Here’s the quote in its entirety:
‘I’m not really an activist, although I am aware that there are some political acts one can do that actually make a difference and I think my coming out as a gay man was probably one of the most valuable things I’ve done in my life. I don’t think any actor had done so voluntarily and I think it helped to change the culture.“
Simon Callow is a top-drawer English character actor of stage and screen, the sort of actor that you might grapple for a name, but you know the face. But, he is also a superb writer and director. What he is not is Simon Cowell or Stephen Fry.
Callow appears in a large percent of some of my top favorite films, including 1984’s Amadeus (he was the original Mozart in the play’s premier), Merchant / Ivory’s A Room With A View (1985), Maurice (1987), and Howards End (1991); plus Postcards From The Edge (1990), Shakespeare In Love (1998), and the great Angels In America (2003). Like his friend Sir Ian McKellen, Callow is an out gay actor who has successfully made the transition from respected theatre actor to sought after film star without much ado about his sexuality.
“I was born in 1949, theoretically in the Dark Ages of homosexual experience. But under the threat of imminent extinction, and with many husbands absent for long periods of time during the Second World War, the strict compartmentalization of sexual desires had broken down. People followed their impulses: who knew whether they’d be alive tomorrow? Peace brought an anxious reassertion of supposedly core values but, at subconscious levels, attitudes had fundamentally changed. Gay men and women who had popped their heads over the parapet ducked down again out of sight, but they were just biding their time.”
He is also a director of film, plays, and operas, plus he is a talented musician and conductor. Callow is also a prolific writer: four volumes of memoirs and highly readable, but scholarly biographies of Orson Welles, Charles Laughton, and Oscar Wilde, plus an anthology of Shakespeare quotes, Shakespeare On Love (2000). His three volumes of Welles bios are the very best source of information and smart anecdotes on the famed director/writer/actor.
Callow:
“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’ and I wrote Being An Actor (1984). 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 not enough LGBTQ-themed films, but back in the 20th century they were quite rare, and back then most movies featuring queer people were “important” Oscar-nominated films such as Philadelphia (1993), or Brokeback Mountain (2005), sad stately affairs. I tend to appreciate the films with less agenda, where LGBTQ characters are more nonchalantly part of the world at large. Callow has a role in what is one of the my top gay-themed films, Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994). With a smart, sly screenplay by Richard Curtis, neatly directed by Mike Newell, it features Callow as Gareth, a flamboyant but not camp chap who doesn’t fit neatly into any 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 weepy poem Funeral Blues (“Stop all the clocks…”) by the gay poet W.H. Auden. It is a scene that requires having Kleenex at hand.
Callow:
“There was an unfortunate consequence of my character’s eccentricity; it stuck in people’s heads. Some people think I am like Gareth in real life, or think that particular acting style, which I call ‘the life and 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 and somehow deeply sad, nor hilarious, bitchy and outrageous, but masculine, exuberant, occasionally offensive, generous and 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 filmmakers 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 and love them individually and 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’s love of theatre began after he wrote a fan letter to Sir Laurence Olivier, at the time, the artistic director of the National Theatre, and received a response suggesting he join their box-office staff. Watching actors rehearse, he realized he wanted to be on stage.
He made his debut in 1973 in gay playwright Martin Sherman‘s Passing By. He appeared as gay poet Paul Verlaine in Total Eclipse (1982), and the title role in Faust (1988) at the Lyric Hammersmith Performing Arts Center, where he also directed The Infernal Machine starring Maggie Smith in 1986 In 1985, he played Molina in The Kiss Of The Spiderwoman on the West End. He played Mozart in the premiere of gay playwright Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the National Theatre (1979).
Among his hundreds of stage performances, in 2009, he appeared in gay director Sean Mathias‘s production of Samuel Beckett‘s Waiting For Godot with McKellen and Patrick Stewart.
In 2012, he appeared in a one-man play Being Shakespeare prior to a run in New York City and Chicago. In 2014, it returned to the West End.
Callow has written to be performed at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, It was to open in 2020, but it has been delayed because of sort of virus. It is about his student days, when he suffered abuse 50 years ago when he was campaigning for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland. He was told to go back home to England as he handed out leaflets, along with famed activist Bernadette Devlin.
Callow:
“I was in Shaftesbury Square politely asking people to take a leaflet. One woman clearly didn’t approve and on hearing his English accent told him: ‘Go home sonny, it’s not your problem’.“
Callow said the “indelibly marked” confrontation with “the very nice” woman sprang back into his mind as he worked on his new play:
‘I reckoned Go Home Sonny would make the perfect title.“
Always busy, Callow recently starred in the British television comedy series The Rebel, which ran for three seasons. He also has a recurring role on Death In Paradise, a very popular crime drama television series on the BBC. This spring he joined the cast of the West End revival of Cole Porter‘s Anything Goes as Elisha Whitney.
Not always keen on the idea of Marriage Equality, in 2016, Callow married his longtime partner Sebastian Fox on a Greek island after changing his mind:
“I had my doubts for many years. It was not exactly that I thought, as some of my friends did, that gay marriage was a mere aping of bourgeois norms. It was rather that in my family, marriage, my parents’, for one, had not been very successful. But slowly I began to understand that it was, or could be, a very public symbol of a profound and challenging commitment to a life shared at the deepest level.
And as these thoughts formed in my mind, I met the first man with whom I had ever wished to embark on that heroic undertaking. And, to my surprise, marriage, a boon in itself, has fundamentally changed my feelings about myself as a member of society; I now feel quite differently connected to it. What was merely private has become an integral and manifest part of the body politic; my love for my husband makes a contribution to the commonwealth.“
To me, he will always be Mr. Beeb in A Room With A View, my favorite of his roles in my favorite film. YouTube won’t allow me to post the scene. They have it was “age-restricted” although it is completely innocent. I blame the MAGAs, who are anti-art and anti-nudity. But, you may go there yourselves.
Callow is certainly an actor who is more than the sum of his parts.
