Peter Ustinov - rare at-home 1987 TV interview!!

[Music] oh [Music] be very careful can we come in yes dude you expected this or not yeah i did i expect you to tomorrow at the same time you once said i live like an englishman i think like a frenchman and i write like a russian i never said that of course no this is typical this is typical of the age we live in this sort of things attributed by some press agent and then uh i get it back at me all the rest of my life except some people said you once wrote that you live like a swede you eat like a norwegian and it's all untrue yes you've been one of the privileged people who met gorbachev in person this must have been been a remarkable visit yes because he's a an extremely uh intelligent i mean it's very few people that you can say immediately that they're intelligent and he's intelligent uh in many ways for instance during his last big speech in the kremlin which was to an audience of 900 to 1000 foreigners uh he suddenly stopped in the middle of what he was having to say which was not abrasive at all it was not calculated to annoy any other country it was very he suddenly stopped and said i have a terrible feeling that i am talking too quickly for the translators and then he looked at the translators for a confirmation and one translator got up and gorbachev said i'm terribly sorry it's my fault it's my failing that i my ideas run away with me and i start talking too quickly i'll watch it from now on and the rest of the speech he gave at half the pace frequently looking in their direction to see whether he hadn't forgotten himself again now if there's nothing else this is intelligent because it's also very flattering for the translators and it's flashing for everybody else who has a party in it because it shows i'm helpless without you people you're important even though it seems to you that you're not important because you're just following my text you are tremendously important in that sense he is he has a degree of almost humility which i find very acceptable [Music] intellectually arthur [Music] [Music] [Music] there again sorry to interrupt you i don't say anything no but are you making a gesture there again what i found extraordinary interesting was that he said to start with that he had read what we had written would we now please explain it to him further if he found anything that we said particularly exciting or he reacted strongly against it he reserved the right to interrupt but he said if i have the same effect to you on you please don't hesitate to interrupt me and i told him that i never thought that i had would live long enough to have such a conversation at the pinnacle of soviet power or in fact a pinnacle of any power and i must say you're extremely positive about him i'm extremely positive i'm not suggesting that he's a man without faults they must be there i met queen juliana who was who was adorable because it was the erasmus prize in which i was asked to go there in order to make a speech for charlie chaplin i was asked by him because he said he was too shy i should have known better because i made an eloquent speech i thought in amsterdam in amsterdam on his behalf and he used me as a warm-up man because immediately i finished he got up and made a speech about himself the other person to share the prize with him was ingmar bergman who couldn't come for some reason but a lady came from stockholm to accept the prize for him and queen juliana who's also short-sighted with these big glasses looked around wanted to shake the swedish lady's hand but suddenly couldn't find her and the swedish lady had gone into a deep curtsy she was down on the floor looking upwards and queen julia uh juliana suddenly saw him but ah got a real shock at seeing her there and said oh get up please you we don't do that in holland and she said from the floor we do it in sweden and queen julian will flush him and know and said well really when you're on your home your masters are doing the romans please stand up and then took me aside afterwards and i'd never met her before and said i hope i haven't defended the poor woman you know it's terrible everybody tries to make me seem as though i'm not just a normal person i hate that she said they also accuse me sometimes of being narrow-minded how can i be narrow-minded that i've had practically every meal in my life in a room with eight famous women's pictures in it and then in the era in the town [Music] the thing that was sinister about this assassination is i didn't hear a single voice just shots and the animals in the garden the squirrels and vultures and things that were there they knew perfectly well by instinct that it wasn't meant for them talking about death i somewhere read that there was some kind of a similarity in the way your parents died because both of them had sort of a final phrase for you is that fact or fiction no well it's not quite right there was one similarity there which is very strange because uh my father uh when he was dying was in a coma and he spoke to me and to everybody else only in french which was really very surprising because he'd really never talked to us in french when he was alive spoke either english occasionally in german very rarely in french and he woke came out of his camera from mom looked at me and said uh in french tia connect that's odd i recognize you from my dreams it was very touching that's the last thing he said and my mother who was very pro-western and and not at all fond of her youth in russia when she was dying she spoke to me only in russian and i don't speak russian very well and sometimes i didn't know what she wanted but i could imagine it the last thing she said was simply that i put on my little radio right near her ear when she was in a coma coma and played a bit from don giovanni quite loud and she smiled and said mozart that's the last thing she said which i think was a very very good last line for anybody fine your father at several occasions stated that he didn't want to get any older than 70 years he told me during the war he refused to get older than 70 because he said life's not any fun one is in a decline it's not interesting i don't find it neutering i promise you i won't live more than 70. and he died about four or five hours before his 70th birthday uh over 20 years after he said that and it was a very roman death because he really disappeared but where are the real dogs [Music] he makes the noise and the other one does the demonstration [Music] come here come here none of your party tricks you're sulking today it's always like that had you come tomorrow as was foreseen you would have got the front of the dog instead of the back it's the general attitude which i found uh frankly interesting and and uh a step ahead of many of us in a way if they send for instance if the russians send a hundred students to america to learn something rather only 80 come back the russian reaction still tends to be where are the other 20 and the reaction of the chinese is 80 come back it's very much more restful but how did the people in those spots react for example on your wife because they must have made big eyes or not yes they did well we went certainly to a part of the world in in langchau province in ganso province at the thailand land shell which is the poorest part of china and which the annual revenue is in parts of 60 dollars you can imagine and there they had never seen a non-chinese face and the chinese were slightly worried about their reaction so one felt like marco polo again uh the reactions are all different we have them on an old lady with an enormous amount of things on her back [Laughter] an old man who's rather military was absolutely outraged by the sight of us a small boy unable to move and a small dog tied up absolutely wild with fury longing to get at us and then the thing that suddenly brought us together was the red varnish on my wife's finger the nail polish they suddenly looked at that and they did everything they could they licked it they tried to scratch it they were not worried about the varnish they knew what that was because there's lacquer everywhere but they thought it might be a disease at first so they were nervous and then when they got to see what it was they became terribly friendly and that was a marvelous meeting when i see what everything you're doing the dish must be here for your dogs because you don't ever have the time to look television i looked at these american hearings the other day and found them absolutely riveting to hear indirectly what's going on over there general c card let me ask you now what did you do in trying to get the arms from israel to iran uh i went to portugal sir portugal is that a logical place to go to get armed well i did i can't tell you what it was like is there any wish in your life that remains to be fulfilled no to see a little more of the impossible dream made possible that's all i don't think uh with the amount of people there are on this earth all thinking differently but all dragooned by the media into thinking the same locally it's very difficult but i think it's still absolutely possible i mean what's really tragic to me not tragic but dramatic is that the means of communication are so wonderful the only thing we haven't yet improved is what we say to each other and i've been called in the swimming pool by somebody from a swimming pool in california just to prove that they had a telephone in their swimming pool well he didn't tell me anything except to ask what the weather's like that's i think it's a waste since a telephone is a bomb for you it's television for me absolutely i mean things are much safer when we didn't know immediately what was going on in other parts of the world i will never call you again don't ever call me again and don't forget that information work moves very fast and misinformation moves at the same pace as information thank you very much it's been a real joy thanks to velman here thank you and proud scenes okay you walk back into your house because we follow you with the camera yarmini here

Channel: slydogmania

Views: 27,099

Keywords: Peter Ustinov, Peter Ustinov television appearances, Peter Ustinov interviews, Great actors of the 20th century, Russia, London

Id: KIQ99dONR2I

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021