Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cause to wear this week is an actress. Today she's the only surviving British star of the

silent screen, but in the 30s she also starred in hugely successful talkies such as Carnival

and Gypsy. Her personal life has been as vivid as the films with which she made her name.

Howard Hughes proposed to her twice, but she ended up marrying men who let her down.

She also walked out on a Hollywood contract with Warner Brothers, which meant she was Blackboard

and unable to make another film. She turned instead to the stage, and in her own phrase,

just plotted on. I'm hanging on by my fingernails to the end of the century, she says.

It's been the most fantastic of all time. She is Chilli Bouchier. Yours is indeed a fantastic story,

Chilli. I suppose in a sense you were really the first sex symbol of the British screen, weren't you?

Yes, I was. I was the English claribo or the English it-go, and we weren't allowed to say

sex in those days, so it was it and not sex. It was sex appeal. It was sex appeal. But you've got

that across even in silent films, so how did you do it? I don't know. I just look different to

everybody else, I think. I had this mad mop of black curly hair and I was unfashionably plump.

Everybody had to look like a beanpole in those days. Plump doesn't curvacious. Curvage or a fat?

Not fat. Oh no, no, no, in the right places. And it was the eyes, though, really, wasn't it?

Yes, they've always been a feature of I'm afraid of me. Why are you afraid? Well, I don't know.

I got you into trouble. They did, because they seem to know more than I did know. I seem to convey more.

I remember one director saying that's a clever girl. She looks at everybody in the same way,

and I wasn't conscious of looking at anybody in any particular way. So they cast you in the naughty

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