Simon Callow

• 1. Introduction

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  Simon Callow was born on the 15th of June 1949 in Streatham, South London, and his path into acting began not in a classroom or a casting office, but with a fan letter. A teenage Callow wrote to Laurence Olivier, then the artistic director of the National Theatre, and Olivier wrote back. The reply did not offer a role. It suggested Callow join the box-office staff. He did, and while watching actors rehearse from the wings, something shifted. He realised he wanted to be among them.

  What followed was a career that would stretch across six decades, from originating one of British theatre's most celebrated roles in Amadeus to playing Charles Dickens so many times that the character became almost a second identity. Callow became a character actor of rare range, moving between Shakespeare and opera, Wilkie Collins and Marvel, the West End and Disney+. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1999 for his services to acting. He has won an Olivier Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and collected BAFTA nominations along the way.

  But the arc of his life is not simply one of professional accumulation. His father left when Callow was eighteen months old. He spent three years at boarding school in South Africa after a failed family reunion in what is now Zambia. He returned to Britain at twelve. He found the gay liberation movement at Queen's University Belfast, dropped his degree after a year to train at the Drama Centre London, and then, in 1984, became one of the first actors to come out publicly as gay. He later said it was probably one of the most valuable things he had done in his life.

  This is the story of how all of that added up to something.

• 2. The Mozart Question

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  Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus had its premiere at the National Theatre in 1979, and it was Callow who first played Mozart on that stage. The role was demanding and unconventional. Shaffer wrote Mozart not as a serene genius but as a vulgar, giggling, almost manic figure, and Callow brought that contradiction to life. He later wrote that he had discovered Mozart quite early, that the operas, the symphonies, the concertos, and the wind serenades were all very much part of his musical landscape when he was asked to play the composer. He suggested that this prior relationship with the music may have been one of the reasons he got the job.

  The role earned Callow a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. When Milos Forman adapted Amadeus for the cinema in 1984, Callow returned to the project but shifted characters entirely, now playing Emanuel Schikaneder, the theatrical impresario who commissioned The Magic Flute. It was his first film appearance, and the production would go on to win multiple Academy Awards.

  The same year, Callow also appeared in the original cast BBC radio production of Amadeus, which meant he had inhabited the world of that play across three distinct formats. The stage production, the radio broadcast, and the film all carried his presence, though in the film he had moved from protagonist to supporting player. That kind of lateral movement within a single work, finding new entry points rather than simply reprising what worked before, would become characteristic of how Callow approached his career.

• 3. Stage Work and Early Risks

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  Callow's stage debut came in 1973 at the Assembly Rooms Theatre in Edinburgh, appearing in The Three Estates. The early years that followed were not spent in prestigious venues. In the early 1970s he joined Gay Sweatshop, a theatre company, and performed in Martin Sherman's Passing By, which critics praised. In 1977 he took various parts in the Joint Stock Theatre Company's production of Epsom Downs.

  At the Lyric Hammersmith, he played Verlaine in Total Eclipse in 1982, Lord Foppington in The Relapse in 1983, and the title role in Faust in 1988. He also directed there, helming The Infernal Machine in 1986 with Dame Maggie Smith in the cast. In 1985 he played Molina in Kiss of the Spiderwoman at the Bush Theatre.

  Between March and August 2009, he played Pozzo in a Sean Mathias production of Waiting for Godot that brought together Ian McKellen as Estragon, Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, and Ronald Pickup as Lucky. The production toured Britain and then ran at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Later that year, he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival performing two Charles Dickens stories adapted and directed by Patrick Garland, and he repeated them from December 2009 to January 2010 at the Riverside Studios and on tour in 2011.

  A one-man play about Shakespeare, originally titled Shakespeare: the Man from Stratford and written by Jonathan Bate, toured nationally from June to November 2010. It was renamed Being Shakespeare for its West End debut at the Trafalgar Studios, opening on the 15th of June 2011, which was Callow's birthday. The production was revived at the same theatre in March 2012 before running in New York City and Chicago, and it returned to the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre in March 2014.

• 4. Directing and the Written Word

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  Callow's 1984 book Being An Actor was a critique of director-dominated theatre, as well as a memoir of his early career. It is also the book in which he came out as gay, writing plainly about his identity at a time when no British actor had voluntarily done so. The Independent placed him 28th in its 2007 listing of the most influential gay men and women in the United Kingdom.

  As a director, Callow won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director of a Musical in 1992 for Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, with Wilhelmenia Fernandez in the title role. The same year he directed the play Shades by Sharman MacDonald and a production of My Fair Lady featuring costumes by Jasper Conran. In 1995, he directed a stage version of the French film Les Enfants du Paradis for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In May 1996, as part of the Covent Garden Festival, he directed Cantabile, which included two world premieres of pieces composed by his friend Stephen Oliver. One of those pieces, Ricercare No. 4, had been commissioned from Oliver by Callow following the death of Oliver's partner.

  His opera directing credits include Die Fledermaus for Scottish Opera in 1988, a production of Cosi fan tutte in Lucerne, and Menotti's The Consul at Holland Park Opera in London in 1999. His book Love Is Where It Falls examines his eleven-year relationship with Peggy Ramsay, who died in 1991 and had been a prominent theatrical agent from the 1960s through the 1980s. Beyond memoir, Callow has written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, and Richard Wagner, and has contributed articles to Gramophone and The New York Review of Books.

• 5. Film, Television, and Dickens

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  Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 brought Callow to a genuinely wide audience. He played Gareth, whose death midway through the film forms its emotional turning point, and the role earned him a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. A Room with a View in 1985 had brought an earlier BAFTA nomination for the same category, with Callow playing the Reverend Mr Beebe. Shakespeare in Love in 1998, in which he played Sir Edmund Tilney, was part of the ensemble that won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

  On television, Callow played Tom Chance across nineteen episodes of the Channel 4 sitcom Chance in a Million from 1984 to 1986, portraying an eccentric individual to whom coincidences happened regularly. He played the Duke of Sandringham across five episodes of the Starz period series Outlander between 2014 and 2016. In 2021, he joined the cast of the Marvel series Hawkeye on Disney+, playing Armand Duquesne.

  Charles Dickens became a recurring presence in Callow's career over several decades. He played the novelist in An Audience with Charles Dickens for the BBC in 1996, in The Mystery of Charles Dickens in 2000, in the film Christmas Carol: The Movie, and in Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale. He appeared as Dickens in the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead" in 2005 and returned to the role for the 2011 season finale. As a narrator, Callow read Robert Fagles' 2006 translation of Virgil's The Aeneid, and served as reader for Roald Dahl's The Twits and The Witches in the Puffin audio collection.

• 6. Private Life and Public Stances

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  Sebastian Fox became Callow's husband in June 2016, after Callow had been open about his sexuality for more than three decades. His decision to come out in Being An Actor in 1984 was one he reflected on directly in an interview. He said he was not really an activist, but that some political acts make a genuine difference. He believed his coming out was probably one of the most valuable things he had done in his life, and that no actor had voluntarily done so before him.

  He was a prominent supporter of Stonewall when it was founded in 1989, but in later years distanced himself from the organisation over its position on trans self-identification. In August 2014 he was among more than two hundred public figures who signed a letter to The Guardian expressing the hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in the independence referendum. In November 2007 he threatened to resign from his role as a patron of the London Oratory School Schola over controversy surrounding the Terrence Higgins Trust, an AIDS charity of which Callow is also a patron.

  In December 2004, he hosted the London Gay Men's Chorus Christmas show, Make the Yuletide Gay, at the Barbican Centre. He is one of the patrons of the Michael Chekhov Studio London. His work as a narrator extended in November 2009 to a recording by the Caput Ensemble of settings of the surreal poetry of Daniil Kharms, composed by Haflidi Hallgrimsson, in which Callow served as narrator; it was released by Hyperion Records. His film commitments have continued into recent years, with Viceroy's House in 2017, in which he played Cyril Radcliffe, the barrister who drew the boundary lines of Partition.