney Bennett. A versatile musician, he is equally at home playing jazz, writing film scores or composing for the concert hall. He wants to give performers music which they want to play, so he has written percussion pieces for Evelyn Glennie and saxophone sonatas for John Harle and Stan Getz. "Nobody," he says, "needs another violin concerto from anybody". His film scores include Murder on the Orient Express, Far From the Madding Crowd and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but he confesses to having most fun when he's just singing jazz.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Violin Concerto by William Walton Book: The Atlantic book of British and American Poetry by Edith Sitwell Luxury: 6mm 36 inch circular knitting needle with a point at each end

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the novelist Rose Tremain. She began writing as a child soon after her father left home. It became a kind of therapy for her and she explains it's something she still turns to, especially in moments of crisis. Recognised for her ability to get right inside the minds of her characters, she offers the reader a view of the world through their eyes. In her book Sacred Country, we become a little girl who believes she's really a boy. In Restoration, we live the life of a 17th-century man. As a writer, she wants her work to feel dangerous, and so after extensive research she likes to forget it; keeping some facts and making others up. It's like playing a game with the reader, she says, a challenge to guess which is fact and which is merely fiction.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Dance Me To The End Of Love by Leonard Cohen Book: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Luxury: Word processor

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the musician and presenter Jools Holland. He first shot into the public eye when he made what he still calls "a bit of a verbal slip", and used a four-letter word on the teenage music show The Tube. These days he hosts a late night television programme, where he plays alongside such musical greats as Eric Clapton, Oasis and Tony Bennett. His own musical performance has evolved and expanded from the days when he and a mate would tour the pubs for a few pounds, a drink and a lot of adoration. In the 1970s he found success with his punk group, Squeeze. And he now fronts his own, 12-man rhythm and blues orchestra. A long way from where he began as a small boy, playing boogie woogie on his grandmother's pianola.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: (We're Gonna) Jump For Joy by Big Joe Turner Book: Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio Luxury: Piano

Sue Lawley's castaway this week has been the voice of racing for half a century. Due to retire in November 1997, Peter O'Sullevan calculates that he has commentated on some 14,000 races. After calling his last Grand National earlier this year he perhaps breathed a sigh of relief, because even after 50 broadcasts he admits to still finding the responsibility nerve-wracking. Horses have always been his life. He owns them, bets on them, writes about them and campaigns for their welfare, with the same enthusiasm that he had as a young boy riding with his grandparents' groom, Truelove.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Piano Concerto 5 in E Flat Major by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley Luxury: Bottle Of Calvados