BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.
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.
My castaway this week is the actor Monica Dolan,
a BAFTA and Olivier Award winner who is equally at home playing a wrongfully convicted postmistress in Mr Bates vs The Post Office
as she is navigating the court of Henry VIII in Wolf Hall.
She's written and performed a critically acclaimed one-woman show at Edinburgh Festival and brought menacing gangland matriarch Anne Branson in Sherwood chillingly to life.
She's especially good at characters whose apparently ordinary exteriors belie her deeper.
inner turmoil.
She calls them her cardigan roles, women with cosy knitwear and sensible haircuts who,
beneath the surface, are a seething mass of drama, intrigue, vulnerability and sometimes pure evil.
She was born to Irish parents who'd come to Britain to pursue their work as scientists and grew up in Surrey,
where she dreamed of becoming an actor,
secretly withdrawing her university application to ensure she followed that path.
She says I think imagination is an actor's most useful tool and truth and authenticity are different things.