June 15, 1949– Simon Callow is a top-drawer English character actor of stage & screen, the sort of actor that you might grapple for a name, but you know the face. He is also a superb writer & director. He is not Simon Cowell or Stephen Fry.
Callow is in a large percent of my top favorite films: Amadeus (1984) he was the original Mozart in the play’s stage premier, A Room With A View (1985), Maurice (1987), Postcards From The Edge (1990), Howard’s End (1991), Shakespeare In Love (1998), Angels In America (2003). Not a traditional leading man, & like his friend Ian McKellen, Callow is an out gay actor who has successfully made the transition from respected theatre actor to sough after film star without much ado about his sexuality. Callow is also a prolific writer: 3 volumes of memoirs & highly readable, but scholarly biographies of Orson Welles, Charles Laughton, & Oscar Wilde. His 2 volumes of Wells bios are considered the very best source of information & smart anecdotes on the famed director/writer/actor.
“Coming out as gay was one of the most valuable things I’ve done. While I told interviewers I was gay in the 1980s, they never printed it. So I thought, ‘I’ve got to get this out in the open air’ & I wrote the book (his memoir, Being An Actor). Many people were concerned on my behalf about the consequences, but as it happens, it was using the book to attack the power of the directors in theatre that might have had the biggest consequence. Some directors probably said, ‘That actor will never work again’.”
There are still few Gay themed films & most featuring gay people are “important” films like Philadelphia (1993) or Brokeback Mountain(2005), sad stately affairs, with no truly specific gay sensibility. I tend to appreciate the movies with less agenda, where gays are more nonchalantly part of the world at large. Callow has a role in what I find to be one of the most important gay themed films, Four Weddings & A Funeral (1994). With a screenplay by Richard Curtis, directed by Mike Newell, Callow plays Gareth, a flamboyant but not camp chap who doesn’t fit neatly into a stereotype. He does not die of AIDS, which during that era is remarkable. In fact, Gareth dies of Scottish dancing. At the funeral of the title, Gareth’s partner Matthew recites the poem Funeral Blues (“Stop all the clocks…”) by gay poet W.H. Auden. It is a scene that requires having Kleenex at hand.
“There was an unfortunate consequence of my character’s eccentricity; it stuck in people’s heads. 20 years on some people think I am like Gareth in real life, or think that particular acting style, which I call ‘the life & death of the party performance’, is all I can do, which certainly isn’t the case.”
“When I read the script, it was immediately evident that this was a new kind of a gay character in films: not sensitive, not intuitive, kind & somehow deeply sad, nor hilarious, bitchy & outrageous, but masculine, exuberant, occasionally offensive, generous & passionate. He was also deeply involved with his partner, the handsome, shy, witty, understated Matthew. In the original screenplay, they were glimpsed at the beginning of the film asleep in bed. In the final cut, the film-makers removed this sequence, in order to allow their relationship to creep up on the audience. They were right to do so: before they knew it, viewers had come to know & love them individually, & were hit hard, first by Gareth’s death, then by Matthew’s oration (with a little help from another splendid bugger, W.H. Auden).”
Callow celebrates 66th birthday today. He lives in London with his fiancée Sebastian Fox, enjoying good food, books, movies at home & dog walks on Hampstead Heath. He will always be Mr. Beeb in A Room With A View to me, my favorite of his roles in a favorite film. He is currently featured on the TV series Outlander on Starz. Callow is certainly an actor who is more than the sum of his parts.
