About Simon Callow: Simon Phillip Hugh Callow is an English actor, musician, writer, and theatre director.
To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.
He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on which he was giving a speech, he once told Wilkie Collins, h...
He always describes his characters' voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They're grotesques really.
He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.
The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.
Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'
Many actors have protested about mobile phones going off in theatres, but the real menace now is people texting during a show. It may only disturb a few people around them, but for me, as an actor, when I spot them answering their emails, I am outrag...
Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.
When children have grieving parents it's also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.
You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.
Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.
I would say critically of myself that I am somebody without secrets. Sometimes acting depends on you having a secret. I don't think I've ever had that.
Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.
I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.
Very often my weekends are spent performing on Saturday, on stage in the afternoon and again in the evening.
I am never bored, never short of anything to do and I don't even ever feel lonely. I am quite gregarious and I get out and about a lot, but sometimes it is just wonderful to be on your own.
When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.
Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.
Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?
There is something essentially sanguine about me, which I am inclined to attribute to the fact that I was born by caesarean section. It must affect you.
