Simon Callow: 'I always told people that I was gay wherever I went'
Simon Callow in Anything Goes. Picture: Marc Brenner
He’s one of film and theatre’s most-loved actors. Now Simon Callow has revealed how his love of drama was honed while in college in Ireland where his lecturers included a legendary poet. The actor first attended Queen’s University in Belfast, having failed to get a grant to attend Trinity in Dublin like some of his peers.
“They must have been the last generation to be able to get a grant. But what I love is I blithely thought: ‘Oh, well, in that case, I'll go to Belfast, it will be much the same’. It certainly wasn't in 1968, my goodness me. But I love it dearly and go back very often actually, and I've worked in Northern Irish Theatre.”
Incredibly, one of his lecturers in those early days was a young writer by the name of Seamus Heaney who would go on to become one of the world’s best-loved poets. “Well he wasn't a very good lecturer by his own admission, to be honest,” the actor smiles affectionately. “I mean, what he had to say was wonderful, but he didn't have the power of command, certainly not over a group of boys sending paper airplanes at him across the floor.
“He was very amiable about it which was very sweet. Actually, if you did listen to what he had to say it was absolutely inspired.
“Years later I was at the Cheltenham Literary Festival and we got talking. We stayed in touch after that. I can't pretend I was very close to him or anything like that, but I thank my lucky stars that I got to know him as much as I did because being in his company was immediately to be revitalised.”
From cutting his theatre teeth in London’s Old Vic in the 1960s, Callow has gone on to be a popular star, playing everyone from Mozart to Charles Dickens on stage. On-screen he’s delivered a diverse body of work that includes Shakespeare in Love, A Room With a View and, more recently, TV’s The Witcher and Hawkeye. But it was as Gareth, the vivacious gay man madly in love with Matthew (John Hannah) in Four Weddings and a Funeral, that he stole moviegoers’ hearts.
It was no doubt a meaningful role for the actor, who was one of the first to come out as a gay man in his 1984 book, Being An Actor. Was it a difficult move?
“Remember that I was working in the theatre. So right from the beginning, even from when I worked in the Old Vic in 1967, it was the first time really that I encountered gay people and I was astounded that it was perfectly normal and ordinary and that there were all kinds of different gay people, perfectly open about being gay.
“However, they weren't able to be open about it outside the theatre itself. Outside the workplace they couldn't be so candid and I always thought that was terrible, and I always told people that I was gay wherever I went. When I was at Queen's everybody knew. I pursued my career, I went to drama school, some of my friends were gay. It wasn't a big deal at all.”
In the years before his book was released, he was warned by concerned peers that his sexuality could damage his career. “It's ridiculous,” he says of his feelings at the time: “I can't understand why I can't just be open about this. And finally, I wrote the book, it came out in 1984. It didn't cause me any trouble, as far as I know. But it did provoke an immense reaction, a huge relief from a lot of gay actors who said: ‘Perhaps it will be okay if we come out. Simon wasn't struck dead by lightning as a result’.”
Now aged 73, he has found it heartening that gay marriage has been legislated for in many countries in recent years, and he wed his partner Sebastian Fox in 2016.
“When it did finally look like it was going through, passed into the statute books, that's when I said to Sebastian Fox, if it does come about and it seems that it will, might you consider marrying me? We were on a boat, and he just said yes. It was settled!”
Next week he returns to the Irish stage in the vibrant musical Anything Goes, and he’s looking forward to bringing the show to Irish fans. The show features many of the songs of Cole Porter.
“I particularly love All Through the Night and Easy to Love. The thing for me at my age, 73, it invokes my childhood. This is the music that I listened to when I was a boy, because my family used to listen to this music.
“It just has a particular tenderness about it, there's a particular sweetness and simplicity. He could write wonderfully simple lyrics and wonderfully accessible tunes. I think that is one of the things that makes the audience so happy are these irresistible tunes, and such a rhythmic kind of energy.
“The big dance numbers like Blow Gabriel Blow which goes on for maybe 12 minutes, it starts at a great level of energy, and then it does go higher and higher and our ensemble of dancers is absolutely brilliant."
- Anything Goes is at Dublin’s Bord Gais Energy Theatre from May 18-28
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