Ginny Dougary :: Award-winning journalist and writer

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my new website. I have been a journalist for the past four decades and here you will find a selection of some of my interviews, features, restaurant reviews and travel pieces. I write freelance for both the UK and Australian markets and my work appears regularly in the Radio Times, The Observer, Daily Mail and Fairfax newspapers.

Over a lifetime of journalism, I have been fortunate enough to have interviewed some of the most extraordinary global figures in music, politics, art and literature. Each month, or so, we will be featuring an encounter From the Archive – from Benazir Bhutto to Donald Trump, from Madonna to Elizabeth Taylor, John Updike to Oprah Winfrey. These pieces will be featured with a new introduction by me putting the interview, on occasion, into some kind of historical perspective and in some cases describing the impact they had during and after publication, or perhaps how my feelings about the subject have changed in the intervening time. I hope this will be of interest to anyone revisiting the interviews or coming across them for the first time.

Leonard Bernstein: ‘charismatic, pompous – and a great father’

16 March 2010 by Ginny Dougary

His daughter Nina tells Ginny Dougary about the joys and traumas of life with one of music’s greats. Had you been fortunate enough to be in the company of the most charismatic American conductor-composer- teacher-broadcaster of all time for long enough, it is likely that you would have heard this explosion at regular intervals in …

Pauline Prescott: ‘John would have resigned over his affair’

7 March 2010 by Ginny Dougary

Pauline Prescott talks to Ginny Dougary about public humiliation, private anguish – and why her husband now does the housework. Photo: Phil Fisk. Pauline Prescott and I have been instructed to keep the volume down by a prefectorial therapist down the corridor from our tiny “treatment” room, where we are sitting opposite one another across …

Even Lloyd Webber isn’t sure why Phantom of the Opera is his biggest hit

21 February 2010 by Ginny Dougary

As a sequel to the Phantom opens, he talks about his new ‘almost cool’ status, his father’s roving eye — and the joy of a dirty joke Andrew Lloyd Webber has his kind face on and is looking straight into my eyes as I sing: “Your looks are laughable, unphoto-graphable, but you’re my favourite work …

The gospel according to John Hurt

11 February 2010 by Ginny Dougary

John Hurt’s familiar nicotine-honed voice – “Come on up… it’s on the next floor” – echoes down the wide staircase of the old-fashioned block of flats that was one of his first homes in London, along with fellow student Ian McShane at RADA, half a century ago. In his contrary way, he prefers not to …

Lord Browne: ‘I’m much happier now than I’ve ever been’

6 February 2010 by Ginny Dougary

He was a world-renowned industrialist whose secret life as a gay man led to his downfall. For the first time, Lord Browne talks about the day he was outed, losing his job and falling in love again.

Photo: Phil Fisk.

Lord Browne of Madingley rebukes me in the gentlest way when I make the mistake of asking a question the wrong way round. If the former chief executive of BP, once widely acknowledged as “the greatest businessman of his generation”, and now chairman of the Tate, could live his life again, would he have been happier making a career in the arts?

“I think probably not is the answer,” he says. “When I started out, I loved science. I adored it. At Cambridge, I did natural science and physics and I loved mathematics and solving problems. I was thinking about doing research until my father made a very good point that maybe I should go and earn some money. So I tried business and I loved it because the problems were bigger and I could stretch the boundaries of my knowledge. And I loved being an engineer for all that time – so I was very, very happy professionally doing that, and I wouldn’t think of doing anything else.”

My question came on the back of us talking – remarkably openly on his part – about the events that led to Browne’s resignation in 2007 from the company he had worked in for 40 years, 3 months earlier than his chosen retirement date. He had been outed by his 27-year-old former lover, Canadian-born Jeff Chevalier, who had sold the story of their four-year relationship to a newspaper.

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Ruth Padel on Derek Walcott, ‘dirty tricks’, and the worst mistake of her life

31 January 2010 by Ginny Dougary

Oxford’s first female Professor of Poetry resigned amid allegations of academic back-stabbing. So what on earth brought on her ‘moment of lunacy’ ? How totally unboring it must be to be Ruth Padel, and that’s quite apart from the recent hoo-ha that prompted her resignation, last May, from her short-lived stint — what should have …

Naked Greece, 30 years on

11 January 2010 by Ginny Dougary

My Greek trip brought back memories of naked fun in my youth, but would the country’s history add extra magic on my return? Skinny tripping: Crab Hole beach can be reached only by boat or on foot. Floating in the cool water, the waves lazily lapping the tiny cove, all I can see are naked …

Rob Marshall on directing Nine

3 January 2010 by Ginny Dougary

From steel town to golden boy of musical glitz with Nine, Marshall is the director of the moment. It was a bit anxious-making when the director Rob Marshall introduced the London audience to the world premiere of his star-studded musical, Nine. He did look appealing enough, resembling a thicker-set Tom Cruise, and he spoke mellifluously …

Mitch Winehouse on the torment of Amy’s self-destruction

20 December 2009 by Ginny Dougary

What must it be like to watch your child’s life spiral into drug-addicted chaos, reported daily by a rapacious press? Mitch Winehouse on the torment of Amy’s self-destruction, its impact on the Winehouse clan, and why he believes she’s finally getting better. Photo – Phil Fisk. So, let’s get the great big elephant out of …

Sandi Toksvig on her Christmas cracker

14 December 2009 by Ginny Dougary

The self-confessed ‘show-off’ talks about her Christmas cabaret show, politics and a crush on Cheryl Cole. Sandi Toksvig has a habit of being picked up by strange women in public conveniences, which sounds like a cheap gag but happens to be true (although not in a George Michael way, obviously). Only the other day, she …