Desert Island Discs

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the musical director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra Lorin Maazel. He was a child prodigy whose career as a conductor has survived, and thrived, beyond his early precocity. His musical talent became apparent at the age of five, when he began playing the violin, while at seven he was discovered conducting a piece by Haydn playing on his parents' record play...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the theatre director Yvonne Brewster. She has been a major force in black British theatre for the last 20 years. Born into a wealthy family in Jamaica, Yvonne rebelled against her parents' plans for her - marriage and children - to become a theatrical pioneer. She says she was the first black drama student in Britain - but when she enrolled, her drama school's pr...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer and illustrator Raymond Briggs. For millions of children, Christmas would be incomplete without Briggs's story The Snowman, which has been shown on television every year since its first release, in 1982, and his enduringly popular Father Christmas. Raymond was born in 1934 in Wimbledon. His mother, Ethel, was a lady's maid and his father, Ernest, a mil...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the playwright and director Stephen Poliakoff. Stephen Poliakoff is probably best known for his explorations of the themes of memory, family and history in his dramas for television, including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince. He was born into an aristocratic, Russian Jewish family in 1952, the third of four children. Stephen's talent as a...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the academic Professor Alison Richard. Professor Alison Richard is Cambridge University's first full-time female Vice-Chancellor. An anthropologist by training, the role of Vice-Chancellor makes her the principal academic and administrative officer of one of Britain's oldest universities, at the head of some 18,000 undergraduates and assets of more than a billion...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor Geoffrey Palmer. Best known for his roles in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Butterflies and As Time Goes By, he had to wait a long time to become a household name and national treasure. Unsure what career to pursue after a spell in the army, he fell into acting because a girlfriend was involved in amateur dramatics. He worked in repertory theatre...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Dr David Starkey. Dr David Starkey forsook the ivory towers of academia to popularise history as a constitutional commentator in the press and as a broadcaster and writer. His approach to history is a personal one; he explains events through the lens of individual hopes, flaws and lusts and says historical influence can be seen in terms of who are "the movers and...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Peter Maxwell Davies. He is one of Britain's greatest living composers. His career has seen him go from enfant terrible and champion of new music, writing pieces such as Worldes Blis and Eight Songs for a Mad King, to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music. Peter Maxwell Davies was born in Salford, near Manchester, in 1934. Whilst studying at Manch...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Dr Jonathan Miller. Jonathan Miller has been an influential and prolific force in British intellectual life since the 1960s. A writer, theatre and opera director and explainer of science to the public, he's had not one career, but several, and is seemingly capable of endlessly reinventing himself - as a scientist, a director, a television presenter, a writer, a f...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Sam Taylor-Wood. She is known for her photography and short films, including 'David' - a film of the footballer David Beckham sleeping - and her 365-degree photograph that was wrapped around the Selfridges store in central London. She is one half of art's most glamorous couple - her husband is the art dealer Jay Jopling. Her route into art was scattere...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the former SAS soldier turned author Andy McNab. After being abandoned as a baby, he was adopted and was brought up in the Peckham area of South London. A life of minor crime followed until he joined the infantry with the Royal Green Jackets in 1976 progressing to the SAS. In the Gulf War, McNab commanded the Bravo Two Zero patrol, given the task of destroying un...

Sue Lawley's castaway is the dancer Carlos Acosta. Carlos Acosta is one of the greatest ballet dancers of his generation. He is the first black principal dancer at Covent Garden. Tocororo, the show about his own life, that he wrote, choreographed and starred in, broke box office records at Sadlers Wells and in his homeland of Cuba he is a national hero. But his extraordinary success has followed a...

Sue Lawley's castaway is the actress Kim Cattrall. Kim Cattrall became a household name in her forties as a result of playing man-eater, defiant singleton and PR mogul Samantha Jones in Sex and the City. She is about to star in the play Whose Life is it Anyway? in the West End of London. She was born in Liverpool but grew up in Canada and decided to be an actress at a young age. She says a formati...

Sue Lawley's castaway is the singer Engelbert Humperdinck. Engelbert Humperdinck is one of Britain's most successful entertainers. He is known as the King of Romance and has been at the top of the showbusiness ladder for nearly 40 years - selling more than 130 million records including sixty-four gold and 23 platinum albums. He was born Arnold George (Gerry) Dorsey in 1936 in India and was one of...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is John Fortune. John Fortune is one of Britain's most respected and enduring satirists. For the past 12 years he has been half of the award-winning double act, The Long Johns, with John Bird, that have brought a sharper political edge to Bremner, Bird and Fortune. As a result of the act, they have been named the Best Opposition by The Oldie Magazine and are Bafta a...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Sir Bobby Robson. Sir Bobby Robson is one of the most enduring and popular faces in football. For more than five decades he has dedicated his life to the game - as a player and manager. As a small boy growing up in a mining village in County Durham, he learnt his ball skills by playing football in the streets and backyard with his four brothers. By the time he wa...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Tracey Emin. Tracey Emin is one of the most successful and controversial artists to emerge during the 1990s. Her work was championed early on by influential art dealer Jay Jopling and later by the collector Charles Saatchi. Her work is highly autobiographical and confessional. A talented drawer and painter, she has attracted most attention for her art...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. Clive Stafford Smith spent more than 25 years representing people on death row. He's saved hundreds of lives and counts his clients among his friends. He says his work is his calling - one he was drawn to after writing an essay on capital punishment while at school. Initially he thought it was a history essay and was app...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is the internationally acclaimed choreographer Matthew Bourne. He was born in the East End of London in 1960. As a child, his great passion was musicals and stage shows - rather than ballet. Despite his later success, he showed no interest in dance until the age of 20 when he enrolled at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London. He's built his reputation on hi...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the distinguished foreign correspondent Ann Leslie. She has witnessed and reported on some of the most significant events of the past 30 years including the fall of the Berlin wall; the failed coup against Michael Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela's final walk to freedom. She has reported on uprisings, massacres and wars, collecting numerous awards as she has done so....

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent. Matthew Pinsent won his fourth Olympic gold medal at this summer's games in Athens. His first three were all won rowing with Sir Steve Redgrave - as a pair in 1992 in Barcelona and 1996 in Atlanta and as part of the coxless four in 2000's Sydney games. This summer's success saw him lead the four to victory - in a photo-...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the poet Dr Jack Mapanje who is one of the most important living African poets. He was born into a poor household in a typical African village in 1944, when Malawi (then Nyasaland) was a British colony, but while he was still a child it became part of the Central African Federation, together with Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Jack started writing poems, inspire...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Liberal Democrat politician Sir Menzies Campbell. Born in Glasgow, he excelled at both academia and sports making it to the University in Glasgow and then Stanford in California where he studied law but all the while dividing his time between this and his other great love - athletics. He became the fastest man in Britain holding and re-breaking the record for...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the journalist and writer Anne Scott-James. Now in her 92nd year, Anne Scott-James came from a line of critics and writers and became one of the first women career journalists, editors and columnists, before embarking on a second career as the author of a series of gardening books. After Oxford she joined Vogue - first as an assistant to a secretary and then went...

Sue's Lawley's castaway this week is the zoologist turned author and broadcaster Desmond Morris. He made his name with The Naked Ape first published in 1967 in which he persuasively argued the case for viewing man as a 'risen ape' rather than a 'fallen angel'. To him, humans should be observed like any other beast in the animal kingdom. The book has sold more than 12 million copies and has been tr...