Simon Callow: ‘Scottish reeling almost killed me.’

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1:07Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that firmly believes that failing better can help us succeed better too. Before we get to my wonderful guest, just a reminder about my subscriber podcast, Failing With Friends, where my guest and I answer your questions and offer advice on some of your failures too. Do send your failures in to get advice from one of my esteemed guests. Follow the link in the podcast notes or look out for my call outs once a month on Instagram for quickfire questions. Thank you so, so much. Simon Callow is probably best known to many of you for his performance as Gareth, the unapologetic bon viveur in the 1994 hit movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.

1:50But his creative output spans the decades, transcends the genres and crosses multiple platforms. As an actor, he rose to prominence playing Mozart in the original stage production of Peter Schaffer's play Amadeus. When it was later made into a film, Callow took on his first movie role as Emmanuel Shikander. He went on to appear in many of the most iconic movies of the last 30 years, including A Room with a View, Howard's End, and Shakespeare in Love. He is currently filming Étoile, a new Amazon drama from the creators of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which follows the dancers and staff of two world-renowned ballet companies.

2:32As a director, Callow was behind the premiere of Willie Russell's Shirley Valentine and directed the late, great Dame Maggie Smith. As an author, he has written critically acclaimed memoirs and biographies of Oscar Wilde, Orson Welles, and Charles Dickens, whom he has also played several times. As a child, Callow thought he would be a lawyer, partly because growing up in Streatham, South London, he simply didn't know anyone in any other kind of profession. He wrote a fan letter to Sir Lawrence Olivier, then Artistic Director of the National Theatre, who suggested Callow joined the box office staff.

3:12While watching the actors rehearse, he realised that was his path. In the years that followed, he's received numerous prizes and accolades, including a CBE. A gifted creative then, but also someone who helped change the culture. In 1984, he wrote about his sexuality in his book, Being an Actor, decades before others would feel they could do the same. I'm aware that there are some political acts one can do that actually make a difference, he said later. And I think my coming out as a gay man was probably one of the most valuable things I've done in my life. Simon Callow, welcome to How to Fail.

3:57Hello. Do you still feel that? Yeah. Yes. I mean, for its time, yeah. Somebody has to do it. You know, somebody has to be the first. And I think I actually was the first gay actor to come out voluntarily. And what was the experience like for you being public when journalists would ask you if you had a girlfriend being able to say, well, actually, no? Yeah, I mean, they were very odd about it. One woman said to me, rather racially, said, I hear you're bisexual. I said, that's an absolute lie, a bare-faced lie. I am homosexual, strictly homosexual. No journalist to whom I confess my sexual proclivities ever published it because, of course, they want to find you out.

4:45They don't want to be told. There's no drama in that. So I sort of, as it were, got away with it because people had warned me in the most baleful terms about what might happen, that I would never work again as an actor, you know. In fact, what turned out that the book in which I told the world that I was gay, much, much more controversial because I attacked directors. And that then, people started saying, you'll never work again, my dear. And that didn't turn out to be true either. I think a good chunk of candor is a rather good thing from time to time. And I don't regret either coming out, obviously, or indeed attacking what I called the directocracy, by which I meant that directors have acquired almost all the power in the theatre.

5:36Power over the repertory, power over the casting, power over the production, power over the interpretation. And certainly, I think at the time that I was writing, very particularly, directors' theatre had become a stranglehold, you know. It really was a daring person who would quarrel with the director's interpretation. And so I staked my claim for some sort of contribution to the artistic, to the creative process. Do you think times have changed for actors who are gay in terms of their being able to be open and for it not to affect their career, either negatively or positively? Well, I think it has changed somewhat.

6:22But you also just have to bear in mind, and I always enter this qualification, that I was never a romantic leading actor. So it's always been a different matter for him. When Ian McKellen, who's most famously came out and has done so enormously much, probably more than almost anybody else, to normalize homosexuality, as it were, Ian had asked me, should I come out like you? And I said, well, it's hard for me to advise you about that, because as he was at the time, you're a romantic leading actor. You know, he'd just been playing Romeo and Stratford and all the rest of it. and I can absolutely understand that it might have been a puzzle for him but later he came up because he was so enraged by section 28 or clause 28 of the a bill which would make it almost impossible to teach anything about homosexuality in schools which a conservative government attempted to impose to answer you more briefly no I don't regret it at all be I do think on the whole, it's much easier for actors to come up and continue to act.

7:30There are a number of very, very well-known actors now who are gay, openly gay, but it still remains much more difficult on film. Let's talk about Gareth, if you don't mind indulging me. This was Four Weddings and a Funeral was a movie I loved so much, I went to see it four times at the cinema in 1994 when it was released. And I read something that you said about the character of Gareth, that you were pleased that he didn't die from AIDS. And that actually, there was something quietly revolutionary about showing this character in that way. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, absolutely. That was the remarkable daring and originality of Richard Curtis in his screenplay.

8:11Remember, this was a time, AIDS was still rampant at the time of making the film. And And there had been the film Philadelphia, which is a very mournful and sentimental film about AIDS. Understandably, I understand why people felt they needed to make a film like that. But it was only endorsing the association of homosexuality and illness, and particularly sexually transmitted illness, which was, you know, one of the things was said about homosexuality. Oh, they're filthy and they spread diseases and all the rest of it. And what was absolutely wonderful about the character of Gareth, who was just a wonderful character generally, was A, he was in a beautiful relationship with Matthew, his wonderful boyfriend, and that he didn't die of AIDS, he died of Scottish dancing.

9:09I've always said that basically the film is a government health warning against the perils of Scottish. I nearly died doing it, I can tell you. What was it like filming for weddings? Was it as fun as it seems as a viewer? Nearly as much. Nearly as much. I mean, films are quite hard work. And we had a very tight schedule, six, six-day weeks. They couldn't afford for us to each have cars of our own to take us to the various locations. So there was this extremely punitive situation where one van would drive around picking us all up. So if you pulled the short straw, you were picked up at four o 'clock in the morning and arrived on the set at nine o 'clock, you know.

9:54So there was that. But on the whole, yes, it was, as you can imagine, a delightful group of people. Everybody was, we were all very friendly because we were stuck on the set. But we might have finished at three o 'clock in the afternoon, but we couldn't go back until the van was ready to take everybody else back. Then we hung around a lot with each other, drinking wine. Final question before we get onto your failures. Amadeus is one of my top five favourite movies of all time, which is a list I'm constantly compiling, sort of on rotation, but that one seems to make the cut a lot of the time. And I hadn't realised that you had originated that role on stage.

10:33You were playing Amadeus, and then in the movie, he was played by Tom Hulse. Was that annoying? I'm annoyed on your behalf it was very annoying indeed but not unexpected because Milos Forman who directed it had made an announcement he came to the very first preview of Amadeus at the National Theatre and signed the contract to direct a film from it there and then and after a while various announcements started coming out of Milos' office that he wouldn't cast anybody in the film who'd played the same part in the theatre and that was because of his morbid anxiety about actors, theatre actors overacting.

11:12Every night as we looked out at the audience, Paul Schofield and Felicity Kendall and I and the others in the company, we would see Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman. They were queuing up, as I said at the time, like kind of potential benefactors from a will waiting for the dearly beloved to die. but none of them of course got the parts because milosh also rather interestingly said that he was going to cast unknowns in the two central parts eventually um uh i did get a call the agent got a call saying milosh would like to meet me and i thought well that's nice he'd like to meet me but i've heard he's screen testing every other young actor in england who's had a good notice in the last three years, but not me.

12:02So anyway, I went along to the Connacht Hotel, where he was in a very civilized way, doing the casting. And the delightful and last much lamented Richard Griffiths was there. And I knew Richard, and Richard introduced me to me. He made a strode into the room with a big cigar in his mouth, exactly what you expect from Hollywood director. And Richard He said, this is Simon Callow. He said, oh, you are Simon Callow. I wanted to meet you coming here. And he sat me down. He said, I got to tell you something. You, I've seen many, many Mozarts, and you are the best by far. You're both an asshole and genius.

12:41You are funny and sad. You are brilliantly witty and sharp and incredible. It's an incredible performance. It's just unbelievable. I wonder, what could you play in our film? I have no idea, Mr. Foreman. What kind of actor are you looking for? Like a bird, like a little bird. Anyway, eventually they offered me the part of Shikanday, and so I turned it down. I was hurt and all the rest of it. And then they kept on asking me and perhaps increasing the amount of money they were prepared to pay me. And so somewhat reluctantly, I agreed. Of course, as soon as I discovered that I was playing Chicken, I knew a lot about Mozart, obviously, because I'd been playing him.

13:29But also, even before I played him, I knew a lot about Mozart. Well, we will come back to theatre because it pertains to one of your failures. But your first failure, and what I love about this is that you have given me many failures, not just the three, but you've also given no elaboration. So I don't know where this is going to go, which is a delight for me. So your first failure is your rejection by Junior Criss Cross Quiz. What is Junior Criss Cross Quiz? Well, I think there must have been a Criss Cross Quiz, but this was the junior edition of it. And there was a question master called Jeremy Hawk, who was an actor, very trim and elegant.

14:08And it was really, I can't even remember what the device of the Criss Cross crosses were, but basically you had to answer questions. and I was I mean I am a sort of polymathic person in the sense that I love facts and knowledge of every kind and I absorb it and I bring it up at all the most inappropriate moments and so on but I thought but I'm a dead cert how old are you because I should think about 12 or something like that, 13. And so I went to Golden Square, which is where Granada, which was the company that put it on, had their offices. And I went up and you had to do a questionnaire or something to prove, I suppose, that you knew something.

14:57And to this day, this is what I believe happened. The paper said, Sir Winston Churchill is most famous as A, a politician, B, a writer, C, a painter. So I put A. And somehow I failed. I failed. And the humiliation of it is almost impossible to describe. I'd lost faith in myself completely as a polymath. I thought, I don't know, but how can it be that Winston Churchill wasn't as famous as a politician? I still don't know how that happened. But I felt so bad about it, so humiliated, that I was living in Streatham. And I walked all the way home from Golden Square, which is off Piccadilly, not in tears, actually, but in a spirit of profound self-disgust.

15:57I just thought, I don't know how I can show my face anymore at all to anybody. Well, of course, it wasn't transmitted. I had the same thing when I did that quiz that Alexander Armstrong does. Pointless. Pointless. Again, everybody said, oh my God, well, you'll just clean up on this. You know everything about everything. And so I went in and I did the first set very well. The second set was the films of Steven Spielberg. And it was named the characters, the central characters in these films. Now, it's a very peculiar thing to have to admit to you, but I've only ever seen two Steven Spielberg movies in my life.

16:42E.T.? And Jaws. Okay. And that's it. We could go into why I haven't seen the others, but it's probably fairly obvious. But I just didn't know. I did not know the answer to these questions. I hadn't seen these films. I didn't know the characters or the actors who played them. And once again, but this time publicly, on camera, and my partner in crime, Imogen Stubbs, who's a very clever person indeed, was shattered because she was dropped as well because she's my partner. I mean, I think she really was. I mean, I think she's recovered from it now. But the humiliation of being knocked out in the second round was just very difficult for both of us to have.

17:26My goodness. Okay, there's so much I want to say to you about this and ask you about it. One thing is, it's extraordinary how many times on this podcast a very illustrious person such as yourself, who has had myriad successes in many, many ways, will be haunted by something that happened in their childhood. Marina Abramovich had the same thing, sort of failure at a chess contest, when she was seven. And I do think that there's something so telling because that's when you're forming your sense of self. Your idea of who you are is hung on certain things. And the first time that's challenged, it's very upsetting.

18:05I would like to know more about 12-year-old Simon and what he was like, other than believing he was a polymath. Yeah. Was he happy? At 12, I think, yes, I was fairly happy. I was very gabby. I mean, I was a very, very talkative child. It's a curious situation because my father decamped when I was 18 months old. And although we had a completely bizarre reunion in Africa. When you were nine. When I was nine. And then that was a disaster. And so then I really hardly ever saw my father again. So I didn't have, I wasn't given much confidence from him. I mean, he was utterly unreliable. You know, he never sent me presents at birthdays or anything like that, and then wrote a letter saying, did you get the check I sent you?

18:55Or he'd never sent you and all that kind of thing. So basically, my point is that I was surrounded by women, utterly and entirely. Because as if by some terrible curse, almost every man in my family, both my grandfathers had died. My mother's brother had died in the war. My father's two brothers lived in, one of them in Nassau in the Bahamas, the other in Australia. There was really almost no man at all around. And I think, well, I pretty well know that it's a curious situation for women to have a single male who's about to become pubescent. And it was a thing of the time. I mean, this is the 50s we're talking about.

19:47It was 50s and then early 60s. It was very common for people to be rude about your physical appearance. That's fallen off a lot since. My mother was always telling me what an ugly bastard I was. Not in an unkind way, if you see what I mean. But she just said, you know, well-known, you are not a good-looking person. You're not good-looking. and I really didn't feel attractive at all at that time. It took a long time actually, I'm not sure I've entirely overcome it even, a long time to really feel myself to be physically attractive and then later desirable. That took a lot of sort of working on myself to sort of sort out.

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21:53Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Now, you did go to university, fascinatingly, in Belfast. I went to school opposite Queen's University, Methodist College. No, Methodist? Yes. My God. I know. I know where you live. Right? Fantastic. But you didn't complete your degree, is that right? And then you went to drama college? Yeah, what happened was that I wanted to go to Trinity College, Dublin, because of Oscar Wilde and all of that. The British government had finally decided that Ireland was indeed an independent country and they wouldn't give you grants to go to university.

22:36And there was no way I could go to university without a grant. And so I said, oh, I'll go to Belfast, Queen's Belfast. It'll be much the same, which it wasn't and isn't, but wonderful in its own way. I love it. It was a great and wonderful, wonderful place. But I had discovered acting then, because I'd already been working at the National Theatre in the box office under Laurence Olivier. and for the first time in my life had thought, oh, well, I saw the acts rehearsing. I thought, this is wonderful. This is, you know, you see Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith and John Gielgud rehearsing and I stood at the back of the stall secretly, you know, to see them.

23:20And I thought, but this is a wonderful job. These people are not, as I expected them to be, wearing dressing gowns and smoking cigarettes out of holders and making witty epigrammatic remarks. Indeed, they were just saying, I don't understand this scene. How do I make it work? Am I on the wrong track with the character? I thought, this is fantastic. This is problem solving. And what a wonderful way to earn a living. And then I thought, well, I'll try and see if I can become an actor. Yeah. Problem solving. What an apt way of putting it. So you became an actor of great note, as we've heard. And then you also took on directing, which must be the apex of the problem solving pyramid in many ways.

24:00And your second failure is your RSC production of Les Enfants du Paradis. Why did you choose this as a failure? It was a massive critical flop. it was absolutely the most savage reviews that i've ever had in my life what was so awful about it was that adrian noble was running the royal shakespeare company and we talked for some time about my directing something for the rsc i suggested various plays shaw and other people that i was interested in and then i said and then i mean i think one could make a really wonderful about Les Enfants du Paradis. And he said, what a wonderful idea. Fantastic. Let's go for it.

24:44So I translated it. I spent months translating it. It's a wonderful text by Jacques Prévert. And wonderful cast with Helen McCrory, Rupert Graves as Baptiste. A wonderful, wonderful cast. Just couldn't have asked for a better cast. And we had the most wonderful time rehearsing this play. And so then we headed to the theater. And on the way to the theater, I bumped into John Mortimer, the great John Mortimer, Rumpole of the Bailey, etc. And John said, well, what are you doing, Simon? And I said, well, I'm doing Les Enfants du Paradis for the RSC. He said, oh, what a wonderful idea. I hope you haven't got a revolve in it, have you?

25:27And I said, yes, we've got the biggest revolve that's ever been built in the British theater. And all the technology is just extraordinary. And I, oh, yeah, I've just done a Christmas carol with a revolver. It never, ever worked, you know. It's a terrible idea to use a revolver. I said, thanks, John. I went into the theater, to the Barbican theater, to see the sort of thing that truly does make a director want to just slash his wrists is a large hole in the middle of the Barbican stage and 12 men peering into it and going, I don't know. I don't know why it doesn't work. It doesn't make any sense.

26:12So there was a problem from the very beginning with this revolve. And the revolve, sorry, forgive my... Revolving stage. It's just a revolving stage, okay. Yeah, so with a big structure on a turntable, basically. Which meant, because there are many, many, many, many scenes that could change terribly, terribly quickly, and big crowd scenes. There was a huge cast. I think the biggest cast the RSC probably has ever had, certainly since, about 30 people or something like that. The lights were in the structure on the revolving stage. So we started the technical rehearsal, and the revolve kept sticking, and we couldn't move forward from it.

26:57And we were desperately trying to... In the rehearsal room, the stage manager just made it whiz around effortlessly, and it was wonderful. The way you can change a scene on a structure like that is fantastic. And then came the first preview, and after four minutes, it stopped dead, and nothing could induce it to move. So we had to cancel the show. And this happened four times in a row. I mean, I had to make this nightly announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most sophisticated revolve which has ever been seen in the British theatre, and it isn't working. Anyway, we managed finally to get a couple of previews where it did work, but it was still unsteady, and everybody was somewhat unsteady, and the first night was not what it should have been.

27:49The good news is that once the revolve was really working properly, they discovered, by the way, that the reason it wasn't working was because somebody had painted the stage, and the stage got stuck in the wheels. Well, they had the most sophisticated electronic equipment, the keyboards and all of this, in order to stage the pressure on this straight revolve at any single point. But the one thing nobody thought to do was to look at the wheels. The press was just kind of hostile in a really personal way, to me mostly, I must say. and they kept on saying how much this production had cost. And after a week or so, there were questions asked in the House of Commons about the cost of this production and this scandal of the RSC having thrown away taxpayers' money and all this kind of thing.

28:46But also, I'd had a little glimmer of something when a very nice chap, whom I knew reasonably well, journalist, had been sent to me for The Guardian to interview me before the first night. And his questions were extraordinarily aggressive. And I said, what's going on? What's the matter? Why are you being so hostile? He said, it's The Guardian. They said to me, don't let him get away with it. People pretended that it was a scandal to adapt this beautiful film that many people love so much. But I don't know what it was. It's not unknown in the theatre, and I suppose in other media, like movies and so on, for critics to sort of gang up on somebody.

29:34They sort of sense, they get a sniff in the air that something's maybe not quite right about this production. Well, let's go for it. Is it difficult not to take those things personally? Of course. Especially since I had left... The first night, as I said, went pretty well. And there were cheers and so on, which was very nice. And then the next day, I was leaving the country to promote the first volume of a biography of Orson Welles that I had written. And I was going to America to promote it. And suddenly I got all these messages and calls saying, it's a disaster. I couldn't come back. I was stuck into this.