An Audience with Peter Ustinov 1988

I'm very proud of this it's actually the Albanian Oscar only it's the only useful award anybody's ever won it's very nice of you to come I accepted the invitation long after most of you when I heard the quality of people so many old friends and so many people I've never met at all which is always very exciting but have admired from further away than this and if I don't recognize you at once you must forgive me hello I'm extremely long sighted and it's wonderful to be in England which I appreciate perhaps more if because I'm not here all the time and because I only arrived here in the first instance by chance my mother was eight months pregnant when we arrived at Harwich we arrived I was travelling as extra weight and I should have been born in Holland but I was born in London my mother was so unacquainted with England that she couldn't understand on the trip from Harwich to London why every station was called Bovril and we ride just in time for being me to be delivered here and so my regard for England has always been that of an extremely friendly foreigner but one who feels more at home here than perhaps anywhere else in the world I say this because my real concept of the essence of Englishness came when my mother told me a story my mother was a painter and she designed the interior of Covent Garden and the ballet for the visit of state visit of President LeBron in 1938 in order to celebrate the art art courtyard and she was selected together with Dane Annette de Valois and constant Lambert to be presented to Queen Mary she knew nothing about that kind of protocol or etiquette and she was told that she must not change the direction of her eyes she must look directly in front of her and only speak when she was spoken to so she stood in the front row with the three of them with the two of them she was the third and Queen Mary swept in as I had seen her on one occasion in Harrods looking very much a ted-like a magnificent ship in full sail and accompanied by one of the elderly ladies who lived in Hampton Court a grand duchess prestech nassau Coburg Gotha and little spot with a tiara which was sued and she was really very very small and pre Mary with this majestic person and they arrived opposite Nanette de Valois my mother stopped stood rigidly like that and Queen Mary said something like no often time and you'll have absolutely unfair we lived about what I said and then my mother sensed that premarin was moving one closer to her in constant Lambert was a huge man who drank rather a lot and who was always slightly side long like and she still looked rigidly ahead not daring to see what was happening and she heard Queen Mary say and you and councilmember said right on No yeah then there was a pause and freedom very landed in front of my mother and she looked at her and said so the Grand Duchess caught between her desire need to follow Queen Mary and to say some sort of consoling word to make up for this absence of any communication just had time to grip my mother's wrist and say what a pity about evolution so that's a certain aspect of Englishness which I've always found very attractive and another one is that this country is still very very full of surprises there was a visit to England the other day from a Dutchman who had lived a quiet and sheltered life and produced the definitive book on the painting of Pieter de haut of Dutch interiors quiet women sweeping floors and yachts in the background and windmills and occasional cow and everything the very epitome of peacefulness and this man was in his early 60s and he had occasion to be invited to a ducal house by a mutual friend of the Duke and of his in England he arrived there and to his horror having written the definitive book which was now published in magnificent coffee table style with all the paintings there pitted a who had ever painted he suddenly saw two new ones on the wall that he had never seen that he got terribly excited and said to the friend but I think these are my people to halt but by whom a Peter to who is it well you better ask to do it how does one call the Duke you call him his grace thank you very much and he went and said his grace these pictures are by faith of the who these are the fools I did that fellas painted on wood of course I heard that cuz when I was younger I used to throw a ball again we had a day puh-pow the other one either probably the other one was in the in the other wing before the fire but I don't remember do you want me to call for the black book and then I can you see they have two glee wings on on the Fela look think after that and now you read me out the number and I'll tell you what there you little be very wonderful these kitties and the butler appeared this size telling me the black book everything came back with it and the Duke ed about the numbers he suggests by 104 and the Humbert and six yeah I wonder what happens in 105 oh yeah what did you say they were each of the whole full marks what is that German no no it's hey I think I won it's Dutch from Holland hey are you from the Netherlands one more from the Low Countries the new champion anything and he was about to shut the book when the Dutch expert said them okay could you tell me where you acquired them where we were where you acquired them yeah yeah oh yeah we bought them from the artist that's another aspect of Englishness I'm told that I should provoke you into asking questions I'm rather charity of starting too soon because I only have about 14 answers but if any of you feel moved to shift me on to somewhere else I would be personally frightfully grateful you have to travel around world meeting very important people and each country has its own particular versions of protocol how would you distinguish and describe the different countries to visited to visited in terms of their protocol how do you cope with it very good question because there's a charming incident in Yugoslavia Tikal there was a huge gentleman who was unfortunately killed in an air crash the prime minister under tito are called mr. Burrage a from the middle of yugoslavia and who was a comrade of Tito's up in the hills during the war inseparable bodyguard and he was eating at a banquet next door to the American ambassador s and Tito on the other side and he was explaining details of the partisans to the American ambassadors and went and on the fourth day we're talking and the anteater noticed that and said bearded when the two divisions were already where they were headed and I was coming together in a class damage knife whoo there's a wonderful class of protocols at the giving out of the Erasmus Prize which was one in The Hague by Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin I had to go and make a speech for Charlie Chaplin at his request because he said he was too shy well I'm just as shy as he is but I did it because it was not for me it was much easier to make the speech but I was the warm-up man because as soon as I'd finished he got up and he spoke for a very long time but the I remember queen juliana who was very short sighted the very charming lady who suddenly didn't see the swedish emissary anymore because Ingmar Bergman couldn't came come himself so that it was somebody from the palace who came and she suddenly said there was a lady here before her and the woman was down there in the deepest curtsy you'd ever seen I tried I understand her nature I tried to indicate you we Jalali got a terrible shot and said please stand up and the woman stood halfway up and said it is done this way in Stockholm and creature Jana said when when I'm home you must really do s outdoing the Romans it's not done here and the world Shaka and Queen Juliana who might never met before took me aside and said I hope I haven't heard that woman's feeling but you know I hate being treated as though I'm something different from everybody else they also think that I'm narrow-minded how can I be never minded that have had nearly every meal in my life in a room with eight famous Rubens paintings in it you know the White House well have you met the Reagan's and does Nancy Reagan run things as we're told she does well we were at the White House and I have no compunction in telling you about this because it was in all the papers but we were actually there at the moment when suddenly there was a thought I was at the same table as Nancy Reagan and a very sculptural ballet dancer great talent called Suzanne Farrell who like many ballet dancers give the impression of being remote and choreography forgive me it sort of unattainable and and wistful but she was very good conversational friend and suddenly there's a Bing Bing Bing and Reagan got out and said well I just want to raise this glass of mine in this white house of ours to welcome the Prince of Wales and his lovely lady David and suddenly I felt adrift like that it was the ballerina who's suddenly there I was a runaway motorbike and she said what he said I said don't worry he's thinking next weekend at Camp Diana what was perhaps a little more disturbing was when 12 o'clock came and we started drifting out and I said to my wife I think we'd better say goodbye she said yes and we I went out to him and spoke very loudly and clearly and said thank you very much for inviting us mr. president and he said and I was standing so close to her and I couldn't go away without saying something else so I said daringly you won't remember this but almost 40 years ago I invited you to dinner in London and we dined together at a restaurant called Liz ambassador and he said oh wow Oh golly which ambassador with that I thought of that the other day when we were with the television crew on the Great Wall of China which is very precipitous it's a very tiring wall altogether it's full of people doing both directions and I met on that wall as somebody I'd been when I was working in Salzburg during the summer so somebody was conducting next door and I never managed to see him Horsch Stein and I ran into him on the Great Wall with all his orchestra and it's that kind of war and suddenly I stopped out absolutely exhausted and the cameras going I said all right this at this very spot both both Reagan and Nixon gave up they were too bereft of any stamina there was nothing left at all either and I'm told that Nixon when he got here said we had a great wall and but I thought sure but Reagan had said this great wall of ours there anyway the most fascinating personality because since the Americans are a grand sporting nation they love to see a man who can admit he's wrong and occasionally Reagan does something which are really quite extraordinary and then goes on the air and says I guess I made another booboo and everybody says oh god the opposition Oh I can see Oh hi James you being you being such a fastidious and elegant man I suppose when you were in the army you were a very neat and disciplined soldier were you right I think you must read somewhere that I wasn't reports or other that was the time that I met David Niven who told me that there had been a general at Sandhurst who was controlling some of these exam papers and not passing people and he came out with her with a wonderful remark which I'm sure that he was too gifted to be a really good general because he said about one candidate yeah he sets himself extremely low standards which unfortunately he fails to live that was another the the saving graces was the proximity of humor all the time because we had at that time some of the last sergeant which came in a direct line I think from from Waterloo perhaps by way of the Crimean War in Florence Nightingale but nothing much had altered and they spoke with this extraordinary accent which suggested that they had fairly humble origins but had been near enough the officers miss to hear certain pronunciations and they came out with language which was really absolutely bizarre and Barak I thought I told you I knew where they come from I never heard it but it has so many grace notes in it that it is as complicated some of the most modern atonal music and perhaps the Chinese would understand it better than we because they have a four tonne language oh oh oh and you can see the most dreadful things if you haven't got a musical here yes it was a it was a consistently horrifying and yet comic experience that we have a sergeant major who was punch-drunk and who spent all his time the avoiding imaginary blur the nearest he could get to my name was it not we when we first called into the army we spent a horrifying first five or six weeks in billets which was so overcrowded there was six of us into the room the size of a toilet it was really absolute agony and after we moved to rather more copious billets although they were freezing and I met this sergeant major in the street and he was a man who as I'm nervous tick would say stand up in bed I mean even if you were lying reading for shoot he came up to me in the street and said Paul you nothing there's a new belly either the new village is much less congested sir he said I know ballroom - Annette so - those full of that kind of thing we had a sergeant age 28 who had not a tooth in his head and they pull him folded over there and the new teeth had been ordered from the Army Dental Corps in 1937 and they did not yet arrived business for a definite purpose because he was a terrible man and he watched you writing home and he watched parcels arrived and who used to come in and say any cake and you'd say no we went once you got wise to this use it no I've got some toffee and to show that it's always difficult in life to know which are the good moments and which are the bad because until you make a final assessment and there's probably no time for that at the end you really don't know which is which but he got his teeth in 1942 and the first day he went out on parade he said God collapsed onto the ground bleeding from his mouth because he'd bitten right through his tongue there was a man who was better without his teeth Oh Dennis Oh Peter you were born in England and started your career in England love to know how it was that you had crossed the Great Divide jumped over the herring pond and landed your first Hollywood job well I the first Hollywood job was not done there it was done in Rome and it was Quo Vadis which was then going to be directed by by John Huston and they thought I looked rather corrupt and shifty and therefore might be good for for Nero and I did a test with with John Huston but that was a period when acting was completely different to what it is today it was a time when I just appeared not so long before in the film called one of our aircraft is missing in which humans appeared a very distinguished actor and a father of someone who's here tonight and he kept watching me the whole time every time I rehearsed I saw him watching me and he had a face which one could see him watching so there was no doubt about what he was doing he wasn't just being himself his part and eventually came up to me and said excuse me young man what are you going to do in this scene and I was terribly shy and said well I mean really I thought I'd do nothing he said oh no you don't I'm doing nothing and that was a period when all drama students I remember them said I've heard how wonderfully gerald de morir offered a cigarette and everybody tried to emulate this negligent gesture cigarette there's nothing had happened in yet everything it happens everything was reduced to such a level the cigarette became tremendously important well I was brought up in that tradition and here I was being nearer going absolutely mad and thinking I was going so far overboard nobody in his senses would engage me especially not if they had seen Gerald amore offer a cigarette and all the time John Huston who's this wonderful mischievous fellow kept saying little more bored and they said they liked it but they said there are they then there was a delivery over a year and they said that they wanted me to play the part it was now Mervyn Leroy who was directing it they wanted me to play the part but they thought I might be a little young for the role I said that Nero died at the age of 31 if they waited any longer I would be too old send me a cable which I still got in cherish which says historical research has proved you correct I think that was because they'd always seen Charles Laughton in the role who was much older in outward appearance although he wasn't at all old but I think maybe he should have done it Jackie Stewart it's a long time since she did the Grand Prix of Gibraltar there's a long player perhaps you might tell us how it came about maybe reminisce a little of some of the voices and why you did it why did he because at the time I was very interested in motor racing since you left I'm less interested though I think it's a very good reason you left I'm proof of that heartily because it's good to see you there and you now become a very good commentator i teased you about this before but I can't resist making it public quite apart from the record which is out of date because it's a long time ago but Jackie I've heard commentating on motor car races in America or Canada and he does a wonderful job except that occasionally you hear him say I don't like the sound of that engine then he says and one thing to notice about this very difficult to around the houses racing that they're doing here is that they've got to keep off the pavement as much as five years is a forsyth coming around again he happens to be in the lead but I don't think you'll hold it for long he's going up on the sidewalk again the back axles not going to take this kinda treatment much longer to tell you that he'll be retired before long there's foresight again he's strangely enough still in the lead then right at the end you hear around the crestfallen jack he's saying well young Forsyth won his first Grand Prix but I think he must have count himself a very lucky um you have a piano onstage does that mean that we're going to hear you sing and play no I don't really but we have I have an old friend sitting in the audience called Tony Hopkins not the one who's playing Lea tonight is a composer and he wrote the music for two or three films I did and many others and we used to have fun improvising in the style of various composers and we thought we'd do it tonight yeah I'm really very hearing Lea because we haven't done it for many years oh wow golly which composer this is under the general title of going into Europe the kind of cultural musts that we have to accept these days I'm here from from the argument it was actually in Bonn we are going to give you one of the rare pieces of Schubert Schubert wrote this when he was healed based on a poem by Eisen Dorf the girl and the halibut the girl is wandering through the countryside fairly near the sea and she sees a helipad and she says I'm hungry I want to eat the helipad the helipad answer stood to this please because if you do this you will be ill like Schubert and the girl doesn't listen she eats the hello button she says I'm feeling Fraulein are to have me I mean there's me who is really the ofrecen Yahoo DFS the socked yeah hi nein nein nein nein endorphins i refresh conda's mating round for us that higher vote for me I lost mine recently we had a question about the nickname that your father enjoyed when he was a secret service mole at the German Embassy I think it was due cough or something like that as a result of that I've had a letter which reproaches me for being a foreigner in Britain who had absorbed the British inability to pronounce foreign names correctly however better than Ustinov he says who can't even pronounce his own name properly I'd like to ask Sir Robin is that action the bowtie of it is that actionable and and secondly which subject would you choose as a specialized subject mast might go oh god I don't know Iceland I think you feel at home not bad they've got a great sense of humor there was their Nobel prize-winning author Haldar laxness who was driving from his farm in a jeep at the age of 66 I think he worked when he was driven off the road by a truck and he ended up side down in a ditch still at the wheel of his car and when the truck driver ran over to him upside down he said upside down and is there anything else I can do for you you wanted to say something um I remember a delightful character who is a dresser of yours in Brighton a dresser who was very very old he was 88 or something and he was terribly nimble and you can hear what he said houses only he said I'm one of the constables of Gloucester I thought he made he was a policeman apparently that's a famous tribe of jockeys and he said I was six thousand eight when I was 21 years of age however do you think I am now I said I have absolutely no idea chicks donate that's funny it was first night I'd never appeared in that play before it was opened in Brighton and I am a little transistor radio with me which was probably a wolf radio in those days and just before I was going on the stage I lifted on just before I went on the stage she stopped me and he said may I ask you a question - I said yes but hurry because I can hear my cue right the first night it's really quite agitated easy in your long career sir have you ever had anything to do with mules I've never had anything to do he said it's a great pity if you don't mind my saying so it's a lovely animal Christian is a dog if you treat it proper then I go on the stage and I came off and the music had changed they were now playing Elgar second Symphony which is a very Edwardian and fruity a piece of music a full orchestra employed nearly all the time and he was listening to it and he suddenly looked up and said oh yeah Becky piccolo that's a fast instrument and he had a tragic circumstance at home because he said to his wife wasn't talking to him anymore it's very alarming when the people have 80 didn't talk to each other it's oh well you know it was during the world near the end of the war and I don't know what was I essentially did I heard a bath bomb and I threw myself on my wife in the street we never forgave me there wasn't no bomb I can never explain it - it was a really sad story I years and years ago I was in Hamburg and new people at the Hamburg Opera at a time when you just directed the Magic Flute out there and after you left the production obviously changed and developed a written its own ways what you feel about actors and singers ad-libbing and adjusting the production and have you ever been guilty of doing this oh yeah when when the director left yeah when I was the director myself rarely but Hamburg had a special character every time anything went wrong in Hamburg you knew who it was and you looked into the wings and you didn't even have to see the man he came out sheepishly and said with a very strong Austrian accent it was made for thinking he said I can't remember his name was now but I said again you he said yes you know this is a temper of German efficiency and an Austrian and say keep they keep me on because I humanize them but however efficient you are in Opera things always can go wrong in other words you have to rehearse everything because one day in zigfried one of the pallbearers was taken ill and as all the extras were leaving the man in charge of them said hotcake don't go home but not on tonight you are on strays about his ill so you excuse and you were gone cake cupcake here show him tell him don't need to go on the stage it's too easy all you do is to go on and bring the secret is that you pick up third and out but look solid all the way to look solid Oshin it said it's easy from have a BF be disgusted fit the clothes Aldi grow and is pretending you live either so they didn't rehearse and Siegfried died was lying on his thing with a horns and wings and the two men went on and they picked it up facing each other and with them both wishing to save the situation they put him down if you want to do a thing badly you have to try harder Oh Ted Heath I suspect that if you weren't so intelligent and hadn't been born so well-endowed you would like to be a politician but tonight you've been rather shy about these questions of East and West but in your own writings and because of your experience you're really in a unique you share the journey unique position to interpret East West mankind generally what is your philosophy of humanity you abandoned dogma and you put humanity in its place well I'm very flattered and honored by the question from someone who one always expect is going to talk about politics but when you visit him in his home you are first of all shown the piano and then pictures of yachts this is the kind of politician I trust the question is is a very complicated one to answer in a short time but I think of course that the media concentrate on what separates us for obvious reasons and once you've accepted that there are differences between us one is always struck by the similarities because conditions are exactly the same because if you're sitting with your own family on the other side of the Iron Curtain that you asked for the salt to be passed and it is passed you don't think for a moment that it may be a bug or that there's anything subversive about it it seems absolutely normal and of course normal people in the course of daily events don't talk about politics very much not as much as politicians think they must and so it doesn't become a burning question I think what's happening in Russia today is tremendously exciting I don't want to appear to be enthusiastic as you fall into another trap then and as one French paper said to me are you sure that you weren't charmed by mr. Gorbachev and I said I really no more affected by the fact that he calls me by my Christian name then I am by the fact that the girl in his goodness once called me Monsieur I think the tremendously exciting times when especially in a society like that which still bears the residue of Stalinism or the habits of what happened in between as in fact any organization must what Gorbachev is doing really without abandoning the aims of communism he's gone back to Lenin and he's trying to do what Lenin might have done if he had lived longer in other words in Christian terms she's gone back to Christ instead of stopping it Alexandra Borja or really afore his inspiration and I think that is extremely refreshing but he's a an extraordinary engaging man and he's one of a whole team because the others are just as extraordinary and I was told I remember when I was working on a big television project by all sorts of scientists that the Russians could never afford computers in schools because they couldn't rely upon the source of information they couldn't exclude things now I got there to find the first Russian computer for schools not only operating but linked with schools in Bologna and Boston and exchanging information by satellite and I was asked whether I knew of any English or Scottish school that would like to attempt the experiment with the other three well if and they've also got on disk the whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica not Soviet Iike Britannica and all of Greek and Roman literature for example with all the footnotes by learning men I think this is a fabulous step forward and one which I never suspected would be possible but evidently it is so my philosophy is watch each other like hawks by all means but don't continue this abrasiveness and malice which is shown by some people in what they say and think it's quite it's time the Russia was treated as a country like any other such a different way of looking at things but basically people everywhere are really very good I think and they are only made bad well I think we've reached about the end of a lot of people's tethers I thought I would send you off perhaps with a last touch of European culture with Professor Denver who is here from the best Germany the punt fear or the facial Suzanne are tight and in order to perform for you with the bowler comic or top nice yeah and the orchestra of the shot Castle a work written by Johann Sebastian Bach at the age of two years perhaps even some years before that it's a segment of a cantata called sacra which was found in Erfurt and smuggled from the manuscript in my museum the music this which of the other side Kobo gigantica which is as everybody knows is a museum which houses the largest collection of musical fragments in the world perhaps even in Europe Oh Oh excellent well coming next on I to be three out Friday night movie Tom Cruise meets the autistic brother who never knew he had Dustin Hoffman co-stars in the Academy award-winning Rain Man

Channel: Archy L

Views: 741,075

Rating: 4.7931032 out of 5

Keywords: Peter Ustinov (Film Actor), An Audience With... (TV Program), Comedy (Theater Genre)

Id: Bi1GXrLLHjs

Length: 51min 25sec (3085 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2015