Jennifer Lawrence's breakthrough role in the 2010 drama Winter’s Bone secured her first Academy Award nomination when she was just 20, and she won the Best Actress category two years later for Silver Linings Playbook. Since then, she has become one of the most prolific, critically acclaimed and highest paid actors in Hollywood as the star of The Hunger Games series and three X-Men movies. Other leading roles include American Hustle, Joy and, most recently, the psychological drama Die My Love.

Jennifer talks to John Wilson about her childhood on her parents' farm in Kentucky. After being scouted by a modelling agency, she left school as a teenager and moved to New York to start working as a model and actor. She recalls how the film Taxi Driver, starring a young Jodie Foster, made a big impression on her as an aspiring actress and how Jodie Foster later became a role model when she directed Jennifer on the set of The Beaver. She also counts Gena Rowlands' performance in A Woman Under The Influence, written and directed by John Cassavetes, as an important inspiration, as well as working with directors David O Russell and Lynne Ramsay. 

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Archive and film clips used:

Uncle Buck, John Hughes, 1989

Rufus Wainwright is a singer-songwriter and composer renowned for his distinctive voice and the theatricality of his performances. Born into a family of folk musicians, his mother was Kate McGarrigle and his father is the songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Since his debut in 1998, his 11 studio albums have been characterised by their candid autobiographical themes, with songs about addiction, sexuality and fraught family dynamics. He has also worked as a classical composer, with his operas Prima Donna and Hadrian, and a choral piece called Dream Requiem. As a performer he has created musical tributes to Judy Garland, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the songs of Kurt Weill, and most recently has staged symphonic versions of his much-loved Want albums.

Rufus Wainwright tells John Wilson about his earliest musical experiences, singing with his mother and aunties in Montreal, Canada where he spent his early years. He chooses The Wizard Of Oz as one of his formative creative influences and explains why the film’s star, Judy Garland, became such an important musical role model for him. Rufus reveals how hearing Verdi’s Requiem at the age of 13 led to a lifelong love of opera and an aspiration to write classical compositions. He also recalls the impact that seeing La Dolce Vita, director Federico Fellini’s masterpiece about wealth and decadence in 1960s Rome, had on him as a teenager. 

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Having spent his early years in London, Mark Ronson grew up in Manhattan, began working as a DJ as a teenager and quickly made a name for himself on the New York club scene of the 1990s. He moved into music production and, in 2006, co-wrote and co-produced the Amy Winehouse album Back To Black. The record won five Grammys and Mark Ronson himself scooped the Producer of the Year Award.  Since then, he has released five solo albums and worked with some of the most successful names in pop including Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Queens Of The Stone Age and Paul McCartney. The winner of ten Grammys and two Brits, he added an Academy Award to his list of accolades in 2018 as co-writer of the song Shallow from the film A Star Is Born. He was also Oscar nominated for his work as executive producer, composer and songwriter for the soundtrack to the Barbie movie. More recently he has written a book called Night People, a memoir about his time as a DJ in 90s New York.  

Mark Ronson tells John Wilson about the influence of his music-loving parents, who often threw parties at their north London home when he was a child. He talks about the influence of his stepfather Mick Jones, songwriter, guitarist and producer of the 80s rock band Foreigner, who allowed Mark to experiment with equipment in his home studio in New York and encouraged his early interest in production. He remembers how hearing the 1992 track They Reminisce Over You by Pete Rock and CL Smooth led him to pursue a career as a club DJ and become renowned for the diverse range of music he played in clubs - from soul and hip-hop to classic rock - an eclectic approach which later informed his work as a producer. Mark Ronson also recalls first meeting Amy Winehouse and how they wrote and recorded the songs for her Back To Black album.  

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Dame Rose Tremain is one of Britain’s most prolific and popular writers, having written 17 novels and five collections of short stories over the last 50 years. She was one of only six women on Granta magazine's inaugural 1982 list of the best young British novelists, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and others. Her fifth novel Restoration was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1989, she won the Whitbread Prize for Music And Silence in 1999, and was awarded the 2008 Orange Prize - the precursor to the Women’s Prize for Fiction - for her novel The Road Home. Having already been made a CBE in 2007, she became Dame Rose Tremain in 2020 for services to writing. Her most recent work is a short story called The Toy Car.

Rose Tremain tells John Wilson how her father, a largely unsuccessful playwright called Keith Thomson, inspired her childhood interest in storytelling, although he never encouraged her to write. She recalls how she first started writing fiction to help her cope with loneliness in a household where there was little parental affection.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

One of the most revered and prolific British classical musicians, Thomas Adès made his name with his 1995 opera Powder Her Face, written when he was just 24 years old. His orchestral composition Asyla was nominated for the Mercury Prize for album of the year in 1999. Recordings of his opera The Tempest and, more recently, his score for the ballet The Dante Project have both won Grammy Awards. His ten symphonic works, three operas and numerous chamber pieces are performed all round the world. In 2024 Adès was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society's prestigious Gold Medal, previous recipients of which include Stravinsky, Brahms and Elgar.

Thomas Adès talks to John Wilson about the influence of his family, including his art historian mother who is an expert in surrealism. Through her he was introduced to the surrealist artists, the films of Luis Buñuel and met the painter Francis Bacon. His grandmother introduced him to the work of T.S. Eliot as read by Sir Alec Guinness on a cassette recording, and it was some of these poems that he was to eventually set to music for his first ever composition. Adès also recalls getting to the semi-finals of the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year in 1990, a watershed moment for him as it prompted him to pursue music as a composer rather than a pianist. He also cites going regularly to the English National Opera as a formative influence and talks about writing his own operas including Powder Her Face about the Duchess of Argyll, and The Exterminating Angel, based on the film by Luis Buñuel.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Jonathan Anderson was appointed as creative director of the French fashion house Dior in March 2025, becoming one of the world’s most influential designers. As creative director of the luxury label Loewe for 11 years from 2013, he led a rebranding of the Spanish company, and was hailed a critical and commercial success. He’s also run his own label JW Anderson since 2008, and launched collaborative lines with high street brands including Top Shop and Uniqlo. The recipient of many accolades since winning the Emerging Talent prize at the British Fashion Awards in 2012, he was named Designer Of The Year in 2023 and 2024.

Jonathan Anderson tells John Wilson about his rural upbringing in Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles, and the influence of his father, the former Ireland rugby team captain Willie Anderson. He recalls a childhood visit to a textiles factory run by his maternal grandfather that sparked a fascination for printed fabrics. Working as a shop window designer for the luxury label Prada led him to pursue ambitions to become a fashion designer, encouraged by Prada stylist Manuela Pavesi. Jonathan Anderson also reflects on the importance of creative freedom in his industry, claiming that the radical era of fashion, epitomised by designers such as Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, has been replaced by a fear of pushing boundaries due to the risk of social media backlash.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Jackie Kay is one of the best known and most popular Scottish literary figures. A poet and novelist, she served as Makar - the name for Scotland’s poet laureate - for five years from 2016. Since her debut poetry collection The Adoption Papers in 1991, she has published 20 works of fiction and verse for adults and children, and a memoir about meeting her biological parents called Red Dust Road. Jackie Kay was made a CBE for services to literature in 2020.

Jackie talks to John Wilson about her childhood in Glasgow as the mixed-race, adopted daughter of a loving couple. From a young age, Jackie was entranced by the parties her parents hosted in their house to raise money for the Communist Party and where they would debate and sing songs. It was her first introduction to performance and theatre. As a teenager, hearing poets such as Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead recite their own work also had a big impact on her literary aspirations.

Growing up in the Glasgow of the 60s and 70s, Jackie had very few black role models and took inspiration from the work of the African American poet Audre Lorde and the American political activist Angela Davis. Jackie also recalls finding her birth parents and how a visit to her birth father's ancestral village in Nigeria finally gave her a sense of dual identity.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Other poets who have appeared on This Cultural Life include Michael Rosen, Linton Kwesi Johnson and George The Poet, along with children’s authors including Katherine Rundell and Michael Morpurgo. You can find them in the This Cultural Life archive, which contains over 130 previous episodes.

American artist Kerry James Marshall is one of the world’s most important living painters. Marshall has been making his large-scale, vividly colourful evocations of African-American life for over 40 years. His figurative paintings are rich with symbolism, metaphor and visual references to both social history and his favourite artists from the past. A 1997 painting called Past Times, which evokes works by Seurat and Manet, sold at auction in 2018 for $21m, setting a world record for a work by a living African-American artist. In the autumn of 2025 a retrospective of his paintings opened at London's Royal Academy, his largest exhibition outside of the US.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Swedish-born Alicia Vikander won global acclaim in 2015 for playing Vera Britten in Testament Of Youth, and a humanoid robot in the thriller Ex-Machina. The following year she won an Academy Award for her supporting role with Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl, along with a Screen Actors Guild Award and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. Since then her diverse range of screen roles have included playing a spy boss in the film Jason Bourne, computer game heroine Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, and Gloria Steinem in the biopic The Glorias. The daughter of acclaimed stage actor Maria Fahl, she tells John Wilson how she first performed on stage at the age of seven in a musical written by Benny and Bjorn of ABBA. She also appeared in Swedish television dramas and films as a child actor. In 2025 Alicia Vikander makes her return to the stage in a new version of Ibsen’s The Lady From The Sea at The Bridge in London, her first theatre role since she was a child.

Producer: Edwina Pitman

Classical trumpeter Alison Balsom talks to John Wilson about the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired her career. Having recorded 17 studio albums since 2002, she has been named Gramophone Artist of the Year, won three Classical Brit Awards, along with an OBE for services to music. She has performed with leading conductors and orchestras around the world, including at the Last Night of the Proms.

Producer: Edwina Pitman