10. Robert Donat

Robert Donat was a British film star in the 30s. He’s in Hitchcock’s British version of The 39 Steps and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. And he’s a very grand sort of old stage actor, when people like him rather spoke like this. I bought this album for a job I was doing, for comic reasons, but I was interested in older accents and older ways of speaking. He belongs to a theatrical tradition that’s probably closer to what was going on at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, and his accent is very posh, but also rather warm, which is nice, like nothing we have today.

One of the things that interests me, given that recording only goes back 150 years, is how did people speak before that? You know, say 200, 250 years ago? Donat did half a dozen or so of these albums – on my copy, he reads Keats’ ‘Bright Star’ and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Way Through The Woods’, and I ended up finding his readings very, very comforting. He was also an interesting character, a film star at a time when there weren’t very many British film stars, a little out of time, but with a liveliness to him on camera that felt new. When I play this, I really feel as if I am plugging into the past.