Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For tonight's reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1989, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an actress, an Oxford graduate from a distinguished family. She might have chosen a number of careers. She hasn't confined herself to acting. She's written books and articles, directed plays, taught and dabbled as a chat show hostess. But it is her abilities on stage which have given her fame. But recognized more and more as a witty and stylish interpreter of Noel Coward's leading ladies. She is of course Maria Aitken. Having said that Maria

I've also recently been one of John Cleese's leading ladies in A Fish Called Wanda. His bossy, priggish... Wife was that as much fun as it looked well it was it was another very articulate comedy which I do enjoy but he I think he may be narrowing my career down to a much easier description which is I may be going to specialize in bitches. Easy to work with. He's absolutely marvelous to work with. I'm not very secure about filming because... Theatre's my medium and one is much more in control of that. But with John, you rehearse so meticulously that it's like... And I really felt that it was you know my character, and I was in control and I could do anything There are two names that constantly crop up when one reads about You and that is Gertrude Lawrence and Kay Kendall now do you accept or reject those comparisons do you like them? Alas my nose is on upside down for Kay Kendall I'm very flattered but I don't

think I'm like either of them I have played a lot of the same parts. Have you now beaten Gertrude Lawrence's record do you think to Noel Coward's leading ladies you must have done. I believe I have although I'm not absolutely sure about that but I think what It's unusual is that I've spanned the age groups in Cowards heroines. Are playing the older ones and most people usually only stick to one section or the other. Um, Gertie did have a play 9 in one go in tonight at 8.30, 'cause... Nine Klaylets. So if you count them as nine separate ones I haven't got a hope. Let's find out about your musical tastes then. What's your first record going to be? Well, oddly enough. My first record is by Nell Coward and it's a song which we're actually using in the vortex as a theme. I play a rather extrovert nymphomaniac, 30's- figure and the theme music is mad about the boy appropriately enough. I've been mad about a few boys so it's not a bad choice from that point of view.

It's also sung in this rather unusual arrangement by a great friend of mine, Diane Lacton, with whom I act... In my first and only musical which was a little night music and she was extraordinary to me she would take me aside Explain that if I breathed here I wouldn't go blue. Give me a glass of port when the occasion demanded and all that kind of thing. She really got me through a year of a Sontine musical.

Noel Coward's Mad About the Boy, sung by Diane Langton. Are you, Mariah, anything at all like me? Do you have anything in common with these coward heroines that you play? I mean, do you see yourself as languid, elegant? Beautifully turned out. They're never languid they're absolutely brimming with terrifying energy even in repose which is why they're such killers to play. I think I...

To when I was younger have more in common I am quite volatile which they are my mood can turn on the sixpence and theirs certainly does The one I'm playing at the moment is quite unlike the others. I think it's rather hard to generalize. I mean, the point about... Most coward heroines is they very rarely say what they mean. I mean, irony is an absolute staple tool. And they use language like a kind of decoy, but this one is completely straightforward. I mean she's pretty Appalling and she makes, she's so self-satisfied she makes no attempt to disguise that at all. She's entirely shallow isn't she? Yes. She is, I mean she's creaming her elbows at her dressing table at moments of high tragedy. The point she is beautifully turned out and you sit before me now with with beautifully painted red nails. I mean is that you? Is that Mariah Rake? Absolutely not. I'm a rare thing, a Virgoan slut. I just am not...

Very tidy. I'm peen, I hasten to add, but I'm not very tidy and I certainly would never paint my nails on a regular basis. Yourself as a leggy lady with a certain amount of wit. Oh how vain that sounds. I retracted all... But you seem, funnily enough, reading about you, to have, in your youth anyway, to have lacked a certain, your early youth, to have lacked a certain confidence about the way you looked. Yes, I mean I think people do don't they? I mean I don't know anyone who is confident about the way that they look and I'm certainly not, I never have been. Careless now. I've got uglier and I don't care. But were you always aware that as long as you could open your mouth and start talking then it would be alright. I was when I was very small about 12 I remember discussing this with my brother because I did long to be one of those girls who would come into the room and silence a party and patently I was not.

And I would say when he'd bring home good-looking boys from school, just give me ten minutes, Jonathan. So that I... Could talk to them because they I didn't mean that they would be falling about in heaps but at least they might spend 20 minutes with me, but they certainly wouldn't if I were mute. I mean, I think I must have been a ridiculous little girl, really, when I look back on it. Sort of brimming with... Polysyllables and terribly sharp-tongued. I mean amusing, not in the least attractive. But you were... You had a precocious talent it seems because you wrote a play did you not when you were seven years old? Yes I did and forced my family to appear in it and wrote a... Suspiciously good cameo part for myself. I think I had... Gladys the maid, wasn't it? Yes, my God, it's like talking to God this. What was it about, this play? It was about Esmerelda and Ebenezer, who were lovers, and Clottwerth.

He was the villain who was my father, but I cannot precisely tell you what else is only only around about six minutes Yes, my mother has it somewhere. Let's have another record. Well, I think probably something from the nursery, because Jonathan, my brother Jonathan and I grew up together in Suffolk. And we had a wind-up gramophone and there's one record I long to have chosen but ever since Have never been able to discover what it was. We sang along phonetically in Italian or something like Italian and the words Pierto bien veni veni veni veni a comst da mer. If anybody knows what that song is, please tell me.

That I've chosen the Andrews sisters singing three little fishes stop mama fishy or you get lost but three little fishy didn't want to be boss the three little fishy swam off on a spree and this way I'm in this way I'm right up to the sea get him daughter bottom get him daughter and swim in slam right up to the sea The Andrews sisters singing Three Little Fishes. Now the impression Mariah 1 always has of your background, you mentioned Suffolk just now, is that you lived the life of the privileged upper middle class in in the country house. I mean is that wide of a mark? It isn't entirely wide of the mark because it became so. But to begin with, it really wasn't so. We lived in a very modest house by the station in a town called Halesworth.

And I went in the afternoons to the local school but I was actually really taught by my grandfather who lived 150 yards away down the road. Who was quite a distinguished gentleman. He was a marvelous and extraordinary man. He had had a very distinguished career. He was not from a grand family. But he sailed up to the top of the civil service and he became Governor General of the Sudan. He was hauled out of retirement to be ambassador in Dublin during the war. And actually he had John Betts from... To be his press secretary, who was my godfather. And that was a real coup because John converted to Catholicism in the middle of it all, and therefore was... Probably the most loved British press secretary there. It was a very successful appointment. Because my grandfather was great friends with de Valera and it worked out very well. Then he retired and I think he would have gone... Or died actually through lack of activity if he hadn't channeled all his energies into his grandchildren Jonathan and me so he had a

greater influence on you than your father did? Yes, my father was working very hard and was an MP and also had to have a full-time job. And we saw him very little. We saw him at weekends when he wasn't in his constituency, which he took very seriously. So I saw my grandfather every day. And he gave me a very eclectic education in a hut at the bottom of his garden, which consisted of Latin and French, but no mathematics to speak of. And I know his idea of English literature was Bulldog Drummond and Browning. It only... This teaching was interspersed with sort of grown-up wisdom being crammed into a young mind because he was always worried he would die before he'd managed to tell me everything. I know that I was absolutely forbidden to pierce my ears because he thought it was barbaric and one might as well pierce one's nose and I never have. I've written a tremendous letter on breastfeeding, the importance of immunising my babies, when I was about nine. That was absolutely imposed on me.

What he taught Jonathan the while goodness knows what he taught you know what he also used to a wonderful thing of burying his medals. He had the most incredible diamond studded medals from the Sudan. He used to bury them in the Suffolk marshes. Set elaborate clues for us to find. It was nice to take the whole summer until we dug up a tin box. Things that we were allowed to keep. I don't know where they are now. What about your relationship with brother Jonathan who was what three who is three years older and now the MP for East Thanet. Thanet East. Thanet East. Are you close? Or did you hate each other? Um, well, a mixture. We were very close. But I... Will never get over the hierarchical thing of him being the older brother. On the other hand, I evolved a very... And tongue in order to hold my own against this bigger person. Were you always secretly trying to impress him? I think so. I did rather run in his wake and I did love it when we played games where I had a proper part.

You know when I was more than a squaw or something like that, and do you still like to impress him? I think we've got past that now we see each other. I think very each other's faults quite coldly But um unjudgmentally I really am extremely fond of him and he's very good to me let's pause for your third record I went to a rather strict girls boarding school and we used to sit at the end of a corridor Saying without knowing what it meant if a man came in now i would give myself to him we'd keep saying hopefully looking at the caretaker with a sort of funny lip and a lip of warts and things and knowing that it was not he and this is the I do remember this song sent us into a literal frenzy. And I must say has a resonance for me even now. Well, there's some more ahead.

♪ He'll leave so long baby you could die ♪ - Who else but Elvis Presley and Heartbreaker? So, Maria, you were totally subversive at boarding school. Midnight parties in tents with the boys from Sherbourne, yes? It's true, but I was got off that hook by my mother, who went... I mean, they were threatening expulsion, and it was... Entirely innocent explanation because we were all very young but and she went to the head And said rather despairingly, Of course you realize this is a question of sardines, not sex. And I was allowed with a mass of punishments to stay on. I think the only... Really, a sort of major exhibition that was made of me that I minded about was when I was... Playing the angel Gabriel for being an atheist which I think was probably quite a suitable punishment really. Anyway, you went off to a crammer in Suffolk and then to Oxford. How did Oxford take you?

You were 17 years old and you arrived there fresh from boarding school. Well, of course it's absolutely heady after the repressions of boarding school. I couldn't believe my life. In any way and I didn't do any work. I did nothing but do rehearsing cellars, doing plays. I would all go out with boys. I mean, there was just, and then in the last month before finals, I was demented. Somehow scrabbled a degree. Now you mentioned out the Oxford University Dramatic Society. You were barred from joining it. And so quite simply, you took action. Personally barred. Women were not members, that was all. We did everything for them anyway. In an exhibitionistic sort of way, padlocked myself to the Playhouse railings with a petition, expecting... Days of martyrdom, but I didn't get that. In about ten minutes I had the requisite hundred signatures. Well now that's one legend of your Oxford days. The second legend of course is that Elizabeth Taylor...

Glass of red wine over you because she was jealous that you were getting off with Richard. Well it's true but it is I feel mean to her because actually she was very very nice to all of us and kind woman to work with probably more approachable Than Richard Burton who was a great monologues. We should explain that they had come up to Oxford. Yes, they were doing a production of Dr. Faustus in which she played Helen of Troy and he played Dr. Faustus. I was the good angel dressed in a tennis net covered in gold bars and some huge wings. I remember getting out of these wings to go illegally during the dress rehearsal to the back of the auditorium. To see the moment when Helen of Troy and Dr. Faustus kiss. And it was an utterable kitsch. There were clouds of dry ice. Elizabeth was wearing white satin winkle pickers and a sort of toga. And ten pounds of false hair, thirty pounds of false hair. And full eyelashes and acres of bosom were visible and she teetered through the dry ice towards Richard Burton and they kissed.

And you actually did feel nations tottering and worlds colliding. It was quite extraordinary. I mean I... By mocking and finished with my jaw and my knees. So I did see that sort of theatrical magic that I had never encountered. Probably never will again. But she did throw the red wine. You're relentless. She did, it was in Rome when we were filming Dr. Fasters. Montgomery Clift had just died. She was very... Upset about the death of Montgomery Clifton. She came into Richard's dressing room, where I was talking to him with my soon-to-be husband, Elizabeth was neglected for a moment. She was with Zeffirelli and I think nobody talked to her for honestly not more than about 30 seconds. seconds. Wine over me and I didn't know how to handle it I wasn't very old so I said well we should go out to dinner and

She bottles the conventional way. And she was a bit grumpy at dinner and then she leant across to me. She said, I'm very sorry, but you're so f-ing tall. And I um I naturally forgave her because it was a she just Her rag for a moment that was all. We shall have some more music. Well I think we better have quite a suitable one. Really which is for both Elizabeth Taylor and me really which is a number called always true to you darling in my fashion. ask me out

♪ For something went, when the vet begins to pet, I shout hooray! ♪ ♪ But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion ♪ ♪ Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way ♪ ♪ There's a lush from Baltimore, who is rich but such a bore ♪ ♪ When the boar falls on the floor, I let him play ♪ ♪ But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion ♪ Anne Miller and Tom Rall singing Always True to You Darling in My Fashion from Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate. So you left Oxford, Moriah? There you were, a graduate with a strong urge, nay a driving ambition to get into the theatre. What did you do? To 120 letters explaining that I was very necessary to a lot of theaters. People... Very kindly did give me some auditions. The first one I went to, they were auditioning for a musical.

The sound of music, it was York. So in between young men singing I Am 16 going on 17, bits of Rosalind and Kate and things. And they kept saying incredulously, Do you know anything else? Can you sing? and I lay on the floor and sang Cleopatra from Salad Days with no accompaniment. They were weeping with hysteria when they finally helped me up the stairs and said that they couldn't actually employ me. The next audition I went to, after I'd done my one acceptable bit, they said, Do you know something else? And I said, Yes. And I then mind sweeping the stage, and they said, What are you doing? I said, But that's what I'm going to do, isn't it? I mean, I'm going to be an acting ASM. So they took me. It was Coventry. And... I spent most of my time representing a mob of 3,000 really at the back of the stage when my teeth blacked out. But you finally got sacked from there, don't you? Immediately rather than finally on the my very first night of my very first production.

Which was Tom Jones and my job was to set the props on a prop table and this gives you Some idea of the comedic qualities of the director. His favorite joke was that Tom Jones would aim his gun in one direction and that a partridge would plop out of the wings. On the other side and come the moment Tom Jones raised his gun on the first night and I thought my God I didn't set that partridge but The joke is that something he doesn't aim at dies. So I fell writhing to the floor. But meanwhile somebody had set the partridge which flew onto the stage. And I can tell you categorically that if two things die which you're not aiming at there's absolutely no joke at all. There was complete silence. And the director fired me and the leading man to his eternal credit said, Look, that's called an

And you reinstate her or I really don't think I can stay here. Let's have some more music. This is the world's most effective love duet. It's Violeta and Alfredo. From La Traviata, she of course is dying and he's too late for their love to ever come to a proper relationship now. It's agony to listen to. It is exquisite. ♪ In your little heart ♪

Placido Domingo and Iliana Cottrebaash singing the love duet from the final scene of Verdi's La Traviata. By Orishas Staats' orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kleiber. Maria Aitken, it was some nine years ago, wasn't it, that illness suddenly overtook you when you were playing Amanda in Private Lives with Michael Jasten, which was a smashing production. Well, you know, when you're doing a long run of a play, you very often just think that you're... dying anyway. I mean that you're worn out. Um, so I ignored a lot of very ev-- and it was only when my son, who was quite small, saw me standing under a light in the corridor and burst into tears and said, You look like a skull. That I realized that my weight loss was so dramatic and that I could hardly really move around and got more and more difficult to perform at all and one night we'd finished the fight which is very tough.

And I just couldn't get up. I just couldn't get off the floor and they put me in an ambulance and that was that. I was very sad. I missed the last two weeks of the run. And what was it? It was a thing called thyrotoxicosis, which is a hyperactive thyroid, which makes you completely toxic. And really very ill, your heart goes like a sort of demented pigeon in your chest. And your limbs hurt. And it's sometimes associated with eye problems which come before... During or after, nobody quite understands the connection. You had to have an operation on your eyes. Yes, you got miles of eyelid tucked up there. One of the problems with the eyes is they get very, very swollen and the lid no longer covers them, which means you sleep with them open at night and you have to have drops to put in them because they get very sore and they feel as if they're full of sand. And eventually the sight is somewhat effective.

And of course you look like hell. That's least important to doctors, but if you're an actress it's quite important. Did this happen? The whole experience, and I know it took a long time to overcome it, did it change your attitude to life in any way or did you just consider it another of those blows you were dealt? Yes of course it changed. Because I hadn't, because I'd never been a beauty, I hadn't realised that I'd actually flirted my way through life. and that when you're... A grotesque, which really you become if you've got a huge goiter and bulging eyes. Then the ordinary mechanics, the transactions of buying a paper or taking a cab or saying good morning to somebody are completely altered. And you have to find a way of, well you just have to become a beautiful personality damn quick as a matter of fact. Of course you've also suffered another of those blows that life deals with, which is that you divorced the father of your mother.

Child Nigel Davenport how much did that hurt you? it's horrible to fail at a marriage it doesn't really matter what the reasons are and particularly when there are children involved perhaps one shouldn't marry Well you have, you did once proclaim that if ever you talked about marriage again that your best friend was to shut you in a darkened room and make you think about it. Yes, well I stick to that. I've lived very happily with somebody for... Longer than any of my marriages now. Let's have another record, number six I think it is. This is really... it's a lovely piece of music and I love Chopin, but... It's really in the nature of a sort of crossword for me because I play the piano excruciatingly, you know, from days of yore. I can read music and I thought if I was going mad with boredom and had enough of the human voice on the other records, I could notate this to keep... Myself sane in the sound.

Chopin Ballard number To in F major played by Vladimir Ashkenazi. Suddenly it seemed, Maria, after the illness that we've been hearing about, you decided quite out of character somehow to go exploring up the Amazon to make a film about a 19th century female explorer. A complete change of track for you, what brought that on? Well, funnily enough, being a chat show host has brought it on, because... I realized I really couldn't continue to be a judge, I enjoyed it very much, because it's very confusing for all... They wonder why this woman thinks she's had a garbler when they know perfectly well. She's a chat show hostess too associated with yourself in the public mind. You really, I think, can't make a career in the theatre. So I then...

Asked the BBC when they said would you like to do some more church shows? I said well couldn't I do a river because they were doing great river journeys My producer, Lavinia Warner, was dead keen to do River II, so we cooked up the Yukon. And were led to believe we might well be going up the Yukon shortly. However, the money ran out and we were broken. About this. And then, some letters were taken to the BBC, which had been written by Lizzie Hessel in the 1880s. 90s about her trip up the Amazon. I was shown them and asked if I thought I could play Lizzie Hessel and my producer... Decided that it would be crucial that a modern woman retrace Lizzie Hessel's steps and thereby cast light on her progression. And that's what we did, and as a matter of fact I think it really worked quite well. And while you were there you met quite a lot of destitute children and lost your heart in many ways. Yes, you can't avoid meeting destitute children.

There was one child in particular who, as is the way of these things, just touched. To me in my heart. A tribe called Pilar and It's a very sad story in the sense that I want more than anything to help her, but I can't because her stepfather has... Taken her away. She's a very bright child and she trained up very well as a beggar for him, he's an alcoholic. And he doesn't want her educated because schooling would stop his income. And so my last visit I spent searching for her and I wandered around with and I made ten radio announcements a day on different stations. And all that. Sort of thing. But we didn't find her. What do you think has happened to her? I'm sure she's alive because she is a... Paramount survivor and she has Such native wit that I think that she'll manage. I think it's going to be very

Difficult. And why does it all matter to you so much? Well she matters to me because we made a commitment to each other. She knows that I was going to look after her. And I feel very bad that I have failed. I'm not an interfera in the sense that it never occurred to me to adopt her and transplant her because that would have been a piece of sentimentality that... It didn't help her. She's indelibly Peruvian. But I thought I could make her life a great deal more beautiful. Better than it was and I'm sure little as she was, she was ten the last time I saw her. Over a period of five years. I think she knew that I was a kind of passport to something and it's just very sad to me that I've not succeeded. Shall we have some more music then? Well, this is, er, Summertime, from Porgy and Bess, which I chose to play.

For a variety of reasons. First of all, I hope my island is going to be something of an idyll. And secondly, I saw... At this production which Simon Rattle conducted and Trevor Nunn directed at Lionborn and it was most thrilling evening of theatre that I've ever seen in my entire life. Ben Blackwell singing 'Summertime' from Ira Gershwin's 'Porgie and Bess' with the London Philharmonic conducted by the London Philharmonic.

By Simon Rattle. I read an interesting comment about you. I wonder what you think of it. It said she always seems to be the sort of person who in fifty years time will crop up in the best biographies and diaries. Would love to be in some sort of gardener's diary as having given them a terrific plant, those sort of things, but I don't honestly think... My life is of abiding interest. I suppose the real question is though how you would like to be viewed, whether you like to be thought of as literary or actresses or a socialite or whether... That you're perhaps searching for something to become something more than that? Well, I honestly am not a socialite. It's an adjective that gets tacked onto you for no reason. I am allergic to parties. Vacation and only people I love are giving them. I would like to be remembered as an actress. I'm not a...

Literary figural as I'm a sort of hack. I'm not going to win the Booker Prize and I'm able to write a Jackie Collins sort of novel either. I'm somewhere disastrously between the two. I've... Would love to be Mother Teresa I so far show very little sign of that. But you might yet shock us all and do something more. Well I hope I'm a bit more used before I snuff it. Shall we have your last record? Oh this is expressly... Snuffing it. This is when I know my end is nigh on the island. So... I shall either suffer a lightning conversion instead of the dim pantheistic. Fervor that I've got now. Or at any rate I'll die with a good tune in my ears.

The Piee-Azu from Foray's Requiem sung by Robert Chilcot with the new... Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by David Wilcox. And now, Mariah, you've got to choose one of those records that you must have with you more than any of the others. It would be traviata because it's a hot line to my sentiment and I guess if you're stuck alone there You really need to be reminded of the existence of other people. What about your book? We have there already for you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Well I thought I'd take a wonderful, splenetic, witty book. Called Fun in a Chinese Laundry by Joseph von Sternberg the director who directed Marlene Dietrich and the Blue Angel and many other films which sounds Like a showbiz autobiography but it really is nothing of the kind I mean that's just a sort of springboard and he's extremely if I do

on the subject of actors, corporations, other people's work. It's a sustained moan in many ways. But it is also very inspiring and terribly funny. It's one of those books where if you open it around them, it's a bit like the I Ching, there's always something to set you off or which seems to apply to you at that moment. My luxury would be an Amazonian rainmaker, which is a tube often made of bamboo. Or sometimes hollowed out wood with magic seeds and beans inside it and a feather on the end very often and you shake it. The shaman, the sort of witch doctor figure, shakes it to bring rain. I have one and I know that it works because Customs and Excise took it to pieces to see what was in it. It rained for three days very spectacularly it's a practical use of course not strictly permissible but

As I don't believe it works, you can have it. Thank you. Mariah Rake, and thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/raisewalk

You fool.