British actor, director, and writer

Callow in 1989

Simon Phillip Hugh Callow CBE (born 15 June 1949) is an English actor, director, and writer.

Contents

• 1 Early years
• 2 Career
  • 2.1 Acting
  • 2.2 Film
  • 2.3 Directing
  • 2.4 Author
  • 2.5 Narration
  • 2.6 Recent work
• 3 Personal life
• 4 Filmography
  • 4.1 Film
  • 4.2 Television
• 5 Bibliography
• 6 References
• 7 External links

Early years

Callow was born on 15 June 1949 in Streatham, London, the son of Yvonne Mary (née Guise), a secretary, and Neil Francis Callow, a businessman. His father was of English and French descent and his mother was of Danish and German ancestry. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. Callow was educated at the London Oratory School and then went on to study at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, where he was active in the Northern Ireland civil-rights movement, before giving up his degree course to train at the Drama Centre London.

Career

Acting

Callow's immersion in the theatre began after he wrote a fan letter to Sir Laurence Olivier, the artistic director of the National Theatre, and received a response suggesting he join their box-office staff. While watching actors rehearse, he realised he wanted to act.

Callow made his stage debut in 1973, appearing in The Three Estates at the *embly Rooms Theatre, Edinburgh. In the early 1970s, he joined the Gay Sweatshop theatre company and performed in Martin Sherman's critically acclaimed P*ing By. In 1977, he took various parts in the Joint Stock Theatre Company's production of Epsom Downs, and in 1979, he starred in Snoo Wilson's The Soul of the White Ant at the Soho Poly.

Callow appeared as Verlaine in Total Eclipse (1982), Lord Foppington in The Relapse (1983), and the *le role in Faust (1988) at the Lyric Hammersmith, where he also directed The Infernal Machine (with Maggie Smith) in 1986.In 1985, he played Molina in The Kiss of the Spiderwoman at the Bush Theatre, London. He played Mozart in the premiere of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus at the National Theatre (1979), also appearing in the 1983 BBC original cast radio production.

He later wrote of having "discovered Mozart quite early: the operas, the symphonies, the concertos, the wind serenades were all very much part of my musical landscape when I was asked to play the part of the composer in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus; possibly this was one of the reasons I got the job." He also appeared at the National Theatre as Orlando in As You Like It (1979) and Fulganzio in Galileo (1980).

Film

He made his first film appearance in 1984 as Schikaneder in Amadeus. The following year, he appeared as the Reverend Mr. Beebe in A Room with a View. His first television role was in the Carry On Laughing episode "Orgy and Bess" in 1975, but it was cut from the final print. He starred in several series of the Channel 4 situation comedy Chance in a Million, as Tom Chance, an eccentric individual to whom coincidences happened regularly. Roles like this and his part in Four Weddings and a Funeral brought him to a wider audience.

Directing

Callow also directed plays and wrote: his Being An Actor (1984) was a critique of 'director dominated' theatre, in addition to containing autobiographical sections relating to his early career as an actor. In 1992, he directed the play Shades by Sharman MacDonald and the musical My Fair Lady, featuring costumes designed by Jasper Conran. In 1995, he directed a stage version of the cl*ic French film Les Enfants du Paradis for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Among opera productions directed by Callow are a Così fan tutte in Lucerne, Die Fledermaus for Scottish Opera in 1988, Il tritico for the Broomhill Trust, Kent in August 1995, Menotti's The Consul at Holland Park Opera, London in 1999 and Le roi malgré lui by Chabrier at Grange Park Opera in 2003. He also directed Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, London in 1991, with Wilhelmenia Fernandez in the *le role.

One of Callow's best-known books is Love Is Where It Falls, an *ysis of his 11-year relationship with Peggy Ramsay (1908–91), a prominent British theatrical agent from the 1960s to the 1980s. He has also written extensively about Charles Dickens, whom he has played several times: in a one-man show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; in the films Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale, and Christmas Carol: The Movie; and on television several times including An Audience with Charles Dickens (BBC, 1996) and in "The Unquiet Dead", a 2005 episode of the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who. He returned to Doctor Who for the 2011 season finale, again taking the role of Dickens.

Callow appeared with Saeed Jaffrey in the 1994 British television drama series Little Napoleons, playing a scheming Conservative councillor in local government. In 1996, Callow directed Cantabile in three musical pieces (Commuting, The Waiter's Revenge, Ricercare No. 4) composed by his friend Stephen Oliver. Ricercare No. 4 was commissioned by Callow especially for Cantabile. He voice-acted the sly and traitorous Wolfgang in Shoebox Zoo. In 2004, he appeared on a Comic Relief episode of Little Britain for charity causes. In 2006, he wrote a piece for the BBC1 programme This Week bemoaning the lack of characters in modern politics. He has starred as Count Fosco, the villain of Wilkie Collins's novel The Woman in White, in film (1997) and on stage (2005, in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in the West End).

In December 2004, he hosted the London Gay Men's Chorus Christmas Show, Make the Yuletide Gay at the Barbican Centre in London. He is currently one of the patrons of the Michael Chekhov Studio London.

In July 2006, the London Oratory School Schola announced Callow as one of their new patrons. In November 2007, he threatened to resign the post over controversy surrounding the Terrence Higgins Trust (an AIDS charity of which Callow is also a patron). Other patrons of the Catholic choir are Princess Michael of Kent and the leading Scottish composer James MacMillan. He reprised his role as Wolfgang in Shoebox Zoo and voice-acted the wild and action-seeking Hunter, as well.

In 2007, he portrayed the role of Pliny the Elder in CBBC's children's drama series, Roman Mysteries in the episode "The Secrets of Vesuvius".

From 11 July to 3 August 2008, Callow appeared at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada in There Reigns Love, a performance of the sonnets of William Shakespeare. The same year, he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, performing "Dr. Marigold" and "Mr. Chops" by Charles Dickens, adapted and directed by Patrick Garland; repeating them from December 2009 to January 2010 at the Riverside Studios and on tour in 2011.

In February 2008, he played the psychiatrist in the Chichester Festival Theatre's production of Peter Shaffer's Equus.

Between March and August 2009, he played Pozzo in Sean Mathias's production of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett with Ian McKellen as Estragon, Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, and Ronald Pickup as Lucky. The production toured Britain before a run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in London

In November 2009, "Mini Stories", a recording by the Caput Ensemble of Haflidi Hallgrimsson's settings of the surreal poetry of Daniil Kharms, featuring Callow as the narrator, was released by Hyperion Records.

From June to November 2010, he appeared in a national tour of a new one-man play, Shakespeare: the Man from Stratford, written by Jonathan Bate, directed by Tom Cairns, and produced by the Amb*ador Theatre Group. The play was renamed Being Shakespeare for its West End debut at the Trafalgar Studios, where it opened on 15 June 2011. It was revived at the same theatre in March 2012, prior to a run in New York City and Chicago. In March 2014, it returned to the West End, this time at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

In October 2014, Callow appeared in a comedy sketch made for Channel 4's The Feeling Nuts Comedy Night to raise awareness of testicular cancer. The same year, he played the recurring role of the fictional Duke of Sandringham in the Starz period TV series, Outlander.

Author

Callow has also written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, and Richard Wagner. He has also written an anthology of Shakespeare p*ages, Shakespeare on Love, and contributed to Cambridge's Actors on Shakespeare series.

A devotee of cl*ical music, he has contributed articles to Gramophone.

Narration

Callow was the reader of The Twits and The Witches in the Puffin Roald Dahl Audio Books Collection (ISBN:978-0-140-92255-4), and has done audio versions of several abridged P.G. Wodehouse books that feature, among others, the fictional character Jeeves. They include Very Good, Jeeves and Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. Callow is the reader of the audio book edition of William E. Wallace's Michelangelo, God's Architect, published by Princeton University Press. Callow narrated the audiobook of Robert *les' 2006 translation of Virgil's The Aeneid.

Recent work

Callow starred in the three-part original Gold comedy The Rebel in 2016.

He plays Armand Duquesne in Marvel's Hawkeye on Disney+.

In 2022, he joined the cast of the UK revival of Cole Porter's Anything Goes replacing Gary Wilmot as Elisha Whitney. The production would complete a UK tour before finishing with a run at the Barbican Centre.

Personal life

Callow was listed 28th in The Independent's 2007 listing of the most influential gay men and women in the UK. In 1999, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to acting. He was one of the first actors to declare their *sexuality publicly, doing so in his 1984 book Being An Actor.

He married Sebastian Fox in June 2016.

In an interview, Callow stated:

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.

In August 2014, Callow was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.

Filmography

Film

See also: List of actors who have appeared in multiple Best Picture Academy Award winners

Television

Bibliography

• Callow, Simon (1986) , Being an Actor, St. Martin's Press, ISBN:978-0-312-07276-6, OCLC:13092196
• Callow, Simon (1991), Acting in Restoration Comedy, The Applause acting series, Applause Theatre Books, ISBN:978-1-55783-119-4, OCLC:24218256
• Callow, Simon (1995), Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, Jonathan Cape, ISBN:978-0-224-03852-2, OCLC:32454874
• Callow, Simon (1997), Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, Fromm International Pub, ISBN:978-0-88064-180-7, OCLC:36315809
• Callow, Simon (2000), The Night of the Hunter, BFI film cl*ics., BFI Publishing, ISBN:978-0-85170-822-5, OCLC:59582358
• Callow, Simon (2003), Dickens' Christmas: A Victorian Celebration, Harry N. Abrams, ISBN:978-0-8109-4534-0, OCLC:51942509
• Callow, Simon (2003), Shooting the Actor, Picador, ISBN:978-0-312-42244-8, OCLC:52178208
• Callow, Simon (2006), Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, Jonathan Cape, ISBN:978-0-224-03853-9, OCLC:63185891
• Callow, Simon (2007), Love Is Where It Falls, Nick Hern, ISBN:978-1-85459-976-6, OCLC:77258353
• Callow, Simon (2012), Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, Vintage Books, ISBN:9780345803238
• Callow, Simon (2015), Orson Welles: Volume 3: One-Man Band, Jonathan Cape
• Callow, Simon (2017), Being Wagner, William Collins, ISBN:9780008105693

References

External links

• Simon Callow at the Internet Broadway Database
• Selected performances in Bristol University Theatre Archive
• Simon Callow at IMDb
• Simon Callow's – MusicalTalk discussing his role as Captain Hook in Peter Pan at the Richmond Theatre, Christmas 2008.
• Simon Callow – Downstage Center interview at American Theatre Wing.org, September 2006
• Simon Callow on BBC1's This Week
• theartsdesk Q&A: Simon Callow (2 October 2010)