Podcasts about Margaret Rutherford

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3041: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores how the meaning of codependence has evolved from enabling addiction to losing yourself in a relationship, while also explaining why healthy interdependence is something to value rather than fear. She offers a balanced perspective on trust, boundaries, and mutual support, showing how strong relationships help both people grow instead of holding each other back. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/what-is-healthy-dependence-in-a-relationship/ Quotes to ponder: “Interdependence builds trust.” “Don't be afraid of depending on someone, if it's the right someone.” “Interdependence doesn't mean you lose yourself, or become less of a strong individual. It means life isn't quite so hard, because you've got a partner.” Episode references: Codependent No More: https://www.amazon.com/Codependent-No-More-Controlling-Yourself/dp/1954118155 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this deeply emotional and eye-opening episode 455 of Inner Voice A Heartfelt chat with Dr. Foojan, Dr. Foojan sits down with renowned clinical psychologist Margaret Rutherford to explore the hidden epidemic of “Perfectly Hidden Depression” — a form of depression that often goes unnoticed behind achievement, success, perfectionism, and smiling faces. Dr. Margaret's groundbreaking TEDx Talk on Perfectly Hidden Depression has reached more than 2 million viewers worldwide and resonated with countless high performers silently struggling with shame, emotional isolation, anxiety, and depression. In this powerful conversation, Dr. Margaret explains the critical difference between healthy perfectionism and destructive perfectionism — revealing how many people use overachievement, control, and outward success to hide deep emotional pain. Together, Dr. Foojan and Dr. Margaret discuss: • What “Perfectly Hidden Depression” really means • Why high achievers often suffer in silence • The connection between perfectionism, shame, and depression • How childhood trauma and emotional suppression shape adult behavior • Why many therapists and diagnostic systems miss hidden depression • The exhausting pressure to appear “fine” while struggling internally • How social media fuels perfectionism and emotional masking • Why successful people are still vulnerable to suicide • How to begin healing shame and reconnecting with your authentic self • Dr. Margaret's workbook and tools for emotional recovery This heartfelt discussion offers hope, validation, and insight for anyone who feels trapped behind the pressure to be perfect. If you've ever felt emotionally alone despite appearing successful, this episode may change the way you see yourself — and your healing journey. Watch, listen, and share with someone who may need this conversation. #PerfectlyHiddenDepression #Perfectionism #MentalHealth #DepressionAwareness #HiddenDepression #TEDxTalk #Shame #HighFunctioningDepression #SelfHealing #InnerVoicePodcast #DrMargaretRutherford #DrFoojan #EmotionalHealth #TraumaHealing #MentalWellness #Anxiety #HealingJourney #Psychology #SelfWorth #EmotionalIsolation #MentalHealth #Wellness #Relationship #PersonalGrowth #Self-Development

What type of protagonist does your story feature? There are 4 types, each of them can be a constant character or a change character, and each one evokes a different emotion from your reader/viewer. And that's exactly what I'm studying this season starting with the hero which could be a literal superhero, or it could be a little old lady. And Melanie is studying the story premise and how to articulate a story in one sentence (because it's a skill EVERY writer needs!). There's loads of great stuff coming up this season, starting with this episode all about Murder, She Said. Enjoy! -V. Submit your query letter and first 10 pages writing sample at storynerd.ca.For access to writing templates and worksheets, and more than 70 hours of training (all for free), subscribe to Valerie's Inner Circle.To learn to read like a writer, visit Melanie's website.To subscribe to Kat's Keynotes (Substack), click here.Watch us on YouTube!

The founder who seems fine is often the one who needs this most.I sit down with Dr. Margaret Rutherford, clinical psychologist, author, and TEDx speaker, to walk through Perfectly Hidden Depression, the form of depression that doesn't look like depression at all. It hides behind high performance, emotional control, and the identity of being someone who handles things. And it's disproportionately common among entrepreneurs and founders who have turned perfectionism into a management style.The through-line of the conversation is the framework shared by Dr. Margaret's new workbook that came to life after 30 years of clinical practice?

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2987: Dr. Margaret Rutherford reframes divorce as a continuation of the patterns within a marriage, showing how self-awareness can shape a healthier outcome. By seeking objectivity, choosing supportive people, and creating space to reflect, you can navigate the process with clarity and growth. Listening further reveals how even painful endings can become opportunities for lasting personal change. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/5-ways-to-be-your-best-self-during-a-painful-divorce/ Quotes to ponder: "YOUR DIVORCE WILL IMITATE YOUR MARRIAGE." "Vulnerabilities that affected your marriage will be present, and likely exaggerated, in your divorce." "Your divorce doesn't have to define you, unless you allow it." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To mark (Aldridge) the occasion of Mark Aldridge's latest book being available in PAPERBACK for the first time, Gray and Mark sit down to watch and natter through Murder at the Gallop (1963), the second of four 1960s films starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple. You can purchase Mark's book, Agatha Christie's Marple: Expert on Wickedness in paperback, ebook and audio now!WE'VE WRITTEN A BOOK! You can pre-order The Swinging Christies: How Agatha Christie Conquered the 1960s ⁠NOW⁠!You can find us on Instagram ⁠@Christie_Time⁠. We are also on Bluesky at ⁠ChristieTime.com. Our YouTube account is @TheSwingingChristies.  Our website is⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ChristieTime.com⁠⁠⁠⁠.Our other podcast, Westmapod, launched on 31 March 2026 - just search Westmapod in your podcatcher of choice to check it out!Please subscribe to the podcast so you're notified every time an episode drops.Please also consider giving us a star rating and/or reviewing us on your podcatcher of choice.The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown. Artwork designed by Bartlett Studio and Tom Double.00:00:00 - Opening titles00:00:44 - Introductory chat00:02:36 - Commentary track for Murder at the Gallop (1963)01:20:41 - How to get in touch01:21:58 - Closing titles01:22:17 - CodaSolutions revealed - After the Funeral, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

In this episode, we explore how perfectly hidden depression can live beneath strength and success, and how learning to gently open up can begin to set you free.  

What if the people who seem the most “put together” are actually struggling the most? Clinical psychologist Dr. Margaret Rutherford unpacks something she calls “Perfectly Hidden Depression” — the kind of struggle that hides behind achievement, perfectionism, and a life that looks flawless from the outside. Dr. Rutherford shares how perfectionism can become emotional armor protecting us from pain, but also disconnecting us from real feelings, real relationships, and even ourselves. ABOUT GUEST Dr. Margaret Rutherford is a clinical psychologist, TEDx speaker, and author of several books. Her latest is “The Perfectly Hidden Depression Workbook” (https://drmargaretrutherford.com/). CHAPTERS (0:00) Introduction (0:49) Therapist Tells Her Truth (3:31) Fear of Being Judged (5:43) What is Perfectly Hidden Depression (7:21) Perfectionism as Armor (10:45) Emotional Range Shrinks (12:33) First Steps Toward Change (15:09) Transparency Over Vulnerability (16:52) Julie Reflection and Conclusion

What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more. TranscriptHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura's Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there's a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie's 1926 disappearance.Laura, welcome.LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I'm such a fan of your Substack, as you know.OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call.THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that's what we like.Christie's Favorite WritersOLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read?THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don't you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine—OLIVER: We've lost it? We don't have the typescript?THOMPSON: I've never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don't know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don't have to.OLIVER: Yes. There's Shakespeare in every book?THOMPSON: No, but it's there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures.OLIVER: Yeah.THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way.OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets?THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there's a lot of Bible in her books, as I'm sure you've noticed.OLIVER: Yes. Yes.THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible.Christie and ShakespeareOLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters.THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is?OLIVER: Well, let's not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers.THOMPSON: That's so interesting.OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him?THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that.OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don't like and I do—THOMPSON: Go on.OLIVER: It's called Murder Most Foul, isn't it?THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And there's something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can't walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting.OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She's not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think?THOMPSON: More rational, maybe.OLIVER: Much more rational.THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she's not mad, Margaret, is she? But she's upset.OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right?THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually—OLIVER: Waspish.THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that's obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis.OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere.THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they're structured. That's not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose.OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that's obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, a couple of Westmacotts, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare.She's very—I hope I'm right in saying this—she's very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn't regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What's wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel.And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I'll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that's sort of the last thing they are. And they're very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they're full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think.Christie on Shakespeare?OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn't. Why?THOMPSON: No. I don't think she ever liked being told what to do.OLIVER: [laughs]THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren't they?OLIVER: Yes, yes. I've only read what's in your book, but yes, I didn't warm to him.THOMPSON: I'm glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they're just thoughts for you.” I don't think she would've felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way.OLIVER: Save it for the novels.THOMPSON: Yes, she's a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would've preferred to do that and use it to her ends.And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is.OLIVER: Was she pro hanging?THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you've killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was.I mean, Miss Marple was. She's quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.”OLIVER: It's one of her most striking lines.THOMPSON: It is, isn't it?OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she's very modern, she's very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes.Dickens and Christie's FamilyOLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House. Do we know what she loved about it? It's obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors?THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I'm going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone? Yes, of course it is.OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It's the first time there's a police detective in a major English novel.THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don't actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11.So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay. And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don't know. She had a lot of go in her.And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would've made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you're that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I've never quite got the habit.OLIVER: But if she's born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she's got a somewhat direct—THOMPSON: Yes, she was.OLIVER: You know, it's sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes. Isn't that extraordinary?OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It's crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow?THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It's like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that.OLIVER: But worse, yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would've been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I'd never, ever thought of that before. Isn't that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I'm leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it's awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way.I don't mean to make extravagant claims, but there's a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won't let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment.Art and MusicOLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings?THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka. It's very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs, the painter in that is a modern artist.And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it's still there.And they used to do this thing—I think it's a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would've dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply.OLIVER: Okay. Interesting.THOMPSON: And there's a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt, the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn't strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would've been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden.And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant's Bread, which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it's all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don't, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties.And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it.Christie's UniquenessOLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn't, to me, feel—she's obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn't feel the same as them somehow.THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: What is that?THOMPSON: Do you think it's her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn't write linear; she writes geometric, I always think.OLIVER: Tell me what you mean.THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that's in that book. It's a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There's a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she's also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together.I don't think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she'd dot every i and cross every t, and she couldn't bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they're a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost.She doesn't do that with Poirot. He's just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it's that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don't quite do. And at the same time, she's redefining it from within.OLIVER: There's something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson—THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don't know, two or three novels, that's gone, and he's Poirot as we know him, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes, yes.OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions.Christie and the TheaterTHOMPSON: Yes. She's sort of conceptual and the others aren't quite, I think. She doesn't do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn't—it's not Cluedo, is it? It's not, there's six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it's: it's nobody, or it's everybody, or it's the policeman, or it's a child, or there's something bigger and bolder going on.And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she's incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl's a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there's 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It's all in there.OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington, which we shan't reveal, but—THOMPSON: That's Cards on the Table. But what I mean is, she's given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can't resist—OLIVER: Yes, but that's what I'm saying. At the end of 4.50, the solution is staged.THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes.OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean.THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: No, no. We're crossed wires.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes.OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes.THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That's a reenactment.OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very—THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself.OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap?THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not—OLIVER: I've seen it once. I've seen it—you know, I don't know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it's you.” It's very dramatic moments. You don't like it?THOMPSON: No, I think you're right. I wouldn't mind seeing it done really, really well. There's something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It's in Ordeal by Innocence. It's in Mrs. McGinty. That's, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it's not abandonment, but I think—OLIVER: Well, yes.THOMPSON: — it's not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we've said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple.And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I've always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924.And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong.The TV AdaptationsOLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don't.THOMPSON: Yes, that's true.OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations?THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that's really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn't really want Murder on the Orient Express. It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don't know. I don't know because I think they're mostly not very good. I don't know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that's deliberate, that they're less—if they drove you back to the books, you'd probably get quite a pleasant surprise.OLIVER: It's hard for me to say because I saw them all more or less after I'd finished reading her.THOMPSON: What did you think?OLIVER: I love Joan Aiken—not Joan Aiken, what's she called?THOMPSON: Yes, Joan Hickson is marvelous. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Hickson. I think she's just perfect because as you say, the simplicity, the not overstating. The “Pocketful of Rye” episode where she turns up and quotes the Bible, and the vicious older sister is there, and they have that moment. It's all so cleanly done.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree.OLIVER: David Suchet, I quite like him. I think he has those wonderful moments. “I cannot eat these eggs. They are not the same.” I think that's very good. It's very funny, you know, he gets it.THOMPSON: You prefer him in spats and art deco mode to when he became—he became like a de facto member of the House of Atreus by the end, hadn't he? It had gone very, very—OLIVER: I mean, I certainly didn't watch them all, no, no.THOMPSON: No. Well, I sort of had to.OLIVER: Yes, you did.THOMPSON: But I could never get through those short story ones. I don't think I've ever got—OLIVER: The moral sort of doom of it all, yes.THOMPSON: Well, the early ones, when they always had—you could see they'd hired a car for the day. [laughter] And I don't think I've ever got to the end of one of those.But I think—sorry, going back to your question, I think they probably did make a massive difference. You know, they're really, really popular. And whether she would have—what you think her—she might be read as much as somebody like Sayers if it weren't for all those adaptations. But then the fact of all those adaptations tells its own story in a way, because that wouldn't happen to one of the others, as you rightly said.Resurgence and PopularityOLIVER: No, they don't have that quality. And also, she was bigger than them. That's why they picked her, because she was bigger than them anyway.THOMPSON: And simpler. Because when I used to read them at university between the pages of Beowulf or whatever, like porn, [laughter] it was a bit mal vu. You read her for entertainment. But you certainly—I don't think—she's always been admired by a certain kind of French intellectual, hasn't she, for that subtextual quality that she has, that sort of fathomless quality that she has.But when I researched that biography, which I started in 2003, I can remember going on the radio. And names will not be named, but I was like a figure of fun with a couple of other detective writers, quite well known, who just sort of openly mocked me for taking her seriously and more or less said, “Oh yeah, we love her, but she's terrible” kind of thing. “Why are you taking her seriously?” I mean, it was regarded as a bit of a joke to take her seriously.I'm not saying I changed the game or anything like that, but I think there must have been a movement around that time in the early twenty-naughties—whatever the damn thing, decade's called—to start seeing that she is an interplay of text and subtext, facade and undercurrents, and these powerful foundations that underpin her books. Murder on the Orient Express is, you know, “Does human justice have the right to exert itself when legal justice has let it down?”There are these very strong—I think this is part of why she's survived the way she has. We intuit powerful truths underneath the Christie construct, if you like. I always say she's not real, she's true. I think she's incredibly wise about human nature, possibly more than any of them.You take a book like Evil Under the Sun, and there's a femme fatale who's murdered. “Oh, the femme fatale. No man can resist her.” Turns out she can't resist men. She's prey; she's not a predator. And of course, women who are so dependent on their looks and so on, that is what they are. They are prey. They're not predators. They're very, very vulnerable. Just a really small thing like that. And I just think, oh, you're very—there's so much easy wisdom in there somehow.And she deploys it perhaps differently—I mean, Ruth Rendell is wise, but it's very, “I am wise and you're going to pay attention to me.” You know what I mean? It's all very, “I'm very dark and very wise and very,” you know. I love her, but everything's so easy with Agatha. It's so, to coin a phrase, two tier. You can read them and have fun with them. You can read them and there's so much stuff going on underneath, and yet she presents this smooth face. I don't think any of the others are quite that resolved, if you like.Self-AdaptationsOLIVER: Now, you wrote that her own stage adaptations of The Hollow and Five Little Pigs lack the subtlety of the original books, quote, “almost as if Agatha herself did not realize what made them such good books.” How much of her talent do you think was unconscious in that way?THOMPSON: Yes. That's such a good question. I do think that, about those plays, it could have been that she just thought, “That's not what my audiences are going to want from me. They're just going to want to be entertained by”—we know she can do the other thing because of her Mary Westmacott books, where everything is laid out. They're not distilled at all; they're quite the opposite.I think they must have been such a pleasure for her to write because she didn't have to constantly—they're unresolved; they ask questions that don't have to be answered. She could have done that with those plays, I'm sure, but I think she would've thought people aren't coming to see them for that. I think she had a very good opinion of herself, in the best possible way.OLIVER: Hmm.THOMPSON: Like I said to you earlier, she didn't take a lot of notice of anything anybody said to her. Because it is like writing this other little book, the one I've just done about 1926. She was very acclaimed right from the start. I didn't emphasize that enough in the biography. And she was really recognized as very special right from the start.And I think it's extraordinary to me how—it's so difficult for us today, isn't it? We're so at the mercy of “That won't sell, don't do that, blah, blah, blah.” She really did not just plow her own furrow, but create that furrow in a way that you can only compare with, like, Lennon and McCartney. Or whether the time was absolutely right that they let her run, they trusted her to do what she wanted, and because she had the gift of pleasing readers . . .You do really feel, although those books are very tight and taut, you do feel an instinctive ease in what she's doing, an instinctive sort of—there's a kind of liberated—which sounds perverse because they are so controlled, the books. But I always feel she's doing exactly what she wants to do because she knows what it is and she knows how to do it. Because I think, would she be amazed that you and I are having this conversation now? I don't know that she would be, really. What do you think?OLIVER: No, I agree with you. I think she had what Johnson said, the felicity of rating herself properly. I think she knew she was really good.THOMPSON: You might know he'd say it right.OLIVER: Yes. [laughs] But there's a—I think there must have been something about—I think it's in Poirot's Christmas, one of those, where someone gets killed in the night in their bedroom, and they go up. And one of the women says, “Who would've thought the old man had so much blood in him?”And the quotation just sort of occurs to—I think there's quite a lot of that in Christie, right? Things are coming up and it fits. And she's good enough to run on instinct at times.THOMPSON: That's right. That's it. Exactly. That's absolutely right. Like the way she quotes from the—yes, I love the bit when she quotes from the Book of Saul in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which is really quite a profound novel about whether—I mean, it's terribly timely—whether it's better to be run by a corrupt capitalist or to let in the radicals. And as I said in the biography, the corrupt capitalist wins on points. But then another element enters, which is what power does to people. And that's when she quotes from the Book of Saul.And it's just like you said, this—an instinctive that she—I do always feel her as an instinctive writer, even though—her notebooks are intriguing because obviously some plots she really has to work away at. And yet they feel felicitous. A coup like The ABC Murders, and she's really—that went through lots and lots of iterations. But what she'll often do is scribble down a line of dialogue, a line of “There they are.” It's the whole—it's not bullet points, which is a loathsome concept. It reminds me of a bee going from flower to flower and knowing exactly which—and she's got this gift of knowing what flowers we're going to need.I sometimes fear I overdo it. I don't want be like one of those people who's writing a PhD on, what was the thing I said on Substack, gynocracy in St. Mary Mead or whatever. It's not—I do think that's a bit overdone these days, the rummaging in the subtext, because she's an interplay. And that's why I write that chapter in the book called “English Murder,” which is about the facade, you know, “smile and smile and be a villain.” And there's nothing more interesting. There's nothing more interesting than murder among classes who are trying to cover things up.And she does that—that's at the heart of golden age murder, I suppose. And I just think she does that better than anybody because she's so all the things we've been talking about. She's so distilled, she's so simple, she's so smooth, she's so instinctive. And she's doing it the way she wanted to do it because of your wonderful Dr. Johnson quote. She knew not to take notice of other people, including her—Quick Opinions on ChristieOLIVER: Should we have—THOMPSON: Yes. Go on.OLIVER: Sorry, sorry. Should we have a quick-fire round?THOMPSON: Please.OLIVER: I will say the name first of a few of her books—THOMPSON: Oh, god.OLIVER: —and then a few other detective writers, and you will just give us your unfiltered opinion: good, bad, ugly, indifferent.THOMPSON: Okay. What fun.OLIVER: You can “nothing” them if you want to.THOMPSON: Okay. [laughter]OLIVER: Hallowe'en Party.THOMPSON: Underrated. Very interesting on sixties counterculture and the effects of societal breakdown, et cetera. What do you think?OLIVER: I think it's a real page turner. I remember reading that for the first time. I loved it. Yes. Nemesis.THOMPSON: I can't keep saying the same thing. Underrated. [laughter] Very interesting philosophy of love in that book, I think. I think it harks back to her first marriage. However badly it turns out, it's better to have experienced it. It's quite a mournful novel.OLIVER: The Mr. Quin—THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Oh, sorry.THOMPSON: No, no. Sorry. You carry on. Marvelous. So inventive, don't you think? Such a clever character.OLIVER: Why didn't she do more of him?THOMPSON: Yes, that would've been good. And she was always interested in the commedia dell'arte. She wrote poems about it as a girl. And the concept of Mr. Quin, yes, as this sort of evanescent figure who's also a moral force, isn't he really? Or—yes, I wish she'd done more. They're marvelous.OLIVER: Towards Zero.THOMPSON: Oh, top notch, don't you think?OLIVER: One of the best.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree. Frightening motive. Very Ruth Rendell.OLIVER: It's very distinct in her. I haven't read all of her novels, but it's very distinct.THOMPSON: But the plot is, again, typical of her because it redefines the word contingent. [laughs] I mean, Dorothy Sayers would be having palpitations. She's very bold and grand like that. “Oh, there's a loose end. Oh, who cares?” You know, I mean, it's so—it just drives along that book, doesn't it? Yes. But I agree with you, one of her best.OLIVER: Death on the Nile.THOMPSON: Quite moving, I think. I think it's one of those ones from the thirties that, again, is talking about love in a way that—I think it just strikes a personal note to me because she was very in love with her first husband, Archie Christie. And he did fall in love with another woman, and it did cause her extreme pain that some people said to me she never quite got over.And I feel that a little bit in that book. There's a shadow of something quite powerful in that book, I think. Again, very, very loose and lovely plot, but powerful. Would you agree? Very good on the place as well, I think, Egypt.OLIVER: I love it. I think the solution is great.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And it makes a really good film.THOMPSON: It's a great film, yes. Wonderful film.Other Mystery WritersOLIVER: Yes. Okay. A few other detective writers: Michael Innes.THOMPSON: You've got me. I haven't read him. Should I?OLIVER: Oh, I think you will like him. Yes. Try Hamlet, Revenge!THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Oh, I like it already.OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, this is exciting. Gladys Mitchell.THOMPSON: Can't get into her.OLIVER: No.THOMPSON: What do you think? Should I try a bit harder?OLIVER: I read two. I thought they were good. I was not intrigued.THOMPSON: No, somebody told—OLIVER: The ones I read—Spotted Hemlock is a wonderful, like, wow, that's great.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Somebody said to me, I know she really—no, I didn't—I read it in a book that she really hadn't liked Agatha Christie, but you know, who knows? All that Detection Club rivalry, you can imagine. But okay, Spotted Hemlock—if I'm going to read one, try that, yes?OLIVER: Yes, that's a great book. Margery Allingham.THOMPSON: Kind of love her, but I never understand her plots. I always feel I'm in a bit of a fog, but she's quite a good writer. Do you think? Or what do you think?OLIVER: She's good at the fog. She's good at that sort of whirligig sense that there's a lot going on—THOMPSON: Yes, whirligig.OLIVER: —and you've got to get to the end before they do, kind of thing.THOMPSON: Also, she had a pub in her sitting room. Now, I like a woman who has a pub in their sitting room.OLIVER: [laughs] E. C. Bentley.THOMPSON: You've got me again, Henry.OLIVER: Oh, The Blotting Book mystery. You'll like this.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay.OLIVER: The other one is not so good, but you'll like that a lot.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Edmund Crispin.THOMPSON: Didn't get on with him.OLIVER: Why not?THOMPSON: Don't know. Don't know. It sounds like I don't read the men, doesn't it? Which is not the truth at all.OLIVER: I think that's fair enough, isn't it?THOMPSON: Well, I don't know. I don't think anyone's ever come up with a really good reason why women have shone so brightly in this genre. I don't know. Why didn't I—I read that one, the toyshop one [The Moving Toyshop] or whatever. I don't know. I just didn't get on with it.OLIVER: Too glib?THOMPSON: Possibly.OLIVER: Bit flippant, bit sort of funny-funny?THOMPSON: Possibly. I just couldn't quite get hold of it in some way. I don't know.OLIVER: I quite like Edmund Crispin, but I do think he's got a bit of a “he's a very clever boy” about him.THOMPSON: Maybe that's what it was. Maybe that.OLIVER: Something, yes. G. K. Chesterton.THOMPSON: I haven't read Father Brown. Oh, this is awful, isn't it? I'm starting to sound like a radical feminist by accident.OLIVER: [laughs] Maybe that's what you are, Laura. Maybe you just need to admit it. [laughs]THOMPSON: No, it does. It sounds really bad because I do really love almost all the women. I just, I don't know why I haven't read him.Christie and NostalgiaOLIVER: Was Agatha a nostalgia writer?THOMPSON: No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think anyone who was a nostalgia writer would've written At Bertram's Hotel, which is an entire spin on the riff of nostalgia. Really clever. I think that's such a clever book. The way she traps us in her golden age, you know, this phantasmagoria of the re-created golden age. And then she says, “Ha, really fooled you.”I've written about this. I think she moved with the 20th century far more than is realized. I love those Cold War novels she writes about her dislike of ideologies. I love her postwar books about the fragmentation of the hierarchical society. I think she's—well, she's an incidental social historian, as are, I think, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, but they're much more underlined about it. Again, I'm intrigued what you think. Do you think she is?OLIVER: I think there's definitely some quality, particularly to the Miss Marple stories—as you say, the social history sort of becomes a way of preserving something that's disappearing. One of them, written in the sixties—you can tell me which one—it opens with that description of all the new houses in the village and the mothers who give their children cereal for breakfast. And what sort of a thing is that to give a child? They should have bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs is a real—you know, and she does have a real something heartfelt and real sense that this part of England is going, and this new thing is coming in.THOMPSON: That's true. That's absolutely true. That's The Mirror Crack'd. And it's—OLIVER: The Mirror, yes, yes.THOMPSON: Yes, and that whole thing of Mrs. Bantry's house has now been bought by a film star and blah, blah, blah. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. I didn't think hard enough before I answered your question.OLIVER: But no, what you said is also true. I can't sort of work out to what extent she regrets it, to what extent it's just useful material for her, you know?THOMPSON: Both. I mean, some of her late books, including Endless Night, I think, which is an incredibly modern book—that whole “me, me, me” culture of “I want, therefore I will have now,” which is written when she was quite an old lady. And then a book like Passenger to Frankfurt, which is—it's a bit sub–Brave New World, but it's very honest and pessimistic about a future—well, the one we are living in, really—full of fear and uncertainty and almost dystopian.She was a realist. You know, she is Miss Marple in a lot of ways. She was a realist in a way that I think a lot of us would find it difficult to be. And her American publishers were often—would sort of say, can she tone this down? Can she not have a young person who's completely evil? Readers want to know, is she going get any therapy? [laughter] And it's so true. There's quite a lot of that going on.She's very clear-eyed. So if she—I'm a bit nostalgic for Blur, do you know what I mean? I mean, you can't help it, in a way, like that brilliant example you give at the start of The Mirror Crack'd. But I would say her image is quite at odds with the reality of her in that way. But the image—OLIVER: And the adaptations don't help with that.THOMPSON: No. No. But at the same time, that Christie image, you know, the gentlewoman, the tea or the eternal bridge party, blah, blah, blah, that has a huge power of its own. So just being too iconoclastic about her, I think, is also a lie. Because I think, again, it's that interplay. She used the image, and the image—I hate the word cozy. I loathe the word cozy, but there's no denying that any book of that kind does have that quality. So I suppose even that's nostalgic in a way.Christie's PoshnessOLIVER: In a way, yes. How posh was she?THOMPSON: Good question. I've been thinking about that a lot. Quite, I would say. Quite grand, with that confidence. Her father really was—as I said, he was a young blade in New York dancing with Jennie Jerome and blah, blah, blah. And then it so happened that he ended up in Torquay, which of course then was very posh. And the fact that when she disappears, she disappears to Harrogate, [laughs] which is like the Torquay of the north.I remember her grandson saying to me, “She dealt with her literary agent. To her, he was staff.” You know, that kind of thing. Her sister, there is a—well, her sister ended up very grand indeed with a huge house up in Cheshire.I think she just had that internal confidence, really. She wasn't—and that there wasn't much money. I mean, there was very little money when she was growing up, as of course you know, but that didn't matter. I mean, her voice is insane. Her voice is, [affecting a posh voice] “Oh, it's lucky it just happens.” [laughter] But yes, there's a part of her that is real late Victorian upper middle class that, again, underpins her books.It's amazing really how broad-minded and cosmopolitan she was. But possibly, I mean, possibly that does—she was—you know, when she disappeared, she was described in foreign newspapers as an Anglo-American, the embodiment of Englishness, and that's how she was described. And then of course she was genuinely cosmopolitan in her love of travel and her love of other cultures and all that obvious stuff. Yes.Inspirations for Miss MarpleOLIVER: How much of her grandmothers is in Miss Marple?THOMPSON: Quite a lot, I would say, particularly the—OLIVER: Drawn from life?THOMPSON: Well, in an essential way not, because Miss Marple has no real experience of life in that way. We're occasionally told about some chap who came calling who wasn't suitable or whatever, but she's almost defined by nonexperience of life in a sense, but observation of life. She's an observer. She's not an outsider in the way that Poirot is. She has a place within the social hierarchy and whatever, and that village has a reality to it. And the way it changes has a reality to it. But she is defined by being an observer, I would say.But Margaret Miller, who was the rich grandmother, who is the one who had the big house at Ealing and was—you know, she's the one who would go to the Army and Navy stores and all that stuff that's in At Bertram's Hotel. She was—there's a lot of her in Miss—I think, as I say in the book, she grew up with the sound of female wisdom in her ears. You know, her grandmother was the sort of—if she'd seen her up in Harrogate, she would've known exactly what was going on. You know, one of those kind of women who could spot an affair at a hundred paces, just a wise sort of woman, worldly, worldly woman.And Miss Marple is worldly in her thinking, but not in her experience, particularly in a book like A Caribbean Mystery, which I think is—she's a real sophisticate, Agatha. I mean, I'm reading The Hollow again at the moment. And it's really astounding to me how there's a love affair at the center of it with a young woman who's kind of a self-portrait and this married man. And not only, there's not—it's not only nonjudgmental; there's literally no concept of judgment being in the vicinity. It's really, really sophisticated, grown-up stuff, I think. And again, I think that's maybe not recognized about her that much.Nursery RhymesOLIVER: What are the importance of nursery rhymes to her?THOMPSON: Yes, that's interesting. They're part of that distilled quality she had, I suppose, that really simple ability to catch hold of something that is simple and familiar in itself and then subvert it. There's books where she—I don't think she needs it in Five Little Pigs. I think the book is almost too good for that.But is it not to do with that—like her titles, which are really, really simple with a faint frisson of the sinister about them. Is it not that ability she has to catch, to take something really, really simple and subvert it for her own ends? What do you think? Do you think that's right? Or do you think it's something more than that?OLIVER: No, I think the simplicity is the point, and I think it probably gives her a way of talking, of showing how fundamental the wickedness is. And as you say, the children can be evil, and it's part of the darkness in a way, but it gives the appearance of innocence and, oh, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe? You know, children do this. And so it leads you through and makes it worse somehow. [laughs]THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But I know I've—how many times have I said the word simple? But I really do feel that's the heart of her. And I also feel it's the heart of why she was misunderstood when I was growing up reading her because it was mistaken for simplistic.Wartime ProductivityOLIVER: Why was she so productive during the war? I mean, there were four books one year.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And as you say, they're some of the best. I mean, what is it about the war that gets her so busy?THOMPSON: Well, she was on her own, which she had never been, really. Well, obviously she divorced her first husband in 1928. So there's a couple of very bleak, dead years before she met her second husband and married him in 1930. But she wasn't completely on her own because she had her friend Charlotte Fisher, who was a sort of secretary-companion, but much more than that—really, really good friend.But in the war, Max Mallowan was abroad. Her daughter—she had one child—her daughter was married and living in Wales. And she was living in the Isokon building in North London, which I love because that's like, “You think I'm chintzy and old fashioned. And here I am socializing with the sort of left-wing intelligentsia at the Isokon building.” And there's something about being in that adorable little flat—they're so fabulous, those flats—and being alone but not feeling abandoned, as she had after her first marriage.And I suppose also, you know, war is, you either cower in despair or you think, “Right, well, better get on with it.” War is stimulating in that way. I think it was to quite a few writers, maybe, or quite a few creatives. The shadow of death. But there was something about that solitude but not abandonment, plus the stimulation of not knowing whether it was your last day on earth that did—it did. I mean, it's absolutely insane how productive she is.And then she wrote—she had a week off. She was also working as a dispenser at a London hospital, and she had a week off. And she wrote a Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, which is one of her best Westmacotts, I think. I mean, she's got a week off and she writes a book. I mean, Jesus, there's a challenge to us, Henry. [laughter]The Mary Westmacott NovelsOLIVER: What are those Mary Westmacotts like? Because I've never read them, but you seem very—THOMPSON: Oh, have you not?OLIVER: You're very up on them. You like them?THOMPSON: I am. I really am. Well, for a biographer, they were a treasure trove because they're very revealing. Unfinished Portrait is, I think, as close as you are ever going to come to a true autobiography, as opposed to the actual autobiography, which is charmingly disingenuous.OLIVER: And also dull. No? I mean, it's just so dull.THOMPSON: Do you think? It is a bit.OLIVER: I couldn't read it. I couldn't read it. No, it was so long and so leaden. I felt like she didn't really want to tell me the story of her life. Just couldn't.THOMPSON: Well, I think that's probably right. It was very heavily edited after her death. And her daughter was very, very protective of her. So, Max Mallowan as well. So maybe there was a much better book in there somewhere. Who knows?OLIVER: So we should read Mary Westmacott if we want the unfiltered Agatha?THOMPSON: I would say Unfinished Portrait. It really fascinates me because the worst time you've ever gone through in your life—so in 1926, she lost her mother and her husband in the space of four months. And I think an awful lot of people, even writers, would think, “I'm going to put that behind me and get on.” But she had to reopen the wound. She had to go through it all again eight years later. I find that really, in itself, incredibly revealing about her.Poirot vs. MarpleOLIVER: Why is there so much more Poirot than Marple?THOMPSON: Yes, I've wondered that because there is this little thing that she hated him, which I don't really think she did. It's just something people say, isn't it?OLIVER: Well, it's a common thing about artists. They're supposed to hate their most successful work, but—THOMPSON: Yes. Yes. All I could come up with was that he was easier to put in different places. He could conceivably be on the Nile or in Mesopotamia or—I mean, it would be a—she does manage to get Miss Marple to the West Indies, but it's certainly—OLIVER: There are only so many holidays your nephew can send you on.THOMPSON: He was really successful, that nephew, wasn't he? Who do you think he was like? Sort of Ian McEwan or—OLIVER: [laughs] I know. It was sort of crazy, isn't it?THOMPSON: And very kind to her.OLIVER: It might be to her credit that she doesn't do a Midsomer Murders thing and just sort of wave away and say, “Oh, we can just have as many of these murders as we want.” She says, “No, we can only fit—” Do you think maybe that's it?THOMPSON: I think there might be a bit of that. I mean, her notebooks sort of—some of the books were originally Marples, like Cat Among the Pigeons and Death on the Nile, in fact. And then they became Poirots. I just wonder whether he's a bit more malleable because she is a more rooted, fixed entity.And he is—I don't mean to denigrate David Suchet because he's a fantastic actor, but he does root him more than I think the written version. I think he is a sketch on the page. And one of her great skills, I think, is how she can sketch, and they've got that quality of aliveness on the page, which you just can't analyze, really. I don't—well, I can't. And that's how I see Poirot. So he was more movable in that sense.And she's incredibly good at certain—like Sleeping Murder, there's no way you could have him in that. And Miss Marple is—her qualities are so perfect for a book like that, which has suddenly reminded me of how she got me into John Webster. I never read John Webster until—OLIVER: [laughs] That's great.THOMPSON: The way she uses The Duchess of Malfi is so clever. Do you think that's right about Poirot? Do you think there's something more . . .Reader Preferences and SalesOLIVER: I can see that. I wondered if there was some reader's prejudice involved.THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Poirot is the sort of exotic—Sherlock Holmes, one thing that makes him popular is that he's a bit wacky, you know. And Poirot—he's always talking about, “You English are so xenophobic. Excuse me, I am Belgian.” And with the eggs and all the little—whereas Miss Marple's just the kind of old lady that we all wish there were more of. And how much of that will readers take? I don't know.THOMPSON: Yes. Although, as I say, she, she did—I mean, I think her publishers did like her to do Poirot, but I don't know that she would've been influenced by that necessarily. I mean, maybe she was—maybe I'm overdoing her—OLIVER: Well, she had these terrible money problems. Didn't she have to be a little bit focused on the dollar?THOMPSON: She did. She did, but she didn't—well, I mean, the money problems are insane because they were absolutely no fault of her own. They were to do with test cases, and it was just this sort of accumulation of horror that put her in tax problems during the war. And she really never could dig her way out of them and was advised to go bankrupt twice, which is unbelievable, just as a way of clearing it. I mean, it's terrible.But I don't know that she—I think her attitude was a bit more, “Well, why should I even bother if they're just going to take it away from me?” In 1948 she didn't write anything at all because I think she thought, “What's the point?” But then, that wasn't her way. But I don't know that she thought of writing as a way of digging out of it necessarily. But I could be—OLIVER: The Marples, did they make less money? Were they, did they sell less?THOMPSON: Not really. I think they all sold. Even poor old Passenger to Frankfurt sold hugely, absolutely hugely. I think people—I mean, my parents would—it was like people just wanted them, the Christie for Christmas.Rereading ChristieOLIVER: How many times have you read these books? Do you ever get bored?THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: Really?THOMPSON: Well, I have them on rotation, and I don't—as you know, I do interleave them with our beloved Elizabeth Bowen, who's my passion at the moment, and other people. But they are consolatory, I suppose. They are—there's bits of—there is this kind of—there's bits of them that I just know completely off by heart, like the gramophone record in And Then There Were None and all that.But there's something—and maybe I should have said this earlier, when I say—I've said it on Substack—that they're fairy tales for adults. There's something about that. There's an almost physical sensation of pleasure, really, when the resolution comes. It is a bit like act five of Shakespeare. I'm not going to say she's quite on that level. Not even I am going to say that.But there is—and it is like being a child again and reading the end toward the happy-ever-after, even though her happy-ever-afters are sometimes compromised. And there is something almost primal in that pleasure. And it almost sounds borderline mad, me saying it like that, but I do think there's something in it because the resolution is so—because it's character based, and at her best, she's character and plot as one, as in Five Little Pigs or The Hollow or Murder on the Orient Express or blah, blah, blah.Her resolutions do tell you something about human nature. You do think, “Oh, yes, that is what that would be. Yes, it would be all about money. Yes. Yes, doctors are untrustworthy,” or something on a more profound level than that. There's something that is a satisfaction, both childlike and I'm experiencing it as an adult. In my defense, P. G. Wodehouse said you can never read them too many times. [laughs] It doesn't matter if you know who did it. There's so much pleasure in them.Thompson's CareerOLIVER: Now, I want to ask a little bit about your career.THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.OLIVER: You were at a sort of stage school, then you studied at Merton, and then you worked at The Times.THOMPSON: Yes. Very briefly. Yes.OLIVER: How does one therefore go from all of this to being the biographer?THOMPSON: Well, I did always think I would have a career in—I wanted to direct plays. I directed Hamlet after university, which is probably the thing I'm still proudest of. But what it was, was that I wrote a couple of books. I won an award when I was quite young.And then I had an agent who—I said to him, “I want to write a biography of Nancy Mitford.” And he wasn't very keen on the idea, but I must have written an okay proposal. Again, because I thought Nancy Mitford was a little bit undervalued, that she's a lot more than just a posh girl. And at the time her reputation was quite low. And so somebody bought into that idea, and it sort of went from there, really.But it's a bit—I sometimes look back at the books I've written, including a memoir of my publican grandmother, and I think, gosh, this is all quite scatter-gun, but maybe that's okay. Maybe you should just write the books you really want to write. But it was a passion for Nancy Mitford that sort of started that particular ball rolling.And then I had the idea of—oh, no. I was down in Devon with a boyfriend, and he said, “You never stop talking about Agatha Christie. Why don't you try and write her biography?” And that was just a luck of timing because her daughter was still alive. So I met her, and she liked me because I knew the Mary Westmacotts so well, and that sort of happened. I mean, quite often these things are very fortuitous, don't you think? Did you not find that with your book?OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, I did. I did. I think some writers, as you say—I don't think of it as scatter-gun. I think of it, it's sort of an emergent thing, and you happen to have these different interests, and you just follow your nose, and that's fine.THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.OLIVER: Tell us about this production of Hamlet.THOMPSON: Oh. Do you know, I think it was not bad. I had a very good Hamlet. I think if you've—well, you're in trouble without—who is now quite a successful actor. And we were all really young, but he was—I saw him in something and said, “Do you want to play Hamlet for me?” And he said, “Okay then.” And it was a room above a pub in Chelsea, and it was very spare and very quick.And it was about—I can't bear when people overanalyze the character of Hamlet, and why does he delay? He delays because Shakespeare wants him to, so that he can write all those incredible speeches. That's a bit simplified, but it was—he was so, he so understood the translucent power of those soliloquies, this actor. So it just sort of worked because we didn't do too much to it. And it was, yes, it was good. I think it was good. But then I did Macbeth, and that was much less good.Secretly Reading ChristieOLIVER: And you've said here, and I think you said it in your book, that when you were at Merton, you were reading Agatha Christie between the covers of what you were supposed to be reading.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, I was.OLIVER: That can't be—is that a slight exaggeration, or did you really not get on with the syllabus?THOMPSON: Well, hang on. I was a bit stuck in the first term. Can you imagine coming from a performing arts school—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —and then being told, “Read that bloody, you know.OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, it's intense.THOMPSON: All I knew was French. How I got in is a minor mystery, but there it was. I've tried to do it honor ever since by writing as best books I possibly can. But I was okay once I got over that bit. Once I got into my beloved Tennyson and all the people we've been talking about, Hardy and blah, blah, blah. Larkin, about whom the best thing I've ever read—the best thing I've ever read about Larkin is your Substack about him, without a shadow of a doubt.OLIVER: Oh, thank you.THOMPSON: Just wonderful. So I sort of winged it a bit, but I had a very nice don. And the autodidact side of me, which is very like Agatha Christie, who barely went to school, and Nancy Mitford—I think it can be a good thing in a way, because you have such a respect for learning and truth. I always try to be truthful in my biographies, which as we know, not everybody is. [laughter]And I think you carry on wanting to learn and carry on wanting to fill all the gaps because I only had half an education, because in the morning you would do ballet and drama and all that kind of thing. So it is a bit odd, but in some ways I think it's been a good thing.OLIVER: Now, the new book is about the 1926 disappearance. When can we expect it to be published?THOMPSON: It's only a short book—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —because obviously I covered it a lot in the biography, and it doesn't—but I have found out a couple of new things. And that will be out in August here and in November in America. And I have come up with a slightly different slant on it, but mainly—and I treat it a little bit like a cold case. And it was—I had to write—I wrote it in five weeks, but it was incredibly good fun. Oh, and I reenacted her journey, which was very interesting, to Harrogate.But mainly it's such a pleasure because I, you know, on Substack, and I think, “Oh, you can't write about Agatha Christie again.” There always seems to be quite a lot to say. I'm intrigued by how you, who I think of as a true intellectual, how you have clear regard for her.Henry on Agatha ChristieOLIVER: I started reading her when I was about 12, and I just thought she was great, and I went through most of them. But I read them at intervals. So I was reading her into my twenties, thirties. And before this interview I tried to—I thought, “Laura's always saying Five Little Pigs is the best one. I'm going to read it.” And I just sort of found that I've lost the taste, in a way.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Which I was quite, I don't know, just maybe—I feel like this is my failing. Maybe I should take a week off and sit by the pool and read it properly. But I've always thought she's really, really great, and very few people can do that many very compelling stories without you sort of thinking, “Oh, I've read this one. I know. Yes. It's the same as the other one, isn't it? Yes. Yes, it was the”—as you say, it's not Cluedo. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, I don't think I could read much more by her, frankly. Great, she's great, but it's enough. [laughs]THOMPSON: Well, I quite like her. The whole—most girls who went to Oxford are quite keen on Gaudy Night, and the character of Harriet Vane is quite satisfying, I think.OLIVER: Indeed, indeed. And Strong Poison is great. And there—but I just mean if she'd written as many books as Agatha, you can't imagine it would've sustained the level of quality.THOMPSON: No, no. There is that lightness in Agatha and that terrible cliché of, “I wrote a long book because it was too—I didn't have enough time to write a short book,” and all that kind of thing. The brevity amazes me. When I said at the start, most writers would take twice as many pages to get all that in.She has style—I don't know if you can call it a style, but there is something blindingly effective about it that nobody can imitate. And it does—there's something so fathomless about her, and that's what continues to compel me. But I think it's very lovely of you to do this if you are no longer an admirer because you've let me sort of—OLIVER: Well, it's not that I'm not an admirer. It's just that I don't—I had this with P. G. Wodehouse. I read quite a lot of it, and now, I don't know, somehow I've reached a point where it's—I sort of get it, but it's just not that funny anymore. I don't know, just need some time away.THOMPSON: Well, maybe. Maybe, but you know, I'm a bit—she's part of my life now. It's like if somebody said, “You can't read her anymore,” it would be like, “You can't listen to the Rolling Stones anymore.” I mean, it'd be like a kind of death. She's part of my life the same way they're part of my life. She's now inseparable from just the way I go on, as is Shakespeare. And if I had to lose one of them, trust me, it would be her, you'll be reassured to know. [laughter]OLIVER: Very good. Laura, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.THOMPSON: Oh, I've really enjoyed it. I really have. And I was really looking forward to it, and it's been even nicer than I thought it would be. So thank you.OLIVER: Oh, it's been delightful.THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Henry.OLIVER: Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

“There is tremendous loneliness in the kind of life where you just don't feel like anybody knows you.” — Margaret RutherfordYesterday, the Brooklyn psychotherapist Daniel Smith defined perfection as the devil. Today, the Arkansas-based Dr. Margaret Rutherford explains what happens in our FOMO age when the devil wins. Her subject is what she calls the “perfectly hidden depression” of today's Instagrammable types. Perfectionism rates are going up, Rutherford warns. And so, not uncoincidentally, are suicide rates.Rutherford's own mother in Fifties suburban Arkansas was a case study. Beautiful, smart, talented and anorexic. The perfectly mannered and coiffeured hostess. Married the “right” husband but in love with the wrong man. An Arkansas Madame Bovary. “The fucked-up fifties woman” as one of her friends called it. She became a prescription drug junkie because of her addiction to perfection. Nobody knew her, not even herself. The relentless camouflage of her life became a prison. Rutherford has spent the last decade trying to help people escape that prison — first with her book Perfectly Hidden Depression, now with a companion workbook.On AI and therapy, Rutherford is equally blunt as Daniel Smith. She noticed that AI always praised her ideas. But what if AI, like Instagram, is what she calls “a bunch of shit”? A real therapist tells you what you may not want to hear. The AI shrink starts with flattery. Rather than therapy, that's just more camouflage for a perfectly imperfect life.Five Takeaways•       Perfectionism Rates Are Going Up. So Are Suicide Rates: The academic researchers have been screaming this for years. People whose lives look like they're going great are dying by suicide. They slip through every diagnostic crack because they answer every question the way a non-depressed person would. They leave the therapist's office with a wave and a smile.•       The Relentless Camouflage of Performing Your Life: Destructive perfectionism isn't wanting to do things well. It's fuelled by fear and shame — the need to cover up everything that's caused you pain. The camouflage becomes a prison. Your sense of worth depends on it. You can allow no one to see you struggling — not even yourself.•       Her Mother Was a Fucked-Up Fifties Woman: Beautiful, smart, talented — and knew none of those things. Anorexic. The perfect hostess. Married the right man but was in love with someone else. Became a prescription drug addict because of the need to look perfect. Nobody knew her. She didn't allow anybody in.•       The Harvard Study: It's Not Money. It's Connection: The seventy-five-year longitudinal study found that happiness comes from feeling in relationship with other people — not wealth, not success, not followers. We've transplanted connection with metrics. The perfectionism epidemic and the loneliness epidemic are the same epidemic.•       AI Therapy: What If It's a Bunch of Shit? Rutherford noticed that AI always praised her ideas. Oh, these are wonderful. Then she thought: what if they're not? Real therapy means being told what you may not want to hear. AI starts with flattery. A good therapist starts with the truth. You cannot replace the human sense of gentle — or not so gentle — confrontation. About the GuestDr. Margaret Rutherford is a clinical psychologist, TEDx speaker (2 million+ views), and host of the Self Work podcast (500+ episodes, 5 million+ downloads). She is the author of Perfectly Hidden Depression and its companion workbook. She practices in Fayetteville, Arkansas.References:•       Dr. Margaret Rutherford — her practice, podcast, and books.•       Episode 2854: Perfection Is the Devil — Daniel Smith on boredom, envy, and why our darkest emotions aren't so dark. The companion conversation.•       Episode 2850: Bring the Friction Back — Stephen Balkam on social media addiction. Rutherford's camouflage meets Balkam's friction.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:31) - Introduction: Daniel Smith, perfection is the devil, and the anxiety memoirist (02:47) - Constructive vs. destructive perfectionism (05:00) - The relentless camouflage of performing your life (08:19) - FOMO, social media, and keeping up with the Joneses on steroids (10:46) - Her son's Patagonia moment: the comparison trap (13:02) - Are therapists the new priests? The secular Bible problem (15:06) - Perfectly Hidden Depression: the book publishers said perfectionists wouldn't buy (17:18) - You deserve to be truly known (20:00) - Her mother: the fucked-up fifties woman (22:44) - The Epstein files, dystopia, and perfectly imperfect times (27:18) - Agency and the American dream of reinvention (30:25) - Perfectionism and the epidemic of loneliness (32:51) - The social media trial: why did people celebrate? (37:17) - AI therapy: what if it's a bunch of shit?

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2927: Dr. Margaret Rutherford reflects on the quiet heartbreak of friendships that fade or abruptly end, exploring the confusion, grief, and self-doubt that often follow. She reveals how even lost relationships can hold lasting meaning, growth, and wisdom. Listening offers reassurance that endings don't erase value, and that healing can deepen the connections that remain. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/finding-meaning-in-friendships-that-end/ Quotes to ponder: "As with a divorce, intimate friendships that end remain an important part of the fabric of your life." "The challenge is to not allow the anger or shame or guilt you may feel in the wake of the parting of ways to demean what the relationship meant in your life." "Whether you or the other did the letting go, you can go on." Episode references: My Other Ex - Women's True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends: https://www.amazon.com/My-Other-Ex-Stories-Leaving/dp/0692272585 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2927: Dr. Margaret Rutherford reflects on the quiet heartbreak of friendships that fade or abruptly end, exploring the confusion, grief, and self-doubt that often follow. She reveals how even lost relationships can hold lasting meaning, growth, and wisdom. Listening offers reassurance that endings don't erase value, and that healing can deepen the connections that remain. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/finding-meaning-in-friendships-that-end/ Quotes to ponder: "As with a divorce, intimate friendships that end remain an important part of the fabric of your life." "The challenge is to not allow the anger or shame or guilt you may feel in the wake of the parting of ways to demean what the relationship meant in your life." "Whether you or the other did the letting go, you can go on." Episode references: My Other Ex - Women's True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends: https://www.amazon.com/My-Other-Ex-Stories-Leaving/dp/0692272585

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2905: Dr. Margaret Rutherford reveals how one simple shift in perspective can defuse recurring conflict and bring more compassion into your relationship. By challenging the instinct to take things personally, you can interrupt destructive cycles and reconnect with your partner's humanity, even in moments of stress or misunderstanding. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/the-one-question-you-can-ask-to-stop-fighting-with-your-partner/ Quotes to ponder: "You interpret their actions to be about you, maybe even to the point you think they are intentionally attempting to hurt you." "Most of us want to get along and have the best assumed of us, to be given the benefit of the doubt." "You don't wake up and hope you can make your partner miserable…"

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2905: Dr. Margaret Rutherford reveals how one simple shift in perspective can defuse recurring conflict and bring more compassion into your relationship. By challenging the instinct to take things personally, you can interrupt destructive cycles and reconnect with your partner's humanity, even in moments of stress or misunderstanding. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/the-one-question-you-can-ask-to-stop-fighting-with-your-partner/ Quotes to ponder: "You interpret their actions to be about you, maybe even to the point you think they are intentionally attempting to hurt you." "Most of us want to get along and have the best assumed of us, to be given the benefit of the doubt." “You don't wake up and hope you can make your partner miserable…” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Năm mươi năm sau ngày Agatha Christie qua đời (1890-1976), các tác phẩm của bà vẫn giữ nguyên sức cuốn hút đối với nhiều thế hệ độc giả. Với hơn hai tỷ rưỡi quyển sách bán chạy từ gần một thế kỷ qua, nữ hoàng tiểu thuyết trinh thám Agatha Christie chẳng những là một trong những tác giả được đọc nhiều nhất, mà còn gợi hứng cho các nhà làm phim thực hiện các bản phóng tác điện ảnh cũng như truyền hình. Theo công ty nghiên cứu thị trường GfK, có trụ sở tại Đức, khi qua đời nhà văn người Anh Agatha Christie đã để lại một di sản nghệ thuật đồ sộ với 66 quyển tiểu thuyết, khoảng 150 truyện ngắn, 20 vở kịch và hai cuốn hồi ký. Thế nhưng, có khá nhiều người hâm mộ lần đầu tiên khám phá thế giới của nữ hoàng tiểu thuyết trinh thám không phải là qua văn chương mà chủ yếu là qua phim ảnh. Kể từ đầu những năm 1930, tác phẩm của Agatha Christie đã bắt đầu được chuyển thể lên màn ảnh lớn với nhân vật thám tử tư Hercule Poirot, đó là trường hợp của bộ phim Black Coffee (Cà phê đen 1931) dựa theo vở kịch cùng tên. Từ đó đến nay, đã có khoảng 50 tác phẩm của bà được phóng tác thành phim truyện điện ảnh, trong khi các phiên bản nhiều  tập chiếu trên đài truyền hình được phát đi phát lại, rất nhiều lần.  Chuyên gia Jérémy Picard là tác giả quyển sách « Agatha Christie : Des romans à l'écran » (Agatha Christie : Từ tiểu thuyết đến màn ảnh) do nhà xuất bản Hugo Doc phát hành. Trả lời phỏng vấn RFI Pháp ngữ, anh cho biết có một điều nghịch lý là mặc dù các bộ phim thành công rực rỡ, nhưng sinh thời Agatha Christie lại không thích các phiên bản điện ảnh phóng tác từ các quyển tiểu thuyết của mình. « Theo tôi, bà Agatha Christie không có nhiều thiện cảm với các bản phóng tác điện ảnh vì lý do tuổi tác. Bà thuộc thế hệ lớn lên trước thời đại khai sinh nền điện ảnh. Những bản chuyển thể đầu tiên từ tiểu thuyết thành phim truyện, thực sự đã gây thất vọng : người xem có cảm tưởng phim trinh thám được quay để "kiếm tiền" chứ không hề có tham vọng nghệ thuật nào. Riêng đối với chính tác giả, các bản phóng tác điện ảnh đầu tiên ít khi nào trung thành với tác phẩm gốc : cốt truyện, nhân vật và thậm chí kết cục bị thay đổi đáng kể, theo ý muốn của nhà sản xuất. Vào năm 1933, bộ phim Pháp "Chiếc hộp sơn mài" (Le coffret de laque) với nữ diễn viên Danielle Darrieux trong vai chính đã được cho ra mắt khán giả mà không hề ghi rằng phim này dựa trên tác phẩm (Cà phê đen/Black Cofee) của nhà văn Agatha Christie. Điều đó khiến bà ghét những người chuyên cắt xén, sửa đổi hay viết lại kịch bản. » Nếu không có nhiều cảm tình với các nhà sản xuất phim ảnh, vậy thì tại sao sinh thời, nữ hoàng tiểu thuyết trinh thám Agatha Christie thường hay bán lại quyền khai thác các quyển sách ăn khách của mình. Tác giả Jérémy Picard giải thích tiếp : « Sinh thời, bà Agatha Christie có đầu óc thực dụng của một nhà kinh doanh. Mặc dù không mặn mà gì với ngành công nghiệp điện ảnh, nhưng bà vẫn tiếp tục nhượng lại bản quyền vì lý do tài chính. Phim dựa theo tiểu thuyết của bà thường có nguồn kinh phí cao, trong trường hợp bộ phim thu hút được nhiều khán giả, bà lại càng dễ mặc cả bản quyền của mình khi có dự án làm phim mới. Xa hơn nữa, thành công của bộ phim phóng tác cũng có lợi cho tác phẩm gốc. Thành công của các phiên bản điện ảnh giúp cho các nhân vật trở nên gần gũi hơn với những khán giả không đọc sách và từ đó họ có thể tìm đọc các quyển tiểu thuyết của nhà văn người Anh. Vào những năm 1960, khi lần đầu tiên bộ tiểu thuyết với nhân vật Miss Marple được chuyển thể thành phim truyền hình nhiều tập, với nữ diễn viên Margaret Rutherford trong vai chính, bà Agatha Christie đã không ngại lên tiếng chê bai, từ khâu soạn kịch bản cho đến thành phần diễn viên mà bà cho là quá tệ. Tuy nhiên, sau một thời gian, khi Miss Marple thành công trên màn ảnh nhỏ, chinh phục được nhiều khán giả truyền hình, thì lúc ấy nhà văn người Anh mới đổi ý. Điều đó cho thấy quan hệ hơi mâu thuẫn giữa Agatha Christie với ngành sản xuất phim ảnh, cho dù không thích nhau nhưng buộc phải "sống chung". » Từ cuối những năm 1950 trở đi, các bản phóng tác điện ảnh (nhất là « Witness for the Prosecution » vào năm 1958) trở thành những bộ phim ăn khách thu hút được nhiều khán giả nhờ dàn ngôi sao màn bạc hàng đầu. Cách tuyển chọn nhiều ngôi sao hạng A vào các vai diễn, chính cũng như phụ, thực sự trở thành một hệ thống từ năm 1974 trở đi. Tác giả Jérémy Picard cho biết vì sao có nhiều diễn viên danh tiếng nhận lời đóng phim phóng tác từ truyện Agatha Christie : « Bởi vì đó là dấu ấn tạo ra nét độc đáo của các bộ phim dựa theo tiểu thuyết của Agatha Christie. Hệ thống tuyển lựa « dàn sao » nổi tiếng bắt đầu với bộ phim « Án mạng trên chuyến tàu tốc hành phương Đông » (Murder on the Orient Express) của Sidney Lumet. Vào thời bấy giờ đạo diễn Mỹ nhận lời quay phim với điều kiện mỗi nhân vật (dù là chính hay phụ) phải do một ngôi sao thủ vai. Trước hết, một dàn diễn viên càng hùng hậu càng dễ lôi kéo khán giả vào rạp. Thứ hai, theo quan niệm của nhà đạo diễn Sidney Lumet, do trong cuộc điều tra vụ án, bất cứ ai cũng có thể bị tình nghi, cho nên việc nhiều ngôi sao xuất hiện cùng lúc giúp duy trì nét bí ẩn, khiến cho khán giả càng không dễ đoán ra ai thực sự là thủ phạm. Chiến lược của Sidney Lumet đã nhắm trúng mục tiêu, vì ngôi sao Ingrid Bergman đã đoạt giải Oscar diễn xuất nhờ bộ phim này dù cô xuất hiện trên màn ảnh lớn chỉ trong vòng 8 phút. Thành công này thuyết phục nhiều diễn viên sau đó tham gia các dự án làm phim khác. Hệ thống dàn sao được lặp lại vào năm 1978 với bộ phim "Án mạng trên sông Nile" (Death on the Nile) và gần đây hơn nữa là ba tập phim Agatha Christie do đạo diễn người Anh Kenneth Branagh thực hiện. Một giai thoại thú vị là nam diễn viên Johnny Depp được trả 10 triệu đô la để đóng vai nạn nhân bị sát hại trong bộ phim "Murder on the Orient Express" (Án mạng trên chuyến tàu tốc hành phương Đông) vào năm 2017. Johnny Depp chỉ xuất hiện trên màn ảnh trong 20 phút. Hãy thử tính xem : nam diễn viên người Mỹ nhận được khoảng nửa triệu đô la cho mỗi phút đóng phim !!! » Trong lãnh vực truyền hình, tiểu thuyết Agatha Christie ăn khách trở lại, khi các nhân vật trong truyện được đưa lên màn ảnh nhỏ. Đầu tiên hết là nhân vật Miss Marple, có đến ba nữ diễn viên khác nhau qua nhiều thời kỳ, đã đóng vai bà cụ thích ngồi đan áo, nhưng nhờ óc quan sát tinh tế, mà tháo gỡ được nhiều nút thắt bí ẩn, để rồi phá án một cách ly kỳ. Đổi lại, theo Jérémy Picard, trong vai thám tử người Bỉ Hercule Poirot, hầu như mọi người đều đồng ý rằng không ai đóng vai này, hay bằng nam diễn viên David Suchet.  « Phải công nhận rằng trong hơn 20 năm, David Suchet đã có một lối diễn đạt xuất sắc tài tình, khi ông hóa thân thành thám tử Hercule Poirot. Điều thú vị là khi được mời đóng vai này, ông hơi đắn đo do dự vì lúc ấy ông không biết gì nhiều về thế giới của Agatha Christie. Để chuẩn bị vai này, David Suchet đã đọc toàn bộ tác phẩm, ghi chú từng chi tiết nhỏ nhặt nhất, dùng để mô tả nhân vật trong truyện : từ thói quen, dáng đi, cách ăn nói để có thể tạo ra một nhân vật gần giống nhân vật tiểu thuyết, một người có kiến thức uyên bác, có óc quan sát bén nhạy nhưng đồng thời cũng lắm tật. Bên cạnh đó, thành công của loạt phim truyền hình này phần lớn cũng là vì kịch bản phóng tác trung thành với bản gốc của tiểu thuyết. » Nửa thế kỷ sau ngày tác giả qua đời, sức cuốn hút của Agatha Christie một lần nữa bùng phát trở lại với sự xuất hiện trên mạng Netflix của một bản chuyển thể mới với tựa đề « The Seven Dials » (Kỳ án bảy mặt đồng hồ). Phim này dài ba tập và hứa hẹn nhiều tình tiết gay cấn ly kỳ xung quanh cái chết của nhiều thanh niên có liên quan đến một hội kín bí ẩn. Sự kiện có thêm một tác phẩm ít nổi tiếng (so với Hercule Poirot và Miss Marple) được dựng thành phim nhiều tập, cho thấy sức sống bền bỉ của các bộ tiểu thuyết, có mang chữ ký của nữ hoàng trinh thám Agatha Christie.

Năm mươi năm sau ngày Agatha Christie qua đời (1890-1976), các tác phẩm của bà vẫn giữ nguyên sức cuốn hút đối với nhiều thế hệ độc giả. Với hơn hai tỷ rưỡi quyển sách bán chạy từ gần một thế kỷ qua, nữ hoàng tiểu thuyết trinh thám Agatha Christie chẳng những là một trong những tác giả được đọc nhiều nhất, mà còn gợi hứng cho các nhà làm phim thực hiện các bản phóng tác điện ảnh cũng như truyền hình. Theo công ty nghiên cứu thị trường GfK, có trụ sở tại Đức, khi qua đời nhà văn người Anh Agatha Christie đã để lại một di sản nghệ thuật đồ sộ với 66 quyển tiểu thuyết, khoảng 150 truyện ngắn, 20 vở kịch và hai cuốn hồi ký. Thế nhưng, có khá nhiều người hâm mộ lần đầu tiên khám phá thế giới của nữ hoàng tiểu thuyết trinh thám không phải là qua văn chương mà chủ yếu là qua phim ảnh. Kể từ đầu những năm 1930, tác phẩm của Agatha Christie đã bắt đầu được chuyển thể lên màn ảnh lớn với nhân vật thám tử tư Hercule Poirot, đó là trường hợp của bộ phim Black Coffee (Cà phê đen 1931) dựa theo vở kịch cùng tên. Từ đó đến nay, đã có khoảng 50 tác phẩm của bà được phóng tác thành phim truyện điện ảnh, trong khi các phiên bản nhiều  tập chiếu trên đài truyền hình được phát đi phát lại, rất nhiều lần.  Chuyên gia Jérémy Picard là tác giả quyển sách « Agatha Christie : Des romans à l'écran » (Agatha Christie : Từ tiểu thuyết đến màn ảnh) do nhà xuất bản Hugo Doc phát hành. Trả lời phỏng vấn RFI Pháp ngữ, anh cho biết có một điều nghịch lý là mặc dù các bộ phim thành công rực rỡ, nhưng sinh thời Agatha Christie lại không thích các phiên bản điện ảnh phóng tác từ các quyển tiểu thuyết của mình. « Theo tôi, bà Agatha Christie không có nhiều thiện cảm với các bản phóng tác điện ảnh vì lý do tuổi tác. Bà thuộc thế hệ lớn lên trước thời đại khai sinh nền điện ảnh. Những bản chuyển thể đầu tiên từ tiểu thuyết thành phim truyện, thực sự đã gây thất vọng : người xem có cảm tưởng phim trinh thám được quay để "kiếm tiền" chứ không hề có tham vọng nghệ thuật nào. Riêng đối với chính tác giả, các bản phóng tác điện ảnh đầu tiên ít khi nào trung thành với tác phẩm gốc : cốt truyện, nhân vật và thậm chí kết cục bị thay đổi đáng kể, theo ý muốn của nhà sản xuất. Vào năm 1933, bộ phim Pháp "Chiếc hộp sơn mài" (Le coffret de laque) với nữ diễn viên Danielle Darrieux trong vai chính đã được cho ra mắt khán giả mà không hề ghi rằng phim này dựa trên tác phẩm (Cà phê đen/Black Cofee) của nhà văn Agatha Christie. Điều đó khiến bà ghét những người chuyên cắt xén, sửa đổi hay viết lại kịch bản. » Nếu không có nhiều cảm tình với các nhà sản xuất phim ảnh, vậy thì tại sao sinh thời, nữ hoàng tiểu thuyết trinh thám Agatha Christie thường hay bán lại quyền khai thác các quyển sách ăn khách của mình. Tác giả Jérémy Picard giải thích tiếp : « Sinh thời, bà Agatha Christie có đầu óc thực dụng của một nhà kinh doanh. Mặc dù không mặn mà gì với ngành công nghiệp điện ảnh, nhưng bà vẫn tiếp tục nhượng lại bản quyền vì lý do tài chính. Phim dựa theo tiểu thuyết của bà thường có nguồn kinh phí cao, trong trường hợp bộ phim thu hút được nhiều khán giả, bà lại càng dễ mặc cả bản quyền của mình khi có dự án làm phim mới. Xa hơn nữa, thành công của bộ phim phóng tác cũng có lợi cho tác phẩm gốc. Thành công của các phiên bản điện ảnh giúp cho các nhân vật trở nên gần gũi hơn với những khán giả không đọc sách và từ đó họ có thể tìm đọc các quyển tiểu thuyết của nhà văn người Anh. Vào những năm 1960, khi lần đầu tiên bộ tiểu thuyết với nhân vật Miss Marple được chuyển thể thành phim truyền hình nhiều tập, với nữ diễn viên Margaret Rutherford trong vai chính, bà Agatha Christie đã không ngại lên tiếng chê bai, từ khâu soạn kịch bản cho đến thành phần diễn viên mà bà cho là quá tệ. Tuy nhiên, sau một thời gian, khi Miss Marple thành công trên màn ảnh nhỏ, chinh phục được nhiều khán giả truyền hình, thì lúc ấy nhà văn người Anh mới đổi ý. Điều đó cho thấy quan hệ hơi mâu thuẫn giữa Agatha Christie với ngành sản xuất phim ảnh, cho dù không thích nhau nhưng buộc phải "sống chung". » Từ cuối những năm 1950 trở đi, các bản phóng tác điện ảnh (nhất là « Witness for the Prosecution » vào năm 1958) trở thành những bộ phim ăn khách thu hút được nhiều khán giả nhờ dàn ngôi sao màn bạc hàng đầu. Cách tuyển chọn nhiều ngôi sao hạng A vào các vai diễn, chính cũng như phụ, thực sự trở thành một hệ thống từ năm 1974 trở đi. Tác giả Jérémy Picard cho biết vì sao có nhiều diễn viên danh tiếng nhận lời đóng phim phóng tác từ truyện Agatha Christie : « Bởi vì đó là dấu ấn tạo ra nét độc đáo của các bộ phim dựa theo tiểu thuyết của Agatha Christie. Hệ thống tuyển lựa « dàn sao » nổi tiếng bắt đầu với bộ phim « Án mạng trên chuyến tàu tốc hành phương Đông » (Murder on the Orient Express) của Sidney Lumet. Vào thời bấy giờ đạo diễn Mỹ nhận lời quay phim với điều kiện mỗi nhân vật (dù là chính hay phụ) phải do một ngôi sao thủ vai. Trước hết, một dàn diễn viên càng hùng hậu càng dễ lôi kéo khán giả vào rạp. Thứ hai, theo quan niệm của nhà đạo diễn Sidney Lumet, do trong cuộc điều tra vụ án, bất cứ ai cũng có thể bị tình nghi, cho nên việc nhiều ngôi sao xuất hiện cùng lúc giúp duy trì nét bí ẩn, khiến cho khán giả càng không dễ đoán ra ai thực sự là thủ phạm. Chiến lược của Sidney Lumet đã nhắm trúng mục tiêu, vì ngôi sao Ingrid Bergman đã đoạt giải Oscar diễn xuất nhờ bộ phim này dù cô xuất hiện trên màn ảnh lớn chỉ trong vòng 8 phút. Thành công này thuyết phục nhiều diễn viên sau đó tham gia các dự án làm phim khác. Hệ thống dàn sao được lặp lại vào năm 1978 với bộ phim "Án mạng trên sông Nile" (Death on the Nile) và gần đây hơn nữa là ba tập phim Agatha Christie do đạo diễn người Anh Kenneth Branagh thực hiện. Một giai thoại thú vị là nam diễn viên Johnny Depp được trả 10 triệu đô la để đóng vai nạn nhân bị sát hại trong bộ phim "Murder on the Orient Express" (Án mạng trên chuyến tàu tốc hành phương Đông) vào năm 2017. Johnny Depp chỉ xuất hiện trên màn ảnh trong 20 phút. Hãy thử tính xem : nam diễn viên người Mỹ nhận được khoảng nửa triệu đô la cho mỗi phút đóng phim !!! » Trong lãnh vực truyền hình, tiểu thuyết Agatha Christie ăn khách trở lại, khi các nhân vật trong truyện được đưa lên màn ảnh nhỏ. Đầu tiên hết là nhân vật Miss Marple, có đến ba nữ diễn viên khác nhau qua nhiều thời kỳ, đã đóng vai bà cụ thích ngồi đan áo, nhưng nhờ óc quan sát tinh tế, mà tháo gỡ được nhiều nút thắt bí ẩn, để rồi phá án một cách ly kỳ. Đổi lại, theo Jérémy Picard, trong vai thám tử người Bỉ Hercule Poirot, hầu như mọi người đều đồng ý rằng không ai đóng vai này, hay bằng nam diễn viên David Suchet.  « Phải công nhận rằng trong hơn 20 năm, David Suchet đã có một lối diễn đạt xuất sắc tài tình, khi ông hóa thân thành thám tử Hercule Poirot. Điều thú vị là khi được mời đóng vai này, ông hơi đắn đo do dự vì lúc ấy ông không biết gì nhiều về thế giới của Agatha Christie. Để chuẩn bị vai này, David Suchet đã đọc toàn bộ tác phẩm, ghi chú từng chi tiết nhỏ nhặt nhất, dùng để mô tả nhân vật trong truyện : từ thói quen, dáng đi, cách ăn nói để có thể tạo ra một nhân vật gần giống nhân vật tiểu thuyết, một người có kiến thức uyên bác, có óc quan sát bén nhạy nhưng đồng thời cũng lắm tật. Bên cạnh đó, thành công của loạt phim truyền hình này phần lớn cũng là vì kịch bản phóng tác trung thành với bản gốc của tiểu thuyết. » Nửa thế kỷ sau ngày tác giả qua đời, sức cuốn hút của Agatha Christie một lần nữa bùng phát trở lại với sự xuất hiện trên mạng Netflix của một bản chuyển thể mới với tựa đề « The Seven Dials » (Kỳ án bảy mặt đồng hồ). Phim này dài ba tập và hứa hẹn nhiều tình tiết gay cấn ly kỳ xung quanh cái chết của nhiều thanh niên có liên quan đến một hội kín bí ẩn. Sự kiện có thêm một tác phẩm ít nổi tiếng (so với Hercule Poirot và Miss Marple) được dựng thành phim nhiều tập, cho thấy sức sống bền bỉ của các bộ tiểu thuyết, có mang chữ ký của nữ hoàng trinh thám Agatha Christie.

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2870: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the hidden emotional toll of enmeshment, when a parent relies too heavily on their child for emotional support and identity. She reveals how this dynamic stifles independence, breeds guilt, and leaves adult children struggling with boundaries, self-trust, and autonomy, while also offering guidance on how to break the cycle and heal. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/when-a-parent-needs-too-much-what-is-enmeshment-and-how-does-it-hurt-a-child/ Quotes to ponder: “If the parent represses the girl's (or boy's) anger not just once but over and over again, a deeper injury occurs: the girl will eventually dismantle her anger response." “When the child reaches adulthood, they can be stricken by guilt for simply wanting and needing their own life.” “Your task is to build your own sense of identity, while learning to share in healthy supportive relationships.” Episode references: Educated: https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590501 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2870: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the hidden emotional toll of enmeshment, when a parent relies too heavily on their child for emotional support and identity. She reveals how this dynamic stifles independence, breeds guilt, and leaves adult children struggling with boundaries, self-trust, and autonomy, while also offering guidance on how to break the cycle and heal. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/when-a-parent-needs-too-much-what-is-enmeshment-and-how-does-it-hurt-a-child/ Quotes to ponder: "If the parent represses the girl's (or boy's) anger not just once but over and over again, a deeper injury occurs: the girl will eventually dismantle her anger response." "When the child reaches adulthood, they can be stricken by guilt for simply wanting and needing their own life." "Your task is to build your own sense of identity, while learning to share in healthy supportive relationships." Episode references: Educated: https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590501

Margaret Rutherford ist bekannt als die einzig wahre Verkörperung von Agatha Christies schrulliger Detektivin, und in dieser Rolle wird die englische Schauspielerin auch 40 Jahre nach ihrem Tod, am 22. Mai 1972, noch verehrt. Für die Fans bleibt sie die ewige Miss Marple. Doch die Oskar-Preisträgerin versuchte ihr Leben lang, den Krimi ihres Lebens vor der Öffentlichkeit zu verbergen: Ihr eigener Vater erschlug ihren Großvater in einer Pension mit einem Nachttopf. Immer in Geldnöten, blieb Rutherford zeitlebens eine Getriebene: nirgendwo zu Hause, außer auf der Bühne, die ihr Leben bedeutete. Von Margarete Hippe DLR/NDR/SWR 2012

On the outside, some teens can look like they “have it all together” but on the inside, they're carrying something much heavier behind the scenes: hidden depression. In this powerful conversation, Dr. Margaret Rutherford—clinical psychologist and author of Perfectly Hidden Depression—breaks down why some teens suppress emotions, strive to seem perfect, and quietly carry stress, pressure, or loneliness without telling anyone. This is an important listen for any teen who feels overwhelmed by trying to “be perfect,” uphold family expectations, manage cultural  or social media pressures  -- and for any parent trying to understand what might be going on beneath the surface.  You'll learn how hidden depression develops, why perfectionism fuels emotional numbness, and how teens can begin opening up even when it feels impossible or “too risky.”  For more on Dr. Rutherford and her work: drmargaretrutherford.com   Like this episode? Leave us a comment or review -- your feedback is important to us.   Parents: Schedule a free Clarity Call with me here to help your teen/YA resolve weight & unhealthy eating habits, while improving body image and self-esteem.   Disclaimer

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2820: Dr. Margaret Rutherford shares a deeply personal account of losing both her parents during the holiday season, revealing the raw emotions and unexpected details that come with grief. Through vivid memories and honest reflection, she invites us to create our own healing rituals and approach the holidays with compassion, for ourselves and for others navigating loss. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/when-the-holidays-bring-the-memory-of-loss/ Quotes to ponder: "Are we allowing ourselves to feel the way we need to?" "Treat yourself as well as you can next time you're in a place of loss." "If you have lost someone you love this year, or if it's the anniversary of their death, you can celebrate their life by creating a ritual that is meaningful for you." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2820: Dr. Margaret Rutherford shares a deeply personal account of losing both her parents during the holiday season, revealing the raw emotions and unexpected details that come with grief. Through vivid memories and honest reflection, she invites us to create our own healing rituals and approach the holidays with compassion, for ourselves and for others navigating loss. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/when-the-holidays-bring-the-memory-of-loss/ Quotes to ponder: "Are we allowing ourselves to feel the way we need to?" "Treat yourself as well as you can next time you're in a place of loss." "If you have lost someone you love this year, or if it's the anniversary of their death, you can celebrate their life by creating a ritual that is meaningful for you."

Episode 185 - Miranda (1948) "You've hated me ever since I set tail in this house." In the canon of post-war British comedy, there are grand spectacles and quiet character studies. And then, every so often, there's a film so completely, cheerfully absurd that it defies category. Miranda (1948) is one such treasure, a fantasy-comedy that is as polished and witty as it is delightfully naughty. It's a film that asks what would happen if a classic British "comedy of manners" was suddenly interrupted by a mermaid—and the answer, it turns in, is pure, bubbly entertainment. The story itself is a wonderfully silly concoction. Dr. Paul Martin (Griffith Jones), escaping his wife for a solo fishing holiday in Cornwall, gets more than he bargained for. He doesn't just catch a fish; he is caught by Miranda, a flirtatious, man-crazy mermaid who promptly holds him captive in her aquatic cave. His ransom? A trip to see London. What follows is a brilliant farce. Paul passes off the beautiful Miranda as an "invalid patient," concealing her tail under long dresses and wheeling her around his sophisticated London home. This is where the film truly shines, thanks to the absolutely enchanting central performance from Glynis Johns. Long before she was Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins, Johns established her star power here. With a coy, kittenish voice and eyes that perpetually sparkle with mischief, her Miranda is a sublime creation. She's no innocent nymph; she's a charming siren who has every man in the house—from her "doctor" to the lovestruck chauffeur (a wonderful David Tomlinson)—wrapped around her little finger, or fin. While Glynis Johns is the undeniable heart of the film, she is bolstered by one of the finest supporting casts in British comedy. Googie Withers is perfectly cast as Paul's increasingly bewildered and suspicious wife, Clare. But it is the magnificent, eccentric Margaret Rutherford who threatens to steal the entire picture as Nurse Carey. Hired to look after the "patient," she is not shocked to discover Miranda's secret but openly delighted, exclaiming, "It's a mermaid! I've always believed in them!" The film is packed with witty dialogue and brilliant sight gags that never get old: Miranda's insistence on eating raw fish sandwiches, her casual snacking from the goldfish bowl, and a priceless scene at the zoo where she communicates with the seals. It's all so unapologetically fun, a droll and airy fantasy that was a smash hit with audiences at the time, and it's easy to see why. Miranda is a whimsical, charming, and thoroughly amusing escape that still feels as fresh and sparkling as the day it first splashed onto the screen. This and previous episodes can be found everywhere you download your podcasts   Bonus content available at: patreon.com/ReelBritanniaPodcast   Follow us on Twitter @rbritanniapod    Thanks for listening Scott and Steven

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2751: Many people are quietly struggling with social anxiety, and it may be showing up in our everyday manners. Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores how our increasing reliance on screens and hesitation to commit to social events can leave us isolated, and offers a simple exercise to challenge avoidance and build confidence. Her reflections invite us to face discomfort with honesty and take small steps toward connection. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/are-we-losing-our-manners-how-to-confront-social-anxiety/ Quotes to ponder: "Not responding, not committing is a choice." "If you stay uncommitted, silent, you're actually committed to hiding." "Everyone else has their own insecurity. Everyone." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2751: Many people are quietly struggling with social anxiety, and it may be showing up in our everyday manners. Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores how our increasing reliance on screens and hesitation to commit to social events can leave us isolated, and offers a simple exercise to challenge avoidance and build confidence. Her reflections invite us to face discomfort with honesty and take small steps toward connection. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/are-we-losing-our-manners-how-to-confront-social-anxiety/ Quotes to ponder: "Not responding, not committing is a choice." "If you stay uncommitted, silent, you're actually committed to hiding." "Everyone else has their own insecurity. Everyone." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Special Subject for September 2025 led us to watch a couple of wartime British films starring Laurence Olivier and his amazing accents: Québécois in Powell and Pressburger's The 49th Parallel (1941), which opposes a Platonic Idea of Canada to Nazi ideology, and Russian in Anthony Asquith's The Demi-Paradise (1943), an alarmingly Soviet-friendly use of the romantic comedy genre to promote cross-cultural understanding. The accents may lack technical accuracy (much like the films' depictions of various cultures), but the ideas on display are worth grappling with and the presentation entertaining, while Olivier himself is rivetingly eccentric and weirdly endearing. Other notable players include FOP Penelope Dudley-Ward, Margaret Rutherford, Glynis Johns, Leslie Howard, Felix Aylmer and Powell/Pressburger regulars Eric Portman and Anton Walbrook.  Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s:    The 49th Parallel (1941) [dir. Michael Powell] 0h 43m 38s:    THE DEMI-PARADISE (1943) [dir. Antohny Asquith] +++ * Listen to our guest episode on The Criterion Project – a discussion of Late Spring * Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s * Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive) * Read Elise's piece on Gangs of New York – “Making America Strange Again” * Check out Dave's Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist's 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!  Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!  st drop us a line if you'd like to join! 

What if the most accomplished person you know—the CEO everyone admires, the doctor saving lives, the entrepreneur crushing their goals—is secretly researching suicide methods at 2 AM? Clinical psychologist Dr. Margaret Rutherford reveals the shocking truth behind a hidden epidemic sweeping through our success-obsessed culture: Perfectly Hidden Depression. This isn’t your typical depression. These are the people whose Instagram feeds look flawless, whose careers are soaring, whose lives seem enviable—yet they’re drowning behind their perfect facades. After 30 years as a clinical psychologist and surviving her own “decade of chaos” involving multiple marriages, panic disorder, and anorexia, Dr. Rutherford has discovered why traditional depression criteria are missing millions of high-achieving people who are silently planning their deaths. This conversation emerged from tragedy: a woman died by suicide, and her husband found Dr. Rutherford’s book “Perfectly Hidden Depression” on her bedside table. That moment sparked a global conversation that has now reached nearly 2 million people through her viral TEDx talk. Dr. Rutherford exposes how our culture has created a deadly trap where success becomes a prison. These individuals are caught in what she calls “destructive perfectionism”—like being trapped on a treadmill where you control neither the speed nor the incline, and you literally cannot get off. The Perfectionism Death Trap Unlike obvious depression symptoms, Perfectly Hidden Depression manifests through relentless achievement, being the “reliable one” everyone counts on, and an inability to be emotionally transparent. These people don’t cry openly or stay in bed—they’re running companies, chairing committees, and being the person everyone admires. The most terrifying part? Mental health professionals are missing this completely. These individuals don’t fit traditional depression criteria, leading therapists to dismiss their struggles with “you’re not depressed, maybe just a little anxious.” Dr. Rutherford distinguishes between constructive perfectionism (process-oriented and adaptable) and destructive perfectionism (where any deviation from the plan equals complete failure). The destructive type is fueled by deep shame and terror of being “found out” as imperfect. The Transparency Revolution The solution isn’t eliminating achievement—it’s learning what Dr. Rutherford calls “transparency.” Unlike vulnerability (which implies weakness), transparency is about a conscious choice to share your authentic struggle with safe people. Her own radical transparency includes openly discussing panic attacks during her viral TEDx talk (she calls her panic “Bob”), failed marriages, and eating disorders. This authenticity literally saves lives by giving others permission to admit they’re struggling behind their perfect performance. Breaking the Suicide Silence Dr. Rutherford demolishes dangerous myths, particularly that “people who talk about suicide don’t do it.” This is catastrophically false. The problem isn’t that successful people don’t talk about suicide—it’s that we’re not listening or taking their pain seriously because their lives look so perfect. Through powerful client stories, she demonstrates how the right response to someone’s deepest shame can literally lift years of burden in a single moment of authentic connection. The Path Back to Life The conversation reveals three revolutionary insights that can save lives: Emotional Transparency: Start with one safe person—share something small that feels vulnerable, then gradually build your capacity for authentic connection. Embrace the “And”: You can be both successful AND struggling, both strong AND scared. Stop living in either/or thinking that demands you choose between achievement and authenticity. Redefine Self-Acceptance: Neither your achievements nor your struggles define you completely. You are both your strengths and your vulnerabilities, and neither cancels out the other. Why This Matters Now Depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing among high achievers. If you’re reading this and thinking “this is me,” Dr. Rutherford’s message is clear: your perfect performance is killing you, but there’s another way to live. This isn’t just about identifying a problem—it’s about throwing a lifeline to millions who are silently drowning in their own success. Sometimes the most successful thing you can do is admit you’re dying inside, because that admission might just save your life. Golden Nuggets From Dr. Margaret Rutherford Here are Dr. Rutherford’s 3 transformational principles you can apply today: Practice Emotional Transparency: Find one safe person and start sharing small vulnerabilities. Begin wherever you are—no struggle is too small when learning authenticity. Embrace the “And”: Stop either/or thinking. You can simultaneously be successful and struggling, strong and vulnerable, achieving and healing. Redefine Self-Acceptance: Recognise that neither your strengths nor your weaknesses completely define you. You are both, and that’s perfectly human. Watch the Full Conversation Now on YouTube About Dr. Margaret Rutherford Dr. Margaret Robinson Rutherford is a clinical psychologist with thirty years of experience, author, TEDx speaker, and podcast host. Her book, Perfectly Hidden Depression: How to Break Free from the Perfectionism That Masks Your Depression, has reached thousands internationally with translations spanning from Korea to Italy, Turkey to Germany. Her highly popular podcast, The SelfWork Podcast, has been continuously rated as one of the best podcasts for mental health and depression. Dr. Margaret is known for her vibrantly engaging and theoretically well-crafted presentations, whether live or virtual. She’s challenging the mental health profession to question their overreliance on official symptom checklists for diagnosis, advocating instead for creating normalcy around suicidal feelings and responding with safety and compassion rather than stigmatising this painful part of human existence. Connect with Dr. Margaret Rutherford Website: drmargaretrutherford.com YouTube: https://youtube.com/@DrMargaretRutherford Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrMargaretRutherford/ Instagram: @drmargaretrutherford 

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2705: Couples who thrive over time tend to “turn toward” one another, facing vulnerability, taking responsibility for mistakes, and embracing empathy, rather than turning away in resentment or detachment. Through the moving story of Jack and Dana, Dr. Margaret Rutherford shows how mutual accountability and heartfelt apologies can rebuild trust, even after years of missed opportunities for connection. Her insights offer a clear path toward transforming regret into renewed commitment. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/knowing-what-you-know-today-would-you-still-marry-your-partner/ Quotes to ponder: "I know I dominated the family. I didn't know how to be any other way." "I allowed Jack to dominate our relationship. There were reasons." "It's never too late to turn toward them to ask for their understanding or forgiveness, to build a more intimate bond." Episode references: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/dp/0553447718 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2705: Couples who thrive over time tend to “turn toward” one another, facing vulnerability, taking responsibility for mistakes, and embracing empathy, rather than turning away in resentment or detachment. Through the moving story of Jack and Dana, Dr. Margaret Rutherford shows how mutual accountability and heartfelt apologies can rebuild trust, even after years of missed opportunities for connection. Her insights offer a clear path toward transforming regret into renewed commitment. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/knowing-what-you-know-today-would-you-still-marry-your-partner/ Quotes to ponder: "I know I dominated the family. I didn't know how to be any other way." "I allowed Jack to dominate our relationship. There were reasons." "It's never too late to turn toward them to ask for their understanding or forgiveness, to build a more intimate bond." Episode references: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/dp/0553447718 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3706: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the delicate process of self-forgiveness, offering five practical steps to help you release shame, accept your mistakes, and re-engage with the present. Her insights speak directly to anyone burdened by guilt, especially those prone to perfectionism or overthinking, and reveal how self-compassion can become a path to lasting growth. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/how-to-forgive-yourself-five-not-so-simple-but-important-steps/ Quotes to ponder: "Your mistake doesn't define you any more than the choices you're proud of." "There's a difference between taking responsibility for the hurtful impact your choices made on others, and carrying around guilt for years and years." "Shame is a helpful emotion if it lasts ten seconds and leads to a change in behavior." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3250: Dr. Margaret Rutherford shares seven practical guidelines for treating your marriage like a well-run business, emphasizing regular "meetings" to align on finances, goals, and shared responsibilities. By approaching your relationship with intention and open communication, couples can avoid resentment, build trust, and maintain a healthy, collaborative partnership. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/seven-guidelines-to-keep-the-business-of-your-marriage-going-strong/ Quotes to ponder: "You get tired of doing even what you do well." "Both of you will be involved in 'the business' of your marriage." "Treat this meeting in a similar way [to a workplace meeting]." Episode references: National Foundation for Credit Counseling: https://www.nfcc.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3706: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the delicate process of self-forgiveness, offering five practical steps to help you release shame, accept your mistakes, and re-engage with the present. Her insights speak directly to anyone burdened by guilt, especially those prone to perfectionism or overthinking, and reveal how self-compassion can become a path to lasting growth. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/how-to-forgive-yourself-five-not-so-simple-but-important-steps/ Quotes to ponder: "Your mistake doesn't define you any more than the choices you're proud of." "There's a difference between taking responsibility for the hurtful impact your choices made on others, and carrying around guilt for years and years." "Shame is a helpful emotion if it lasts ten seconds and leads to a change in behavior." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3706: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the delicate process of self-forgiveness, offering five practical steps to help you release shame, accept your mistakes, and re-engage with the present. Her insights speak directly to anyone burdened by guilt, especially those prone to perfectionism or overthinking, and reveal how self-compassion can become a path to lasting growth. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/how-to-forgive-yourself-five-not-so-simple-but-important-steps/ Quotes to ponder: "Your mistake doesn't define you any more than the choices you're proud of." "There's a difference between taking responsibility for the hurtful impact your choices made on others, and carrying around guilt for years and years." "Shame is a helpful emotion if it lasts ten seconds and leads to a change in behavior." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3250: Dr. Margaret Rutherford shares seven practical guidelines for treating your marriage like a well-run business, emphasizing regular "meetings" to align on finances, goals, and shared responsibilities. By approaching your relationship with intention and open communication, couples can avoid resentment, build trust, and maintain a healthy, collaborative partnership. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/seven-guidelines-to-keep-the-business-of-your-marriage-going-strong/ Quotes to ponder: "You get tired of doing even what you do well." "Both of you will be involved in 'the business' of your marriage." "Treat this meeting in a similar way [to a workplace meeting]." Episode references: National Foundation for Credit Counseling: https://www.nfcc.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3250: Dr. Margaret Rutherford shares seven practical guidelines for treating your marriage like a well-run business, emphasizing regular "meetings" to align on finances, goals, and shared responsibilities. By approaching your relationship with intention and open communication, couples can avoid resentment, build trust, and maintain a healthy, collaborative partnership. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/seven-guidelines-to-keep-the-business-of-your-marriage-going-strong/ Quotes to ponder: "You get tired of doing even what you do well." "Both of you will be involved in 'the business' of your marriage." "Treat this meeting in a similar way [to a workplace meeting]." Episode references: National Foundation for Credit Counseling: https://www.nfcc.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2683: Dr. Margaret Rutherford outlines four empowering ways to find emotional closure after a relationship ends, especially when the other person won't engage. By focusing on personal growth, setting boundaries, and trusting yourself to process grief, you can heal and move forward with integrity and peace. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/4-ways-to-get-emotional-closure-in-a-relationship-by-yourself/ Quotes to ponder: "Often the conversation you can imagine having is just that. It's in your imagination, or your fantasy." "Guide your own life in a way that reflects your values. Your children will learn. Your friends will take sides or they won't." "You can give yourself closure. And you can move on." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2683: Dr. Margaret Rutherford outlines four empowering ways to find emotional closure after a relationship ends, especially when the other person won't engage. By focusing on personal growth, setting boundaries, and trusting yourself to process grief, you can heal and move forward with integrity and peace. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/4-ways-to-get-emotional-closure-in-a-relationship-by-yourself/ Quotes to ponder: "Often the conversation you can imagine having is just that. It's in your imagination, or your fantasy." "Guide your own life in a way that reflects your values. Your children will learn. Your friends will take sides or they won't." "You can give yourself closure. And you can move on." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 55 - In this episode Dr Margaret Rutherford talks about hidden depression and the miracles that come when you face traumas and inner secrets. Disclaimer: Please note that all information and content on the UK Health Radio Network, all its radio broadcasts and podcasts are provided by the authors, producers, presenters and companies themselves and is only intended as additional information to your general knowledge. As a service to our listeners/readers our programs/content are for general information and entertainment only.  The UK Health Radio Network does not recommend, endorse, or object to the views, products or topics expressed or discussed by show hosts or their guests, authors and interviewees.  We suggest you always consult with your own professional – personal, medical, financial or legal advisor. So please do not delay or disregard any professional – personal, medical, financial or legal advice received due to something you have heard or read on the UK Health Radio Network.

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2641: Dr. Margaret Rutherford shines a compassionate light on the hidden roots of common couple conflicts, revealing how everyday arguments often mask deeper needs like trust, gratitude, and vulnerability. Learn five destructive patterns of bickering and five transformative strategies to replace them with understanding, empathy, and emotional connection. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/5-common-ways-couples-bicker-and-fuss-and-five-strategies-to-stop/ Quotes to ponder: "Contempt is the number one communication quality that kills a relationship." "Blame is easy. The second is much, much more vulnerable and thus, more difficult." "People who are truly secure in and of themselves don't have to be right." Episode references: Pia Mellody's Work - Facing Codependence: https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Codependence-What-Really-Recovery/dp/0062505890 The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/dp/0609805797 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2641: Dr. Margaret Rutherford shines a compassionate light on the hidden roots of common couple conflicts, revealing how everyday arguments often mask deeper needs like trust, gratitude, and vulnerability. Learn five destructive patterns of bickering and five transformative strategies to replace them with understanding, empathy, and emotional connection. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/5-common-ways-couples-bicker-and-fuss-and-five-strategies-to-stop/ Quotes to ponder: "Contempt is the number one communication quality that kills a relationship." "Blame is easy. The second is much, much more vulnerable and thus, more difficult." "People who are truly secure in and of themselves don't have to be right." Episode references: Pia Mellody's Work - Facing Codependence: https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Codependence-What-Really-Recovery/dp/0062505890 The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/dp/0609805797 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this conversation, Margaret Rutherford discusses the concept of Perfectly Hidden Depression, a form of depression characterized by perfectionism and high achievement, often masked by a facade of success. She explains how this type of depression differs from traditional depression, emphasizing the difficulty individuals face in expressing their emotions. Hunter and Margaret explore the roots of perfectionism, the impact of childhood experiences, and the societal pressures that contribute to emotional suppression. Rutherford offers insights into breaking generational cycles and practical steps for parents to begin their journey towards emotional freedom and self-acceptance. ABOUT HUNTER CLARKE-FIELDS: Hunter Clarke-Fields is the host Mindful Parenting Podcast (Top 0.5% podcast ), global speaker, number 1 bestselling author of “Raising Good Humans” and “Raising Good Humans Every Day,” Mindfulness Meditation teacher and creator of the Mindful Parenting Course and Teacher Training. Find more podcasts, Hunter's books, blog posts, free resources, and more at ⁠MindfulMamaMentor.com⁠. Discover your Unique-To-You Podcast Playlist at ⁠mindfulmamamentor.com/quiz/⁠ We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: ⁠/mindfulmamamentor.com/mindful-mama-podcast-sponsors/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you were brought up in a family or a culture that never recognized, discussed, or processed things like depression and trauma, you may have learned to simply hide those difficult feelings away and simply act as if everything's great. You can be a high achiever, striving perfection, all to keep away demons that you've never really faced. Your act can be so good that it even fools you. For a while, anyway. Until it doesn't. And then things can get very ugly. Psychologist Dr. Margaret Rutherford coined the term Perfectly Hidden Depression several years ago in a blog post that instantly went viral, filling her inbox with people shocked to recognize their own lives in what she described. She joins us to talk about PHD, how to recognize it in yourself, and what to do about it.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of Maximum Fun.Check out our I'm Glad You're Here and Depresh Mode merchandise at the brand new merch website MaxFunStore.com!Hey, remember, you're part of Depresh Mode and we want to hear what you want to hear about. What guests and issues would you like to have covered in a future episode? Write us at depreshmode@maximumfun.org.Depresh Mode is on BlueSky, Instagram, Substack, and you can join our Preshies Facebook group. Help is available right away.The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 or 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-273-TALKCrisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741.International suicide hotline numbers available here: https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

Margaret Rutherford, Alastair Sim, Peter Sellers, John Gielgud, Leigh Lawson are among just a few of the glittering stars we meet as Mel Byron and the team take a look at what's coming up on TPTV Over late April and early May. It's Easter treats galore for classic film and TV fans!

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3528: A self-centered person shifts every conversation to themselves, often without realizing it, while selfishness involves consistently prioritizing personal desires over others' needs. Dr. Margaret Rutherford clarifies how self-awareness stands apart, it's about acknowledging personal wants and needs while valuing those of others equally. By recognizing these distinctions, you can break free from harmful conditioning, embrace vulnerability, and start prioritizing yourself without guilt. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/whats-the-difference-between-being-selfish-and-being-self-aware/ Quotes to ponder: "You keep in mind your own needs or wants, and treat them with as much consideration as you treat the wants and needs of others." "You're giving yourself the message that you're important, a message that maybe you never or rarely received." "It may feel awkward at first to do things like this for yourself, but it's so worth it. Because you're worth it." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3528: A self-centered person shifts every conversation to themselves, often without realizing it, while selfishness involves consistently prioritizing personal desires over others' needs. Dr. Margaret Rutherford clarifies how self-awareness stands apart, it's about acknowledging personal wants and needs while valuing those of others equally. By recognizing these distinctions, you can break free from harmful conditioning, embrace vulnerability, and start prioritizing yourself without guilt. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/whats-the-difference-between-being-selfish-and-being-self-aware/ Quotes to ponder: "You keep in mind your own needs or wants, and treat them with as much consideration as you treat the wants and needs of others." "You're giving yourself the message that you're important, a message that maybe you never or rarely received." "It may feel awkward at first to do things like this for yourself, but it's so worth it. Because you're worth it." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3528: A self-centered person shifts every conversation to themselves, often without realizing it, while selfishness involves consistently prioritizing personal desires over others' needs. Dr. Margaret Rutherford clarifies how self-awareness stands apart, it's about acknowledging personal wants and needs while valuing those of others equally. By recognizing these distinctions, you can break free from harmful conditioning, embrace vulnerability, and start prioritizing yourself without guilt. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/whats-the-difference-between-being-selfish-and-being-self-aware/ Quotes to ponder: "You keep in mind your own needs or wants, and treat them with as much consideration as you treat the wants and needs of others." "You're giving yourself the message that you're important, a message that maybe you never or rarely received." "It may feel awkward at first to do things like this for yourself, but it's so worth it. Because you're worth it." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2409: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the complexities of unconditional parental love when faced with the destructive behaviors of an adult child. She discusses the profound emotional toll, the necessity of setting boundaries, and the delicate balance between love and detachment. This piece offers both empathy and guidance for parents navigating these heart-wrenching challenges. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/when-a-parents-unconditional-love-is-worn-away/ Quotes to ponder: "Unconditional parental love can be used up, worn away, and virtually destroyed." "It's a kind of emotional death. The death of dreams, of hope, and of trust." "Changing the locks, cutting financial support, or setting boundaries can break your heart - but your head knows they're all that's left to do." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2409: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the complexities of unconditional parental love when faced with the destructive behaviors of an adult child. She discusses the profound emotional toll, the necessity of setting boundaries, and the delicate balance between love and detachment. This piece offers both empathy and guidance for parents navigating these heart-wrenching challenges. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/when-a-parents-unconditional-love-is-worn-away/ Quotes to ponder: "Unconditional parental love can be used up, worn away, and virtually destroyed." "It's a kind of emotional death. The death of dreams, of hope, and of trust." "Changing the locks, cutting financial support, or setting boundaries can break your heart - but your head knows they're all that's left to do." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2765: Dr. Margaret Rutherford explores the nuances between comfort eating and binge eating, sharing personal stories of emotional eating to highlight the importance of self-awareness. She provides practical tips to help differentiate emotional hunger from physical hunger and suggests healthier coping mechanisms to address emotional distress without resorting to food. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/bingeing-or-comfort-eating-five-ways-for-comfort-eating-to-stay-comfortable/ Quotes to ponder: "Comfort eating, while not a clinical term, is almost exclusively for self-soothing." "Shame and hatred will only serve as a hurdle rather than some kind of self-punitive motivation." "Grief, sadness, guilt, anger, disappointment, humiliation none of these emotions are easy to feel. Yet the more you avoid them, the stronger they can become." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3233: Dr. Margaret Rutherford offers a heartfelt exploration of loving someone with recurrent depression, sharing Patricia's story to illustrate the complexities and challenges involved. By developing empathy and understanding, loved ones can better support and help manage this difficult condition. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://drmargaretrutherford.com/how-to-understand-when-you-love-someone-with-recurrent-depression/ Quotes to ponder: "Every now and then, the powers that be dig a hole in the floor somewhere, a hole just big enough for you to fall through." "Patricia's eyes filled with tears. Dan looked at her. 'I'm sorry. Now I get it. I'd be paralyzed.'" "You can help by not judging and by giving them the respectful message that you know they're trying." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices