Anna Scher

Kirsty Young's castaway is the drama teacher Anna Scher.

It's more than forty years since she set up her theatre school and it has launched the careers of Kathy Burke, Martin Kemp, Pauline Quirke and Patsy Palmer to name just a few. It started out as a lunchtime drama club - and very quickly grew. Anna Scher says: "There were enormous classes - about seventy in a class - and a lot of those pupils were non-readers and so I fell into improvisation by chance. I found that it was a very effective way of character training."

Producer: Leanne Buckle