Vincent Price on the beach in 1966’s ‘Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs’

Who better to be stranded on a desert island with than Vincent Price? He could probably recite all kinds of poetry and dramatic dialogue from memory, and he could certainly cook. Then, when the tedium and awful island fever and scurvy and parasites got you down, I bet he would liven things up a bit by threatening to kill and eat you. “I’d love to have you for dinner,” that sort of thing.

In the summer of 1969, Price was a guest on the long-running BBC radio series Desert Island Discs. All the “castaways” who appear on the show are asked to name a favorite record; Price’s charming selection was his own reading of “America the Beautiful” from his 1961 LP of the same title.

But then, he was into language, Vincent Price. Only four of the eight records he chose for the show had any music etched on them: Debussy’s “L’isle Joyeuse,” Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben,” Beethoven’s “Zärtliche Liebe” and Nat King Cole singing “Nature Boy.” The other half consisted of spoken word records like “America the Beautiful,” in addition to which Price chose a speech on human rights by FDR, John Gielgud reading “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and Alec Guinness in the first production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. His book is Leaves of Grass, his luxury a double bed.

Below, in the only surviving fragment of the broadcast, Price doesn’t mention any of his selections, but he discusses his education, his early years on the stage, and his work with museums and art foundations:

That goes, really, back to my debt to the president—President Roosevelt—because I feel that the actor, if he is an important actor in the public’s mind, that part of his debt to himself, particularly, and to his public, is to be a public servant, and to do something good. The one thing I knew before I became an actor was the history of man through his art. And in America, we were a nation, quite honestly, of blind people. Actually, musically, we’re terribly aware, but we’re still just learning how to open our eyes and see. We aren’t concentrated, and it’s a big effort to go and see pictures. Television has flunked it. Radio gave us music at its very best. You know, the world is conscious of good music, of all kinds of music. But television has given us no pictures.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Vincent Price teaches the dark arts on his 1969 album ‘An Adventure in Demonology’