Masters of the Bench

Simon Callow was born in South London in 1949. He  lived in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) for three years; when he returned to England he became a pupil at the London Oratory Grammar School, of which he eventually became Head Boy. In 1967, after leaving school he went to work in the Box Office of Sir Laurence Olivier’s Old Vic Theatre. In 1968 he went to Queen’s University in Belfast, but after nine months ran away to become an actor.  In the year before he went to train at the Drama Centre, he worked in box offices again, at the Mermaid Theatre and then at the Aldwych Theatre, home  of the RSC. He left the Drama Centre in 1973 to take his first job, playing the front end of a horse in Büchner’s Woyzeck at the Edinburgh Festival. He then played in repertory at Lincoln, and with the Young Lyceum and Traverse Theatre Companies in Edinburgh. His first West End appearance was in 1975 opposite Harry Secombe in The Plumber’s Progress;  later that year, he worked for  Gay Sweatshop, after which he then Joint Stock Theatre Company. After two years with them played Titus Andronicus at the Bristol Old Vic, Arturo Ui at the Half Moon Theatre and Eddie in Mary Barnes at the Royal Court, before joining the National Theatre to create the part of Mozart in Amadeus and perform all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

He has since worked at the Royal Court Theatre, in the West End, at the National Theatre, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon, at the Bush Theatre and the Southwark Playhouse. He has toured extensively, an activity about which he is passionate. In 1988, he played Faust in both parts of Goethe’s play at the Lyric Hammersmith; in 1997, he acted in Micheál Mac Liammóir’s The Importance of Being Oscar, following this in 2000 with The Mystery of Charles Dickens, which he played for four years in Britain, Ireland, America (New York and Chicago) and Australia (Sydney and Melbourne); in 2005 he acted in The Holy Terror by Simon Gray. He has appeared in The Woman in White and, for the RSC, Merry Wives: the Musical. In 2008, he played Captain Hook in Peter Pan in which he made his entrance singing Michael Jackson’s Bad. The following year, he played Pozzo in Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and the late Ronald Pickup, on tour and at the Theatre Royal Haymarket; he did not sing anything by Michael Jackson in it. In Christmas 2009, he played two little-known one-man plays by Charles Dickens, Mr Chops and Dr Marigold at the Riverside Studios, and in 2010 performed his one-man show about Shakespeare, The Man from Stratford,  across the British Isles and in Trieste; in 2011 and in 2012 he did highly successful seasons of Being Shakespeare, a revised version of The Man from Stratford,  in the West End.

At the Edinburgh Festival, he gave the English language première of Emmanuel Darley’s Tuesday at Tesco’s, which won a Fringe First Award and the Glasgow Herald’s Archangel. At Christmas in 2011 and 2012, he premièred his new one-man version of A Christmas Carol; in 2013 he gave the world premiere of Matthew Hurt’s one-man play The Man Jesus at the Lyric Theatre Belfast, in which he played the Virgin Mary and 11 other characters.  The same year he performed his own one-man play Inside Wagner’s  Head in the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House. After that he acted with Felicity Kendal in a tour of Billetdoux’s Chin-Chin. In 2015, he revived Tuesday at Tesco’s off-Broadway, and at Christmas 2016 reprised A Christmas Carol with great success at the Arts Theatre. In 2018, he performed Frank McGuiness’s new dramatization of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis in the West End and at the Edinburgh Festival, and revived A Christmas Carol at the Arts Theatre. In 2019, he played Sir Hugo Latymer in Noël Coward’s last play, A Song at Twilight, at the Theatre Royal Bath, with other people, which made a nice change.    

His films include Amadeus, A Room with A View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Thunderpants and The Phantom of the Opera, The Viceroy’s House, Mindhorn, and, most recently, Victoria and Abdul. His latest films, soon to be released, are The Blue Iguana, The Matchbox and a film version of his A Christmas Carol.  Television includes the 1980’s cult sitcom, A Chance in a  Million and, most recently, The Rebel, for UK Gold. He has directed over thirty plays, musicals and operas, including the original West End and Broadway productions of Shirley Valentine, the première of Single Spies at the National Theatre, Les Enfants du Paradis at the RSC, Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, Die Fledermaus for Scottish Opera, Jus’ Like That  at the Garrick and The Magic Flute at Holland Park Opera, with designs by Tom Phillips. In 2015, he directed the world premiere of Iain Bell’s opera of A Christmas Carol for the Houston Grand Opera; he also wrote the libretto. In 2017, he directed Christophe Hampton’s The Philanthropist at the Trafalgar Studio. He directed the film of The Ballad of the Sad Café, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Keith Carradine and Rod Steiger, in 1990.

He has also written sixteen books, including Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor, and Love is Where It Falls, as well as biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and  the first three volumes of a life of Orson Welles; Dickens’s Christmas has recently been reissued. His most recent books are  My Life in Pieces, which won the Sheridan Morley Theatre Biography Award, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, Being Wagner (2017). His most recent book is London’s Great Theatres, with  the photographer Derry Moore

He was appointed C.B.E in 1999 and is an honorary doctor of Queen’s University Belfast, Birmingham University, the Open University, and Kingston University, as well a Fellow of the University of the Arts London. In 2014 he was made a Freeman of the City of London.