Simon Callow: ‘Scottish reeling almost killed me.’

Simon Callow is a critically acclaimed actor, director, author and star of classic movies such as Room with a View, Shakespeare in Love and Howards End. However, it’s his part as Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral that many took to their hearts. Callow’s failures include a childhood rejection that still haunts him, a play he directed which was savaged by the critics, painting and how he was ‘very annoyed’ not to get the movie part of Amadeus despite having played it on stage. ✨ IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 01:35 Childhood Aspirations and Influences 02:12 Coming Out and Its Impact 02:46 Reflections on Being Openly Gay in the Industry 06:34 Iconic Role in Four Weddings and a Funeral 08:16 Challenges and Fun of Filming 09:11 Amadeus: Stage to Screen Transition 12:31 Failures and Rejections 17:26 Personal Life and Family Background 20:12 University Days and Discovering Acting 22:10 Directing Challenges at the RSC 31:19 Artistic Pursuits and Painting 35:31 Modern Acting and Final Thoughts Do you have something to share of your own? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Studio and Mix Engineer: Matias Torres Sole and Gulliver Tickell Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:35Elizabeth Day?

  Welcome 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 callouts 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 vivant in the 1994 hit movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.

• 2:18Elizabeth Day?

  But 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 Shaffer'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 Etoile, a new Amazon drama from the creators of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which follows the dancers and staff of two world-renowned ballet companies.

• 2:59Elizabeth Day?

  As 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 Stretton, South London, he simply didn't know anyone in any other kind of profession. He wrote a fan letter to Sir Laurence Olivier, then artistic director of the National Theatre, who suggested Callow join the box office staff. While watching the actors' rehearse, he realised that was his path.

• 3:44Elizabeth Day?

  In the years that followed, he has 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.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 4:25Elizabeth Day?

  Do you still feel that?

• 4:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:41Elizabeth Day?

  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.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they they were very odd about it. One woman said to me, I hear, 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. They don't want to be told. It's it's there's no there's no drama in that. So I sort of, as it were, got away with it because the 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,

• 5:34Speaker 03

  much more controversial because I attacked directors. And that was that then people started to say, 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, which I by which I meant that directors have acquired almost all the power in the theatre. Power 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.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  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, so the creative process.

• 6:34Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Well, I think that I think it has changed somewhat, but 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 much famously came out and has done so enormously much, probably more than almost anybody else, to normalise 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 in Stratford and all the rest of it. And I can absolutely understand that it might have been a puzzle

• 7:29Speaker 03

  for him. But but later, he came up because he was so enraged by section 28, or whatever, 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. B, I do think, on the whole, it's much easier for actors to come out and continue to act. There are a number of very, very well-known actors now who are gay, openly gay. But it still remains much more difficult on film.

• 8:06Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. That was the remarkable daring and originality of Richard Curtis in his screenplay, that, remember, this was a time AIDS was was still, you know, rampant at the time of making the film. And there had been the film Philadelphia, which is a very mournful and sentimental film about 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 they spread diseases and all the rest of it.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  And what was absolutely wonderful about the character Gareth, who was just a wonderful character generally, was A, he was in a beautiful relationship with Matthew, the his wonderful boyfriend, and that he didn't die of AIDS, he died of Scottish dancing. I've always said that basically the film is a government health warning against the perils of Scotland. I nearly died doing it, I can tell you.

• 9:45Elizabeth Day?

  What was it like filming for weddings? Was it as fun as it seems as a viewer?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Nearly as much, nearly as much. I mean, films are quite hard work and 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. So 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 because we were stuck on the set.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:43Elizabeth Day?

  Final question before we get on to your failures. Amadeus is one of my top five favorite movies of all time, so 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 realized that you had originated that role on stage. You were playing Amadeus and then in the movie he was played by Tom Hulse. Was that annoying?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  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's 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. Every night, as we looked out at the audience, Paul Schofield and Philistine Kendall and I and the others in the company, we would see Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  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 Milos also, rather interestingly, said that he was going to cast unknowns in the two central parts. Eventually, I did get a call. The agent got a call saying Milos would like to meet me. And I thought, well, that's nice. He'd like to meet me, but I have 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. So anyway, I went along to the Cornet Hotel, where he was in a very civilized way,

• 12:33Speaker 03

  doing the casting, and the delightful and last much lamented Richard Griffiths was there. And I knew Richard, and Richard introduced me to me. Milos strode into the room with a big cigar in his mouth, exactly what you expect from Hollywood director. And Richard said, this is Simon Callow. He said, oh, you are Simon Callow. I wanted to meet you come in here. And he sat me down. He said, I got to tell you something. You, I've seen many, many months, and you are the best by far. You're both asshole and genius.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  You are funny and sad. You are brilliantly witty and sharp and incredible. It was incredible performance. It's just unbelievable. I wonder, what could you play in our film?

• 13:29Speaker 03

  I have no idea, Mr Foreman, what kind of actor you're looking like, like a bird, like a little bird. Anyway, eventually they offered me the part of chicken, and so of course I turned it down. I was hurt and not all the rest of it. And then they kept on, you know, 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, but also, but even before I played him, I knew a lot about Mozart.

• 14:00Elizabeth Day?

  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?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  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 Hawke, who was an actor and very trim and elegant. And it was really, I can't even remember what the what the device of the Criss Cross Criss 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 the 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.

• 15:04Elizabeth Day?

  How old are you at this stage?

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Uh, I should think about 12, something like about 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 questionnaire or something to prove, I suppose, that you knew something. And 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.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  And somehow I failed, I failed. And I was, 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, I still don't know how that happened. But I was so, I felt so bad about it, so humiliated. But 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.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  I 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.

• 16:39Elizabeth Day?

  Pointless.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  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. And the second set was the films of Steven Spielberg. And it does name 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.

• 17:09Elizabeth Day?

  E T?

• 17:10Speaker 03

  And yours.

• 17:10Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  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 handle.

• 17:53Elizabeth Day?

  My 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 Abramovic 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.

• 18:33Elizabeth Day?

  I would like to know more about 12-year-old Simon and what he was like, other than believing he was a polymath.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:41Elizabeth Day?

  Was he happy?

• 18:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:59Elizabeth Day?

  When you were nine?

• 19:00Speaker 03

  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'd never sent me presents at birthdays or anything like that, and then wrote a letter saying, "Did you get the cheque I sent you?" or whatever, 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,

• 19:43Speaker 03

  my father's two brothers lived, one of them in Nassau, in the Bahamas, the other in Australia. There was really almost no man at all around.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  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. It 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's 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.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  And I really didn't feel attractive at all at that time. It took a long time, actually. I'm not sure I 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.

• 21:08Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 21:53Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail.

• 22:06Elizabeth Day?

  Now, you did go to university, fascinatingly, in Belfast.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:09Elizabeth Day?

  I went to school opposite Queen's University, Methodist College.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  No, Methodist?

• 22:14Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, yes.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  My god.

• 22:15Elizabeth Day?

  I know.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  How about that?

• 22:16Elizabeth Day?

  I know where you live.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Right, fantastic.

• 22:20Elizabeth Day?

  But you, you didn't complete your degree, is that right? And then you went to drama college.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  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. And 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. Because it was a great and wonderful, wonderful place. But I had discovered acting then because I'd already been to the, working at the National Theatre in the box office under Laurence Olivier.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  And for the first time in my life had thought, oh, well, I saw the actors rehearsing. I thought, this is wonderful. This is, you know, you see Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith and John Gilgood rehearsing. And, and, and I stood at the back of the store secretly, you know, to see them. And 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, am I on the wrong track with the cat? I thought, this is fantastic. This is problem solving. And it's a wonder, what a wonderful way to earn a living. And then I thought, well, I, I should try and see if I can become an actor.

• 23:49Elizabeth Day?

  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. And your second failure is your RSE production of Les Enfants du Paradis.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:08Elizabeth Day?

  Why did you choose this as a failure?

• 24:10Speaker 03

  It was a massive critical flop.

• 24:14Elizabeth Day?

  No, I'm sorry.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  It was absolutely the most savage review that I've ever had in my life. What was so awful about it was that

• 24:26Speaker 03

  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 play about Les Enfants du Paradis. And he said, what a wonderful idea. Fantastic. Let's go for it. So I translated, 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.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  And so then we headed to the theatre and on the way to the theatre, I bumped into John Mortimer, the great John Mortimer, Rumpole of the Bailey, et cetera. And John said, what are you doing, Simon? And I said, well, I'm doing Les Enfants du Paradis for the RSC. He said, oh, a wonderful idea. I hope you haven't got a revolve in it, have you? And I said, yes, we've got the biggest revolve that's ever been built in the British theatre and all the technology is just extraordinary. Oh, okay. I've just done a Christmas carol with a revolve. It never, ever worked, you know. It's a terrible idea, this revolve. I said, thanks, John.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  I went into the theatre, to the Barbican Theatre, 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 what, I don't know why it doesn't work. It doesn't make any sense. So there was a problem from the very beginning with this revolve.

• 26:20Elizabeth Day?

  And the revolve, sorry.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Revolving stage.

• 26:23Elizabeth Day?

  It's just a revolving stage, okay.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so with a big, with a big structure on a turntable.

• 26:27Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Basically, which meant, because there are many, many, many, many scenes, many could change, changes terribly, terribly quickly and big crowd scenes. It 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.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  So we started the technical rehearsal and the revolve kept sticking and we couldn't move forward from it and and and we were desperately trying to in the rehearsal room, the stage manager just made it whiz round 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. So ladies and gentlemen, this is the most sophisticated

• 27:33Speaker 03

  revolve which has ever been seen in British theatre and it isn't working. Anyway, we managed finally to get a couple of previews where it did work and but it was still unsteady and everybody was somewhat unsteady and and the first night was not what it should have been. The good news is that 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 great revolve at any single point. But the one thing nobody thought to do was to

• 28:18Speaker 03

  look at the wheels. The press was just kind of hostile in a in a really personal way to me mostly, I must say. And they kept 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. But 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.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  And these questions were extraordinarily aggressive. And I said, um, 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.

• 29:26Elizabeth Day?

  How strange.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  It happens, it's not unknown in the theatre. And I suppose another media like movies and so on, for critics to sort of gang up on somebody, they sort of sense, they get a sniff in the air that something's maybe not quite right about this production. Well, let's, let's go for it.

• 29:44Elizabeth Day?

  Is it difficult not to take those things personally?

• 29:47Speaker 03

  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 going, I was leaving the country to promote first volume of a biography of Orson Welles that I, I, 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. And when I came back to see the actors, they were a bit, um, well, a bit sort of cross with me for going away. But I, I, as far as I knew, it was by the first night working perfectly with it.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  All in all, it seemed a, a, at every level to be a big failure and all my fault somehow. I don't believe it was all my fault, as I've said, I've explained my position. Maybe it was over ambitious. I don't know. I don't think so. It was, the, the other thing was very maddening is I, I would constantly get letters from the public saying, this is what the R S C is all about. This is what we want to see. We want to see great, you know, epic scenes of people on stage and, you know, of, of big crowds on stage, life, you know, a, a representation of life and so on.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  And I, I, I think they did get that. And I do think it was, I, I don't, you know, if I thought it was disaster, and I have done, I have been personally responsible for a couple of disasters as a director, but this was not one of them.

• 31:27Elizabeth Day?

  What do you think it ended up teaching you, if anything?

• 31:33Speaker 03

  It sort of made me doubt my judgment. Not actually what I'd done with it, but the very idea itself. I adore the French language. I adore France. I adore French literature and culture. I wanted to turn the RSC for that one production into a sort of crack ensemble of actors who were acting in the French tradition. It was a great big experiment in a way, what I was doing. But obviously, many people thought it was just a failure, but I don't.

• 32:13Speaker 04

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• 33:12Elizabeth Day?

  Interesting that the first failure you chose made you doubt your identity as a polymath. The second failure made you doubt your judgment. And your third failure is also about being a polymath because it's you throwing in the towel as a painter. When did you have time to paint?

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Well, this is another, but this is a childhood. It isn't recent. I'm a painting, uh, unlike Winston Churchill.

• 33:41Elizabeth Day?

  Well, exactly, famed, the famed painter.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  I come from a, a, a line of painters on both sides of my family. My great, great grandfather Floyce came to England in the eighteen fifties or something to be the art teacher at Marlborough College. And there's still an arch in Marlborough College, uh, which is called Floyce's Arch, which is where people went to, um, make up their differences, you know. Uh, his children, that's to say, my great grandfather and his two brothers were all painters. One of them had a studio in Paris. My great grandfather was a stained glass artist.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  And the third brother was more of a sort of scientific explorer, but he also was a, a very distinguished painter. And I've got examples of, of their work. They were very academically skillful. They weren't great creative artists by any means. My, uh, uncle Tony, who died in the war, saving someone else's life, was the only person to be, to get an education. As I said, he went to Slade School and was apparently a very skillful draftsman and all the rest of it. So I always felt there's all this painting. And then on the Callow side, William Callow was a very, very distinguished watercolorist and his bust is up there on the, uh, Watercolor Society.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  He taught the children of the French Empress Eugenie's children to, to draw and paint and so on. And I always felt I should be able to do this. And I have a sort of, um, I can do sort of cartoon things and, and reasonable sketches of people's faces, credible sketches and so on. And I worked quite hard at draftsmanship. I was trying to build this up. I didn't evince any great talent, but enough that at school, annual school dance, I painted huge murals, which sort of dominated the room. But my best friend, Eamonn McDonagh.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Was brilliant.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  He really was brilliant. He was a fantastic draftsman. Uh, he had a wonderful sense of colour and colour combinations and things like this. I fought against it so long. I fought against what was staring me in the face, which was this man has talent. And I had none and I carried on struggling. I'd even horribly, I was thinking of it cheated. You could buy these things, which were wooden structures like this, where you put a pencil in the thing like that. And you could trace something already existing, you know, a portrait or something like that. And it would sort of do a reasonable fact to me. But I then was embarrassed by that and confessed to everybody what I'd done.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  But I really, I feel I have it deeply in me to do something in the visual arts. But I've never had the time, actually, to tell you the truth, the time to go to classes or anything like that. And I know that I should. I should go to even just drawing classes, just for the, I know that it would be deeply satisfying. And, and there's all my family sort of looming over my shoulders.

• 37:08Elizabeth Day?

  You must, maybe it's the next phase of your life.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, just bring it on.

• 37:12Elizabeth Day?

  What do you think of acting now? Because you are, as well as being an actor yourself, a sort of, uh, uh, an observer of, and a writer of all of the different phases and the histories. What, what phase do you think modern acting is in?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Uh, there are many wonderful actors around. There always will be, you know, but as if you were asking about in general, the general drift of acting at the moment is less, I sense a, a, a kind of retreat from the idea of giving great performances. I think there's a sort of ironing out, it's this, this kind of leveling up thing. But a great acting, like great anything, like great piano playing or, or great dancing, it is inevitably egregious. It's exceptional.

• 38:05Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  It's a, an aspiration towards the exceptional. And I've always said that.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  One of the principal objectives of acting, I might even say one of the principal responsibilities of acting, is that it should be memorable. When you've left the theatre, your mind should be churning, your imagination to be on fire with what you've seen and heard, and by the depths of human experience that have been revealed. I don't think people use this particular phrase, but I think there's a sort of general feeling that it's rather bourgeois, that idea, that it's kind of old fashioned and that's not what we want anymore from actors. Well, it's what I want from actors.

• 38:56Elizabeth Day?

  Wow, just hearing you talk about acting is like being in the presence of a fantastic performance. Honestly, I've loved it. Final question before we move on to Fading with Friends, where the focus is no longer on you, you'll be relieved to hear, which is, what was the last great thing you saw on television, acting wise?

• 39:18Speaker 03

  I'm very taken with Gary Oldman, whom I've always loved as an actor in Slow Horses. I'll just stick with that for the time being, because that is a wonderful performance. And Gary has been an actor who's pressed himself, really pushed the possibilities of acting. I love that idea, that acting is, you know, the art of acting is a very ancient one, and it's one which is, there's really no limit to what you can achieve with profound imagination. I wrote a book about the truly, truly great actor who, I would use this word very sparingly

• 39:56Speaker 03

  of acting, but any acting, but Charles Lawton, a great, great actor who died in 1961, I think, was a maker of indelible images as an actor. You cannot forget a performance of Charles Lawton's in its complexity, its depth, and the gesture of it, the shape of it.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  This is...

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Acting as a creative art and Marlon Brando, of course, one would say exactly the same thing of and you know, Lawrence Olivier, John Gilchrist, they're all, they pushed the boat out as far as they could.

• 40:39Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I'm going to add Simon Callow to that list. It's been a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for what you've given us and you are, I think, my favourite polymath. So thank you, thank you so much for coming on How to Fail.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  It's a great pleasure.

• 40:57Elizabeth Day?

  We heartily recommend you follow us to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do tell all of your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.