Kirsty Young's castaway is the Oscar-winning actor, writer and director Tim Robbins.

His film credits include The Shawshank Redemption, Dead Man Walking, The Hudsucker Proxy and Mystic River. Brought up in an artistic and creative household in New York's Greenwich Village, he was always encouraged to sing and perform. After talking politics around the dinner table as a teenager he would, on occasion, spend his evenings working the lights for the local drag act.

Indeed it was on stage, rather than in front of the camera, that Tim Robbins developed his own acting style: "It gave me a discipline to still the anarchic energy I had," he says: "A rigid discipline to an emotional truth and the ability to have that at my fingertips."

Producer: Leanne Buckle

Record: A Case of You -Joni Mitchell
Book: A Matchbook
Luxury: A Surfboard.