Simon Callow: I’m a national treasure and proud of it...
AFTER 45 years as an actor, writer and director, Simon Callow CBE is happy to be hailed as a national treasure. “I never know quite what the ground rules are for it,” smiles the Four Weddings And A Funeral star, whose one-man stage version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has become as much a part of the festive season as mince pies and mulled wine.
“But if people think of me that way then I’m delighted,” smiles Callow, 69. “People do on the whole seem quite pleased to see me when I’m out and about.”
The Streatham-born multi-tasker is everything you might expect: genial, well-spoken, enthusiastic about his work and, having come out in his 1984 autobiography, open about his personal life.
He was appointed CBE in 1999 for services to acting and, with more than 40 films on his CV plus many stage and TV credits, he found the recognition thrilling. “It’s very lovely if people think I’ve rendered some services to acting,” he says as we chat about the return of A Christmas Carol to the West End.
He began performing the show in 2011 and is bringing it back after a two-year hiatus. It sees Simon playing every part as he brings the Dickens tale to life. “There are so many extraordinary scenes, characters and dialogue in it and it’s more strange and extraordinary than anyone remembers so when you dramatise it you can’t keep pace with Dickens’s imagination,” he says.
It sounds like he is admitting defeat when he adds: “The only way you could probably do it justice would be as a cartoon.” But he has performed it to rave reviews and packed houses, and he understands why the tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who hates Christmas, and his clerk Bob Cratchit, who loves it, continues to enthral readers and audiences.
“The characters are so brilliantly conceived,” says Callow, who has played Dickens in another one-man show, The Mystery Of Charles Dickens, as well as in a couple of episodes of Doctor Who. “In the book there’s actually only three or four pages about the Cratchit family but you never forget them. There’s something tremendously heartwarming about it. Whenever I do the play, I just feel absolutely enriched by it.”
We’re chatting in a members’ club in Brydges Place, tucked away in an alley near London’s Charing Cross and as dark and cosy as anything in Dickens’s novels. Callow sports a well-worn tweed waistcoat and jacket, an ensemble perfect for the decor.
Often perceived as a genial eccentric, he is juggling a fresh pot of tea with a cup of coffee that has gone cold. We are sitting at a wobbly table but when the waiter offers to rectify it Callow grins and says: “Don’t worry, we’re not going to be doing acrobatics.”
He saves the acrobatics for the show as he flits between Dickens as narrator and myriad other characters. To stay fit, he walks from his North London home to the theatre, clearing his head and running through his lines, then eats a plate of liver.
“Anyone who has the insanity to do a one-person play twice a day requires a great deal of feeding,” he says. “You have to be mentally and physically alert. Sometimes I do scenes with four characters talking simultaneously and you have to be absolutely on top of it.”
He and director Tom Cairns have also filmed the show for cinemas. They reconceived it and shot it in a munitions depot over seven days. “And I’m the only person in it, in every single shot, so God almighty, it was the most tiring seven days of my life.”
Callow’s own Christmases were magical. “I never saw the decorations until Christmas Day,” he says. “My parents would work on them overnight and as I was the only child it was all for me.”
He laughs. “But later a sort of nasty calculation crept in and I stopped wanting presents and wanted money instead. I’d sit there adding up how much I thought I’d get from people.”
As an adult he came to loathe this time of year. “I detested it beyond words. I became so oppressed with the commercialism of it and caught myself going out buying presents for people with hatred in my heart but then I was a home help for a couple of Christmases, which was something I’d done when I was a student. That was very touching because they welcomed me so much and gave me a glass of sherry. It was nice to do something useful.”
‘Anyone who has the insanity to do a oneperson play twice a day requires a great deal of feeding’
HE NOW spends Christmas at home with Sebastian Fox, 35, whom he married in 2016. Before the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013, he never thought it possible. “Nor did I want it,” he confesses. “I wasn’t a fan of marriage until I met Sebastian. He was very interested in the idea of committing himself to someone for life and I had been thinking along those lines for a long time too.”
He doesn’t see himself as a gay rights activist. “It’s not in my nature but I’ve always thought the most important thing anybody can do for gay rights is to come out.”
He did that in his memoir Being An Actor. “Everybody said, ‘It’s the end of your career’ and I thought, ‘I don’t want this career if I can’t be candid about myself ’. Actors before my generation lived with it, people like John Gielgud, Noel Coward and Ivor Novello. Everybody knew they were gay, they just didn’t mention it.”
It certainly wasn’t the end of his career. Having worked in theatre since 1973 and made his film debut in Amadeus in 1984, his subsequent roles have ranged from
Merchant Ivory films to guest slots on TV series such as Poirot, and acclaimed performances in countless stage productions.
His role as party animal Gareth in Four Weddings... remains a favourite, both with fans and with the actor himself. When people meet him, they expect him to be just like garrulous Gareth.
“They expect me to be the life and soul of the party with an endless stream of jokes and Scottish dancing,” he smiles, “but I’m not.”
Now he has finished a book on London theatres and is deep in research for the last quartet of tomes on Orson Welles, with no plans to slow down after he turns 70 in June. “On the contrary,” he smiles. “My experience is the older one gets, the harder one works because time is running out and you think, ‘I’ve still got all these things to do’.”
A Christmas Carol is at the Arts Theatre, London, from Saturday to January 12 and is shown in cinemas on December 11. artstheatrewestend.co.uk