Peter Ustinov - the Parkinson Interviews compilation

i have but one man is my guest tonight but is in fact many men if you've got an hour or so to spare i could begin to sketch in a detail or two about his career he's played vaudeville and designed sets and costumes for opera producer novelist playwright raconteur as much at home in a film studio as on a stage he set down his life so far in a book called dear me and in it he sums up his life thus and i quote i'm betrothed to laughter the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the universe ladies and gentlemen peter houston off peter yustenov was a true all-rounder it's easier to list what he hadn't done rather than what he had actor writer director producer humorist and a tireless ambassador for unicef his death in march 2004 has left the world a poorer place this was a man who directed opera in russia sat at negotiating tables with world leaders and played tennis not as well as he'd have liked between 1971 and 1982 michael parkinson interviewed him seven times one of these encounters has been lost to the archive but the remainder proved comprehensively why parkinson described his guest as god's gift to the talk show host houstonoff was one of the great storytellers of modern times he often mined the rich vein of his melting pot background for material he was after all a man who claimed to be conceived in saint petersburg born in london and christened in germany just explain to us where the tap roots are and in your your background in your family well i suppose my father's father and my mother's mother were russian my mother's father was of french origin with an italian mother and my father's mother was a swiss with an ethiopian mother after that i'm still finding out it's an extraordinary mix isn't it i don't know it seems quite normal to me someone was described you as the best bred mongrel in europe and i wondered if there was in fact any one particular country because i mean you are truly european that you regard as your homeland well well it depends where i am i obviously i when i first went back to russia i wondered whether i would behave foolishly as i sat in the plane and maybe really be very moved and i wasn't really obviously i feel less russian in russia but full of the real thing than i do here but perhaps i feel there's english in england than i do in france is is it true that you devised an imaginary country imaginary it wasn't about one foreign really it didn't happen well first i when i was eight uh which i mentioned in my in my book um when i was eight i went for a walk in sussex and came around the corner and saw a chicken having its neck run and this appalled me i'd never thought of it i never connected the leg or the wing lying on a bed of rice on a plate with things screeching and running across the road like a mad girlfriend plus fours being pursued by a woman with a knife or whatever and i was horrified and so i invented this country in which the constitution and i had its constitution in its way as fine as the american constitution or any other the first point of the constitution was that no chicken should have its neck grind this is how the country is targeted but then the country grew with me and now it has it has uh a way of life and population and difficulties extremely big like everybody else really yes and that's why i don't talk about the country but it's absolutely real to me it has a geographical position and when anything happens in the world my first reaction is how are we going to react to that you're one you're a dictator in your own country of course are you no i'm not it's a democracy but for some extraordinary reason i'm always elected you're also of course left in the charge for a while of nannies weren't you i mean you brought him in that kind of world i mean i never had a nanny poor deprived fellow but i wonder what i wonder what was right with you well precisely you see what what sort of experiences do you have with nannies the two that i remember who really uh created an impression on me they were both very cruel women one was curious enough was black and unlike the traditional image of the warm-hearted southern nanny who everybody relies on and who is exudes godliness and warmth this one came from one of the german west african possessions of the time and had gravitated much more towards germany than anywhere else and she had she was she had a rather frizzy hair and a black pair and she screamed at me come here so fat doctor here come like a gal like it looked absolutely wrong absolutely wrong they had kind of punishments at the time which were unusual and one had to stand for hours in a corner with a wet diaper on one's head i mean more stupid anyway she was fired by my father and then came a rather hypocritical lady from the emerald eye and she wore a black felt hat and a pin which seemed to go right through her head always worried me and uh my mother was very keen on exercise and breathing the fresh air and she was sent out with me this nurse and we never got very far she was supposed to be in the park and she went around two or three streets behind victoria station so i was put next to a railing while she went downstairs into the basement and a man came up after time and placed a parrot there to amuse me and the parrot imitated me and i immediately imitated it after about an hour the nurse would arrive would come up from the basement rather flushed she looked as if she'd had much more exercise than i had once we were at home of course i started doing the imitation of the parrot which my parents thought hilarious until my father suddenly said just a moment he hardly could see a parrot in the park that's right so they followed the pram the next day and waited until this lady emerged and that was the end of her odyssey and the first of my very one of the first of my imitations really was the paris yes yes and that was the age of what you mentioned this thing about um because you were a lonely child not necessarily unhappy but isolated in a sense from other children and one wonders then um how you managed to cope with the prep school the the first school you went to i mean was it was it difficult did you have any camouflage that you adopted to well i automatically gravitated towards making people laugh at me because i noticed at school also at the army later on that i got out of trouble by being so hopeless that it amused people and every unit or every school has their the but for unmalicious jokes and i became that which which was sad in a way because i was rather good at one or two things which i was never allowed to do because i was too odd it didn't fit you know i mean i would have loved to have played tennis properly earlier on as it was i could nearly always beat people in the school team at westminster but was never allowed to play because they didn't take it seriously now at the end of my road i've been asked by not semi officially to be a linesman at wimbledon but i said i'm not old enough i can still see the ball for them i used to be forced to play qriket at school of course but there's something about the shape of the ball that's the small painful thing uh i i once got it right on my thumb and it pushed my thumb it was really very painful but so by then i knew i wouldn't catch it so just as i was missing the ball i shouted butter fingers myself and so a laid and so i took over little sting out of the general shout that went up but i did once win a match for my school simply because they made me the scorer and the scorer for the other school was a little bullied boy to whom i was very nice and he was so grateful that he just listened to me talking and i did all my work and eventually he'd completely forgotten to do his and he had a crib from mine and although the school made far less runs on the other side we won and the headmaster was corrupt enough to engage mia scorer in the future but the other scorers in the other schools weren't of the same quality so they tended to lose what about soccer did you play soccer soccer i was very often put in goal uh the idea being that being larger than other boys i might inadvertently stop more boys without moving but i enjoy soccer very much i'm i enjoy tennis most of all because they're on on believe it or not on the limited space i can move quite fast even today so long as those nettings stop me did this thing about your size at uh have you ever consciously tried to slim away no well i know but things always things happened you know and i was forced to row at school i don't like growing very much because i don't like sitting with my back to the engine slaving away and you see the other school diminishing in size and eventually all you see is a little troubled water out of the corner of your eye and you're still going on doing this when the thing is hopeless and i did what was called catching a crab i uh the thing got caught and it was because my little chair came off its rollers and i resisted this with all my power and the little chair went sideways and through this cigar wrapping and the whole boat began to sink there's nothing sillier than eight people sitting in line and gradually the water coming up with a very small one sitting at the other end with them with a megaphone it's an idiotic situation and after after i destroyed the boat i was allowed to play tennis and i realized that you've always got to destroy the boat if you want to get your way what about the masters though generally i mean when you look back at them again and reassess and reassess them were they any use to you at all i mean what kind of men were they well some are very good although i'm surprised now i mean i think that i learn much more every day now than i did at that time i think personally that schools are there to teach you to learn and in that sense uh i think it wasn't very good at the time i mean they were so the headmaster for instance he was a clergyman with an absolutely sickening slide it was the largest smile and there was a cathedral in his mouth an organ often stained glass windows and everything and he revealed that a photograph of a woman in a one-piece bathing costume had been found holding a beach ball i will get to the bottom of this filth will any boy own up silence of course very well he said when i find the culprit as find him i will i shall beat him and then as an afterthought i am in the need of exercise i mentioned by the headmaster discovering what must have been i mean by modern tastes of very sort of ordinary tit bits uh pinup you know the beach ball absolutely yeah um but um did you was there any such thing as sex education to school like that no there was none at all and i was left totally in the dark but things were perhaps a little more evolved as my old friend a man called sir clifford norton who was a wonderful man uh told me what it was like in rugby uh around about 1910 when the headmaster decided that the time had come for certain boys to be instructed in these delicate matters and said are we all here is armstrong here oh yes there you are you're so small come forward armstrong uh daley shut the door he's your brother your brother yes right shut the door are you all here very well now look here if you touch it it will fall the rights returned your dormitories and they left equipped now for life eustinov didn't thrive in the english public school system failing his school certificate he dropped out of westminster and into drama school he was on the stage by the age of 17 wrote his first play at 19. but europe was on the verge of war and by 1942 he'd been conscripted into the army as it was for many of his generation the army was used to not's crucible he went in a private and went out of private no mean feat and one which depended on him not only doing things badly but doing things badly with skill houstonov's family brought him closer to events in 1999 mi5 files disclosed that houstonov's father had worked as an agent for british intelligence before the war in fact he warned the government of hitler's intention to invade czechoslovakia in his interviews with michael eustinov hinted at his father's role the full extent of which was only revealed later let's turn to to another aspect of your life which is that you're now coming up to this time towards the warriors we were generally speaking your father was in fact working um for the german uh embassy in the press office wasn't it yes he was the press attache in 1935 he left with the help of lord van sitters and they put in these notice that you're that you wish to become british in a welsh language paper in carmarthen which frustrated even the ingenuity of the gestapo it certainly would yes it was did in fact it uh did in fact the the position your father had and therefore the intimate knowledge that you had what was going on did you have any full warning at all that being the case that war was imminent in 1938 i came back from my drama school uh to find him rather agitated we live in we lived then on the fourth floor of 34 red cliff gardens in london and he said why are you so late i want you to go to the movies he'd never offered me that before and i said well if you want me to go to the movies i need some money and he called my mother gave me nine pins and sent me off to the movie it was so uncharacteristic for him who was always saying you spend your time at the movies you don't study enough i didn't understand it but i went down and i was too late already i understood that he was agitated there were a group of old men climbing these stairs laboriously they looked like a lot of elephants trying to find somewhere to die you know on they went i stood flush with the wall as they passed about eight nine old men and uh i went to my movie and came back home there was a bar of light under the door explixating some asphyxiating smell of cigar smoke i went to bed and i never mentioned it again until the middle of the war about five years later four years later i said to my father what was that evening now that now that i think of it and he said well i had left the german embassy for three years before and all the contacts had made for them had been dissolved by ribbon trump who behaved like such an idiot uh while ambassador that now in 1938 i got a call from a phone box from the german military attache general gaia von schweppenberg he called my father on a pay phone and said look here as an ex officer of the german army i'm appealing to you uh we're in such bad odor of the british we have no context anymore we simply must get the british to stand firm at munich because it's the last chance we have of stopping hitler and if you can arrange a meeting between members of the british general staff and members of the german general staff our generals will take leave all at the same time go to various european capitals and come to england in con incognito by commercial airliner this was the meeting in your house yes on the fourth floor in case there are any historians listening of 34 red cliff gardens and the british decided that they couldn't risk it it may be a trap and so we all started preparing for dunkirk what arm do would you like to serve in if it were possible and i said the tank core really he became terribly excited why and i said because i would like to go into battle sitting down you had an army report which said under no circumstances must this man be put in charge of others i tried it gave me the most enormous confidence did it because it came from the army you were possibly uh the wrong shape the army in a sense as well i would agree with you yes but i mean i i i try and convince them and the colonel said you don't want to leave us they said all right you will leave tomorrow morning spend this afternoon in the rifle range i never had anybody who wants to leave us before and it was a terribly sad occasion i was so happy that on the rifle range i just shot anyhow and i shot all the bullets into the same hole with the result that the colonel framed my target i was sent on a sniper's club taught me you can never be careless you have to do if you want to do something badly you have to concentrate just as you're going to do it well first of all the great kid that fitted me over here reached right down to the ground because he came off the pig so that i looked already a bit strange and i took the cap badge off so i had a berry then with nothing on it i wore glasses all the time which i didn't need i smoked a cigarette out of a thin holder and i carried an empty briefcase the result was that i saluted nobody but polls of all ranks what sort of soldier were you you're a fairly unremarkable one in the sense that uh i've got your war record before me actually you were four and a half years in the army you went into private and came out of private now that takes some dude at the same time i'm sure that if i had been heeded the war would have been over very much sooner i want to put this on record but i mean what you were mentioning the different kinds of of uh of army uh personality who emerged in any you're right in any barrack room you've got them what were you what was your role peter my role yes i mean were you the joker or were you the uh yes i was the guy who couldn't march properly yes exactly and but i was always saved by some extraordinary you know i had to do a kit inspection i remember one of these awful things where you have to put your socks in little patterns and uh if you can just look at me and you know people will if i put a sock on it's lost its shape it's a thing looking much more like italy than it is like with sicily and sardinia added and so when you then have to make that into a little square mine came out as a nice bun and it rolled about on top of this full blanket and the sergeant major who since went mad i saw the symptoms he came in and was absolutely he said he did it he was into him and i said i'm terribly sorry so i can't do yoga at that moment the officer came in and so the sergeant-major said something very coherent like and so we all stood stiffly to attention the officer came straightly over to me and said you know your photographs in tact clothes and we had a perfectly awful sergeant major who eventually went off his rocker completely and he kept on avoiding imaginary blows he was punch drunk and he kept on saying under his breath as a nervous tick stand up him then even if you were lying by your machine gun you say stand up then you start to get up there well this man uh we already know we were in a billet where we were very overcrowded at ramsgate or margate or somewhere really awful with somebody else's feet in your face all night there was no room to move at all and just afterwards we were moved into a more attractive place um where there was only one of somebody else's foot in your face there was room to move and i met him in the street and he said mourning you no that was my name can't happen how are you how's your new billy i said it's much better thank you sir it's uh much less congested i know more room too he now well that's the sort of thing you were up against what was that the biggest problem i mean the csm on the rso i mean they were always a problem i suppose was that the biggest the thing you hated most about the army well i think these were the last lot i don't think they exist anymore these people i really don't think they can anymore uh there was one another one only 28 years old and he got no teeth everything folded up like that only very very pale very unpainted eye very unpleasant eye highly unpleasant very pale blue nice and he used to go around he had no teeth watching parcels arrived and then used to follow the parcel and go to the people that had received it and said any cake i found you a piece of cake yeah because one wants to be ingratiating with him and one thought maybe causes some favors it really brings out the most bestial side of human nature they sort of people said yes i got a piece of cake you're on a charge you know eating the cake well after a time we all got wise to this and when he said any cake i'd say no i've got some toffee well this man eventually his teeth arrived they did what happened then they had been ordered in 1936 from the army dental corps and they had at last found their master this happens and he suddenly looked quite different from the early spread ladder and he was like a bloodhound because the face was so used to being up in that shape but suddenly now they were kind of like red skating rinks and he looked awful with the thing and uh he had a tragic end because we were on parade he said squad and made a noise really like a wolf at night in some canadian and he bitten right through his tongue and blood was coming out like you like the end of a western you know go on without me oh and then i remember when i went to the to the film unit first the my parent unit only i went from the film unit to the um entertainment unit eventually but the sergeant of the film unit uh he said uh you're a sharer aren't you you want to hold yourself up straight you're lucky to have a nice on me like me i'll help you on with your where you get where you're going you look out well the sergeant major there won't be tender artillery i am now you yeah i got to the new unit where the sergeant major said let me help you off with your equipment now we tolerate almost anything here only one thing we do draw the line at no suede shoes tell me all the many things that you do um so well which was the first to show itself i mean was it the sort of the theatrical side of the acting cell the mimicry side of what as a child i think it was probably mimicry as far as i don't really remember but i'm told it was mimicry what sort of stuff oh no i mean i i did an invitation if my memory says that but i can't remember it now nor would anybody know whether it was accurate or not so we're quite safe get away with it yes but um i think it was mimicry and again many critics say that it's got nothing to do with acting of course it has everything to do with acting because uh acting is uh imitation of the imaginary if you're going to play an old man you imagine the old man then you play him i've never seen the old man i'm doing now i'm getting more irritated because you don't seem to understand what i'm saying but i can imagine such a man you know you've seen in your mind's eye oh oh it acts what's it look like it doesn't look like anyone here no no have you in fact made a study of accents do you consciously study the way people talk no i just funnily enough in trying to describe them afterwards i mean i having worked with john gielgud for instance i think i got rather good at drinking even ralph richardson he was always surprised to see you and absolutely elected and then can't remember so those things now live with me you know are there any special physical characteristics that help one to be a a good mimic i don't know i just can't i can't really judge that but i think mimicry is really only a method of description and i think if you don't know what people say then there's no point in being a mimic i mean it's really uh it's getting inside somebody and and illustrating a point of view or or or even a shortcoming there's nothing about physical characteristics oh well that's true enough what's very interesting from a purely i don't know what it's a philological point of view is that if i speak french or german on the french or german television and i'm being myself like this in a talk show well i have a slight intonation or an accent because the inside of my mouth is trained in english having been brought up here and without saying that if i want to alter the if i don't want to alter the outside want to keep as relaxed as i am now then i have to have a little accent if however i'm going to be a french general or a german politician but you have the nature you have to change the outside of it and it becomes different because you accommodate the inside of your mouth for french and therefore the tongue lands in different place i make it sound like a kind of steeple chase course but it is like yes it is always remember to breathe with your forehead we attack tomorrow at dawn no we have a meeting always try to think with your stomach i'm not going to have them across my field your big daddy was just the most gorgeous thing we ever saw and i must say i've forgotten how to do the other two but i still sing with my eye houston off skill with voices made his stories come alive a writer director and raconteur yusunov was also an acclaimed actor he won two oscars for his roles in spartacus and top cappy a golden globe for his portrayal of emperor narrow in cuovardus and millions later came to love him as hair cure poirot complete with perfectly groomed moustache and little grey sounds peter worked with the greats of his generation and remembered them in his stories with affection and great good humor he was a wonderful anecdotalist who could turn a story into a one-man show and you directly 1946 was it your your first film for the air ministry yes but it was also commercial film yeah school for secret secrets yes you worked in in that film of course with uh sir richardson who is one of the um great figures of the breeze theatre what do you remember about him looking back at him well i thank goodness i can still look forward at him too because he's a a remarkable and an adorable don quixote of a character except that his uh his nag was always a very powerful motorbike and as often as not his windmills were ditches and he had at that time um an ingenious uh form of bridge work in his mouth which was a tribute to british dental science after all the accidents and the walls he'd landed into and he was in tremendously good humor the fourth day and i was 24 years old i was very shy of this great man my assistant was mickey anderson who was now a famous director in his own right of course and uh ralph was playing falstaff at night for the old vic and he was in high good humor he came in the morning and said i am looking forward to works i said more wonderful ralph oh yes the weather's fine so i looked at mickey he understood immediately what had happened and went off to phone ralph's house meanwhile i got in a panic because i said we can't work yet why not and i said because the uh because the the camera's broken his eyes lit up the camera broken he went over to jack hilliard who was standing by the camera who hadn't heard this and said i hear the camera's broken jack said no camera isn't broken no camera we're ready to go when you are he came to me and said why did you lie to me the camera's not broken at all i said um and i noticed the sound man every time that happened was going with all his dials so i i managed to catch his eye and said it's my inexperience ralph uh it's not the camera it's the the sound the sound the sound is it broken the sound man said yes it's the uh helical ball joint which is fouling the contraception pin which invented some kind of jargon there which i didn't follow and uh at that moment mickey anderson came back and said uh mr richardson your house is on the phone oh i don't want to speak to them i want to work we said yes but you've got plenty of time until we fix the sound machine oh what a bother i said please go and phone so he went on the phone and he came back a moment later and said oh dear dear boy i got this during the war it's kind of me grain i get it occasionally i've got some miracle pills dear fellow i'm so sorry to let you down can i lie down for a moment until the pills arrived we said yes of course and 25 minutes later a car arrived with a small packet and five minutes after that he was back on the set again saying they are miracle pills they've never failed i'm now ready to work and it must have been fascinating if we were working on on the donor hollywood epic in in any case did you get any sort of assistance though from mr la roy well i was very much nearer my dramatic student days then and so i wanted to find out from my new director what he thought of the part that i was about to play and i got i saw him the first time 24 hours before we shot and he was on a huge stage like this and he was standing smiling with his cigar and i said how do you want me to what you think of what do you think how do you think i ought to play nero he said nero son of a i said i said yes i agree we agreed so far i said and then he thought and he said you know what he did to his mother with decent concern as though there was something that could still be done about it i said yes i do know what that was very reprehensible yeah son of a suddenly he began tap dance and he said i used to be a hooker i said a hoofer rather i thought for a terrible moment he wanted me to tap dance in the part of nero but he didn't he considered what i'd said and he said the way i see it and i was all i was all listening there he said nero's a guy plays with himself knights that's the only instruction i got and i thought i thought it was pretty foolish and on retrospect i think he's absolutely right you do in point of fact it's the briefest most the crispest kind of instruction i've ever had from a director yes what about what about olivia because she worked with him yes we had one a little scene in spartacus where i had to run up to his horse which is rather a frisky horse and grabbed the reins and say divinity if i identify spartacus for you will you give me the women and the children. and he was supposed to say spartacus you have found him and i was supposed to say yes that was the scene but in fact i ran up and got heard of the horse and said divinity if i identify spartacus for you will you give me the women and the children he's sitting on the horse went spartacus you have found him i said yes he said dear boy could you come a little quicker with your yes what about some of the other people you've worked with because you you have worked with just about every great name in the in the business do you work with ceratic guinness store yes i have we worked in a film called the comedians yes and we have worked on the radio ones and i'm tremendously devoted to him i think he's a marvelous character for a demure and uh bewitching kind of the mure man he suddenly had an irresistible desire to play hitler which surprised everybody because you couldn't find two people more different quite frankly and he'd got to such a pitch that i believe he heard that dustin hoffman was going to play hitler and he got desperate he said hitler is mine a bit unlike him and he went to the extent of taking the initiative and going to a famous firm of theatrical is where he had found a hitler outfit to fit him and he went with a photographer somewhere in bayswater and took pictures in a fairly isolated street and there was allegheny standing on the sidewalk and nobody took any notice people passed with prams even dogs hesitated they didn't stop and it was really absolutely extraordinary that this past absolutely unnoticed by everybody except one policeman who wandered up to him said excuse me sir is that your car over the double yellow line well actually so that is a no parking area i'm only going to warn you on this occasion i'm not giving you a ticket as i have no desire to spend the rest of my life in a concentration houstonov could do much more than simply entertain he was a rare creature equally at home debating at the un as working on a film set he was a pragmatist with great passion for europe for communication for peace houston off wasn't afraid to roll his sleeves up and work tirelessly as an ambassador for unicef his dedication to the un even led kofi annan to joke that houstonov was just the man to take over from him you're a man who will do very easily so straddles the the the the continent the particularly you live in france don't you know and come over here a lot we of course are entering into this momentous phase as they say the politicians say in our history the common market and this sort of thing the problem is of course that we don't like the french do we very much and they don't like us well yeah but you've been such old enemies for so long i can afford to put on my russian mantle for a moment uh the awkward moment did catch the outsider yes that i think there's really no alternative but friendship now um i'm very pro-european because i'm really owing to the innumerable indiscretions of my ancestors there's no other way for me because when i see national minorities getting head up they're still majorities for me because with an ethiopian grandmother and french and italians and russians and germans and all sorts of people all over the place how can i avoid it and i think that europe is a inevitable thing because i think we have to decide now whether we're going to be one player or eight tennis balls and uh especially i feel that it's being speeded up uh more quickly than one could have dreamt of even the more most pro-european speeded up by the strange feeling of of collusion that exists between the super powers at the moment uh which doesn't make me feel very easy would you favor a more leisured approach would you to what to join to the the whole thing happening no no i'm very much into it simply because i think that if two raindrops are going to join on a train window they're going to join there's no way of keeping them apart and britain uh always regarded the united states as a kind of young nephew who's doing awfully well but in point of fact it's it's not that at all we've been misled by the fact that we happen to use the same language but the american society has been formed by many disparate elements it's been it's been influenced by swedish and german architecture in their villages and by all sorts of different foods which are not ours necessarily american troops in europe are very much more at home in germany than they are in france or britain they've got their delicatessen stores they've got all that heritage of german and and russian and jewish cooking which they like which has become part of the national thing um and villagers look like scandinavian ones or what depends where you are or mexican or russian ones but i think what is terribly interesting about america is that it is a melting pot and that it has acquired a personality so quickly i think this is a this is a really interesting thing about human nature even how that's possible that you look out of your hotel window in paris or wherever you are and you see an american walking there and you know he's an american before you know whether he's a swedish or or russian origin and why i was talking about russia and america and this strange relationship which is developing is because even historically i mean if you remember that the liberation of the serfs was almost the same time as the american civil war the opening up of the west was almost the same time as the opening up of the east it was kazaks who reached the vladivostok who were outlaws and who were liberated as a reward for having reached the pacific it's all terribly similar in many ways with the one great difference that at the time that america was being formed the problems of communications were already being conquered whereas the russians lived for eight or nine centuries in miles from each other and consequently lost all sense of time or efficiency i mean the the the russians really are blommer vests at heart it's the only country that i know of in which you get a ticket in in moscow for instance for having a dirty car now this is a tremendous desire to pull people up and say why don't you shave which peter the great started there was a final there was a tax on beards that's why you took it do you think you don't tell much about the country actually when you go there about by watching that television uh certainly um i was very interested watching soviet television because it's extremely low key as though they're trying to keep everybody very quiet all the time and they get uh the newscast and the the the wickedest remark i heard in the whole time i watched it for about a week was and meanwhile in cairo the voter bill continues that's not very tough very bland very quiet very calm what sort of stuff do they show on russian television oh there came one wonderful thing but i have some a football match between sweden and russia very poor quality but in the sunlight and we were all freezing in leningrad at that time and the swedes and the the russians were playing suddenly a whistle went and a very sad dignified woman came on the screen and she said now it is half time with a bun it is now half time and we're taking over to the supreme soviet to see some of this morning's speeches and there they all were and we heard two and a half speeches and in the middle of the third speech excerpts the screen went black i thought oh god they've had an electricity cut or something not at all the woman came back again and said we are interrupting this morning session of the supreme soviet to take you back for the second half of the football match things have changed a great deal and i asked about that and they said there would have been another revolution if they'd cut off a moment of a football match what were you doing in russia peter well that was the first oil recently i've been because a book of mine which i wrote in all innocence 13 years ago and which had a very uh good press but didn't sell that many copies it suddenly was a runaway success in the soviet union that's crumb negligence that's chrome in which in the first 20 days they calculate between 85 000 and 100 000 people have read it are you regarded in russia then more as a writer than you are an actor well yeah they've only seen spartacus i think and death on the nile was just opening but it's nearly always a writer not known at all as an actor but what about the money though in in russia well i don't know i i they pay me royalties because i suggested to them it would be unkind not to i said you know they said that they couldn't at first because i wrote the book in 71 and that they only signed the burn convention in 73 but i said that's unfair because karl marx said everybody should be paid according to their work this is correct i said and on top of it all in a geriatric society why penalize the older writer that started writing earlier you wouldn't do that to brezhnev they came with a lot of money the next morning and i said what's this they said we have convinced the ministry that you're right so this monolith has a very tender skin they're very very easily uh upset and hurt by your attitude they're very hospitable and so i said but what can i do with this money they said is the limousine still there we'll go to the bank so i got my soviet bank book really that's only got the advance in it for the moment so you're you're got lots of rubles have you in there well not yet but i mean i i suppose so yes but you can't there's no way you can take it out with us no but i don't want to i consider it as a as a as a wonderful surprise suddenly uh at my time of life to have a few rubles why not you mentioned that you might think they're going back there to live are you no no i'm just no no i don't know i don't want to choose freedom not yet you in fact just as i said in the introduction being around the world just about promoting the film i mean you're in some extraordinary places we had the michael parkinson of japan oh interviewing me really and with the translator and it was an hour show stop me if i told you this before but uh he was dressed with a black shirt and a white tie and black and white golf shoes and the first question was something like that what a question and it became clear in the translation that the japanese found some difficulty in separating agatha christie from dostoyevsky because when it came to the question translated by the young lady was mr furukawa asked when you arrest the carpet there you are fear in your heart a great tenderness undercover passion for their work for the condition moral and mental condition of the young lady or are you in your heart the same call a colossal a police officer doing his duty well there's a question agatha christie should have answered but i knew she would be incapable of doing so because when it ever got to the great interviewer he said after 55 minutes of this i made it a point of honor to get through and er the largest the translation began and the translation was of all the film you've done in your life which are your favorite i said the next i will rephrase the question during your life you got a domain film now you turn back and look at all the film you've done in your whole life and you put a finger on one of them and you say that one is the bad one i said the next i try to ask our question one other way by this time the man got nervous because the ball was never reaching him and eventually got through to him he looked at me and he said ah five seconds before the hour was up i got through oh god i'm satisfied you have to be here but you work of course do a lot a lot of work and have done still do with unesco and unicef yes yes um looking at it from the outset it's difficult i suppose for the outside observer to understand comprehend oh how effective these organizations are they always seem to me to be great big corporate organizations in a sense that that they're too unwieldy to do much good is that a fair assessment no i wouldn't have thought so i think that of course they're very easy to criticize and very easy to destroy and it's a miracle that they exist and people often criticize the united nations in general because they get annoyed with what transpires in the security council or the general assembly in new york which is really like quarreling about something goes on in a shop window i don't see how these things could function differently once they're democratically constituted what unicef and unesco and the world health organization and such things do is what goes on inside the shop which people don't usually see and which are conducted obviously they are open to criticism anything that size is but they do an extraordinary amount of very valid work but when you also realize that uh the amount of money spent by nations for children every year is roughly equivalent to what they spend on armaments every hour and a half then you realize how much these things are necessary and if you actually go into the field and see the receiving end you're struck by how very important this work is and that certain illnesses like glaucoma have been practically eradicated that there's an enormous water program where they're actually digging far deeper in certain parts of the world where people never had the technical knowledge to dig deeper and it's i think of course absolutely essential and very very worthwhile i'd be much poorer in myself if i didn't do a little bit of that whenever i could afford it it's very important to you quite obviously oh it's more important than anything in its way but you don't find it uh depressing given the the the statistics that you've just told me about the imbalance between the amount we spent on children saying that's only one example and the amount was spent on on the ability to destroy ourselves does not closer contact with with this part of your work does it not make you even more pessimistic about that no i think pessimism is completely out of date i think that's a a romantic indulgence i don't think anybody can afford to be pessimistic anymore i mean there's so much that can go wrong optimism is the only thing possible anymore if you see me i've seen my point i've always thought that an optimist was a person who knew exactly how sad a place the world could be and a pessimist a man who finds out a new every morning that's the real difference no i'm obviously optimistic because you simply have to be it's an obligation to be optimistic but finally peter i've been very fond of the last three four minutes we've got left to us you've you've written down your lifestyle as i said again earlier that i mean that's a kind of voyage isn't it you go back and you you look at things that you not consider before what kind of journey was it for you oh a fascinating one i mean i i'm enjoying it more now than i ever did before and even if i had a pretty rocky emotional life the more that went wrong with my marriages the more optimistic i became and i think now it's justified i think i was right to be optimistic marriage is a part what were the the emotional mistakes in your life what were they the other mistakes when you've reconsidered your journey i mean where are the things the things that went wrong i think it's really impossible to say because even on a purely mundane and everyday level if you invest a lot of yourself in a play which doesn't come off or which does come off in the other sense uh you suddenly feel you find yourself with nothing to do and you're suddenly offered the greatest part you've ever played in the film if the player had run you would not be free for that film so eventually you really cannot assess this at the moment you don't know what's been the good things and what have been the bad and i doubt with you ever can because even when at the moment when you win an oscar or something very very glamorous you're delighted but there's a pang of sadness because you've reached a peak and you've got to go down the other side of it and when you've come under very big attack for something that's the moment when you're permitted to behave with dignity which is also compensation because people discover that you have a little stature or a little fiber or little guts so i don't know i'm never depressed unduly or excited unduly about anything let me ask you finally i mean you've got a man of many many considerable gifts many many areas of you in which you're very talented which do you yourself consider to be the most precious gift that you've got i think it's the gift of listening really as much as anything because i think a good actor can act well a something better than a good actor or a good conversationalist listens as well and it's terribly important because you simply can't talk without listening and i must say without paying you a compliment i like listening to you very much the pleasure listening to your videos and being all mine and all this love thank you peter eustinov died on march the 28th 2004. he was buried in bersan the alpine village overlooking lake geneva where he lived a man with a breathtaking ability to entertain houstonoff gave great pleasure to everyone who ever watched him perform read one of his books or even sat next to him at a dinner party his work will continue to do so drama next tonight here on bbc4 from another acclaimed british talent kwame kwayama's walters war is here in just a few moments

Channel: Neville Williams

Views: 1,388,856

Rating: 4.7537327 out of 5

Keywords: Peter Ustinov, Ustinov, Michael Parkinson

Id: SfxxEfdmn_Y

Length: 58min 8sec (3488 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2013