PAUL: Hello and welcome to Regrets,
I've Had A Few.

I'm Paul Hunter, Artistic Director of Told

by an Idiot, and this is a podcast where I
talk to friends and colleagues,

delving into what made them
the person they are today.

Hello and welcome.

My guest this month needs no
introduction, so here goes.

He has had an extraordinary career across

many different disciplines - actor,
director, writer, translator.

He has been around many key moments
in British theatre,

including creating the role of Mozart
in Amadeus at the National Theatre.

He also appeared in some of the most

successful British movies of the 1980s
and 90s, and his books on acting

and cinema, particularly his astonishing
work on Orson Welles, are unmatchable.

And he played the lead in one

of my favourite sitcoms. Welcome,
Simon Callow, who was, for a second,

trying to recall what I
was referring to there.

We will come to that later,
because it was wonderful thing.

I obviously have had the chance to work

with you, Simon, on two occasions,
both of which were on French projects.

Your adaptation,
brilliant adaptation of the masterpiece

that is the French film
Les Enfants du Paradis and the joy that it

was pre lockdown to feature in your
wonderful version

of La Cage aux Folles, the play,
not the musical.

We will touch on that later.

But I just wanted to ask quickly
about your love of all things French.

Did that come from your
father, who, was he...?

SIMON: Er no, well, in a way,
his mother was French.

She came from Léon.

She came to England when she was 18
and for the rest of her life,

up to the age of 88, she spoke
with an Inspector Clouseau accent.

She never acquired an English accent,
ever, though she was absolutely au fait

with Dickens,
Shakespeare and all the rest.

So she was very French,
a very French French woman,

obsessed with domestic cleanliness
and perfection at all levels.

Incredibly hard working, very sharp eyed.

I contrast her with my other grandmother,
who was of German origin,

but had had a Danish husband and was
somehow much, much more cosmopolitan than

- although she spoke with a perfectly
regular English accent,

but she seemed to embrace the whole idea
of being European much more than Totu.

And in fact, that was
my grandmother's nickname.

Her real name was
Jenny Isabet Lenor and her family name was

Harvey, because her
father had been Scottish.

So it's all kind of quite
interwoven and inter European.

My background, really,

my grandmother, the other one,
the one with the Danish husband,

used to describe it as 57 varieties,
like Heinz Salad Cream.

And I've always felt terrifically

connected to the continent of Europe and
every nation within it,

but particularly French,
because that's the language I speak.

Although, oddly enough,
I don't know France that well.

I know Italy so much better.

I even know Germany better,
but apart from Paris and Marseille

and Léon, that's sort of the extent
of my knowledge of the French landscape,

but my knowledge of French culture is,
well, wide.

I won't say deep.

I've always loved the language and it came
very naturally to me to translate it.

But the reason sorry,

I'm probably saying much more
than you probably wanted to know.

But I started translating from French
for a rather almost shameful reason,

which is that I'd come across a play
by the Odéon Theatre in Paris.

There's a street just beside it,

alongside it, where there's the most
wonderful theatre bookshop.

And I was scanning the shelves,

because in those days,
I suppose I was in my 30s, in those days,

it was still quite common for French
plays to be done in English translation.

It was a big part of our dramatic kind

of output and I wanted
something new and interesting.

And I saw that Milan Kundera
had written a play.

It's called Jacques et son maître.

In fact, he wrote a number of plays.

But I was so abjectly in love

with Kundera's work,
I had one immediate thought, which,

maybe I could translate this
and I'd get to meet him.

That was my absolute motive.

This play is a wonderful play,
inspired by Diderot, but it's

everything you would expect
from a play by Milan Kundera.

Just fantastic.

I've never been able to persuade
anybody to do it in England.

Not anybody at all.

They go, oh, it's so French.

It's so French because people talk about
life, art and philosophy and the meaning

of things, which is inimical
to the British public (laughs)

PAUL: We will return to that.

But I have to ask, did you
get to meet Milan Kundera?

SIMON: I did.

I had spent one of the most wonderful days
of my life

in Paris with him drinking huge quantities
of alcohol, nothing with Becherovka,

which he still loyally dran, it's a
Czechoslovakian national drink.

And I suppose it is one of the, there's

little things, aren't there in one's life
where you just think, well,

something truly miraculously
good has happened in my life.

And that was when he decided to write when
it was published by Faber,

he was invited to write a forward, but he
decided instead to write an after word.

And it started with the phrase,

"how is it possible that my play, that
has been translated

by an English actor and it turns out to be
the best, most faithful translation of any

of my work in any language?"
Put that on my tombstone.

That'll do.

PAUL: But sometimes when you say about a day or
an evening, I kind of know what you mean.

I remember once having dinner
with the film director, Terence Davis.

SIMON: Oh, yes.

PAUL: And we went to Kettners.

I was very nervous because for me,
his film Distant Voices, Still Lives is

one of the greatest
British films of all time.

I don't know if you met him or know him,

but I was a bit nervous because when I'd
read about him,

he comes across as potentially quite a - b
ut we had the most joyous evening and his

knowledge of cinema,
particularly kind of American cinema,

from the kind of mid 40s through
to the mid 60s, was astonishing.

I look, I never saw him again.
We never met again.

A project didn't emerge.

But I will always have that evening

in Kettners with
Terence Davis, as you will with Kundera.

SIMON: Yeah.
These are golden moments.

You have to ring fence them.

PAUL: Exactly, now,
I have to move on now,

like I do with all my
guests. Lets talk about your early

experiences of theatre,
whether that was in the family?

Did you see theatre or?

SIMON: Not so much although I do
remember the things that I saw.

We weren't particularly
a theatre going family.

All the theatre was at home.

It was a highly charged atmosphere,

very flamboyant and very full
of emotions of one sort or another.

They didn't feel the need to see
that reproduced on the stage.

But
I was taken,

there's some confusion in my mind as
to what exactly the first thing that I saw

was, because there are two
things vying for that honour.

Actually, three things vying

for that honour, and they sort of,
in a way, maybe point to a lot of what

happened in the rest of my life,
which which is

I was taken to a theatre in Croydon,
a theatre in the round,

to see a version of A Christmas Carol
performed by an ensemble of actors.

And Scrooge was played by an actor called
Lawrence Payne, and he was an RSC sort

of veteran, and he was
slumming it in Croydon.

But I think it was probably
a very good production.

But it scared the shit out of me.

And I thought I was seven or
something like that, maybe six.

I thought, I never want to see
anything by this Dickens again.

It's just scary stuff.

So I stayed off for quite a long while
from Dickens, but it's in my mind even

now, this very past production,
just a few chairs and so on.

Absolutely wonderful.

Second great memory is being taken

to the Scala Theatre, now long demolished,
which was the home of Peter Pan.

And this is the story that I remember

and that has subsequently been told,
which is it was a snowy day.

We were queuing outside the theatre.

I was just howling with with
tears and and and rage as you do when

you're six or seven
in those circumstances.

And then remember finally getting

into the foyer but still crying and crying
and crying and then sitting in this big

room with all this red velvet and big
curtain and so on and still crying

and crying and crying and then the curtain
rising on the Darlings family home

with the dog Nana adding
about and all tears ending.

And we were just utterly
and totally enraptured.

And that show, Peter Pan, has stayed with
me deep, deep in my heart ever since.

I still think it's one of the most curious
and profound and odd plays ever written.

But goodness me, when I saw,
years and years and years later,

saw the RSC production, the second cast
featured Mark Rylance as Peter Pan.

PAUL: Wow.
SIMON: Absolutely and totally definitive.

And nothing that Mark has done,

all the many wonderful things Mark's done
since, has eclipsed my memory of that.

He was that boy man,
reluctant to be a man boy.

It was just absolutely miraculous.

And then the third thing is
a pantomime at the Stretham Hill Theatre.

I was born in Stretham and my grandmother,

my mother's mother lived
in Stretham still.

And we were taken

to the Stretham Hill Theatre to see
what's the one with Baron Hardup in it.

I should be able to remember
this, shouldn't I.

It might be Mother Goose, I can't
remember it's one of, one of them.

And the villain Baron Hardup was played by
an actor called Jimmy Edwards.

PAUL: Oh, yes, Jimmy Edwards of course.

SIMON: With a huge handlebar moustache,
all of that.

And the little story attached to that is

that obviously they'd been
running it in for some time.

And the cast, as they tend to be in panto,
on the brink of corpsing at every minute,

and he somebody said something like,
"I have a message from the Queen".

And he takes it and he looks

at the message and he says,
"Silly old Queen".

And of course, that was a gag for his
fellow actors and they all broke up

because he was he'd made
the line up, obviously.

I evidently a monarchist
at the age of five stood up.

How dare you say something about our
Queen, pulled backed down by my family.

Shut up!
So that was sort of it, really.

And then I went to live
in Africa when I was nine.

For three years I lived in Zambia,

basically, but went
to school in South Africa.

And there I saw some a couple of play,
amateur productions of things like

The Merchant of Venice and so on,
and I found them very engaging.

But this is sort of the first proper plays

that I ever saw, as I said,
done by amateurs.

I have no idea now whether
they were any good or not.

And at my boarding school I did do a play,
which I have no memory,

except there's a photograph of me in it,
playing a 90 year old major general

with a huge moustache and the lantern,
and I'm shining it into the face

of the other actor and going
like this, I'm in it.

I'm definitely in character.

No doubt about that.

And then a famous last thing was in Lusaka

when I was back there at school
in Northern Rhodesia.

It was then not Zambia,
Miss Isabel, the beautiest Miss Isabel was

the sort of English teacher, but she
put on a little play from time to time.

And there was this play about a king who

was afflicted with spots in front of his
eyes, and everybody in the kingdom was

sent out to find a cure
for this and nobody could.

And doctors were kicked out
of the house and killed and whatever.

And then eventually a man comes up

into the palace and he says, Excuse me,
I'd like to speak to the King.

And they say, no, you can't.

The King is in great distress.

He said, no, I've got to say,
it's very important.

He says, I made a suit
for him just recently.

I made a shirt for him,
and I think the collar was too tight.

And they said, oh, for God's sake,
this is not important.

He said, but the side effect,
he might see spots in front of his eyes.

And that was the end.
That was the little story of the play.

So I said to Miss Isabel,
wouldn't it be marvellous if when he says,

you could see spots in front of you,
I just fell backwards?

And she said, no, I don't think
that would be good at all.

It would be very vulgar.

Simon, don't do that.
So I said, okay.

And then, of course,
when we showed it in front of the public,

I did exactly that,
got a round of applause.

So there probably started my suspicion
of the control of directors.

PAUL: Yes, I think you've touched on it.

What a wonderful eclectic mix
of influences, theatrically there.

I mean, it's fascinating
that and of course,

you then obviously went on to initially go
to university in Belfast, is that right?

SIMON: Yeah, that's right.

PAUL: But at what point during your studies
there was theatre becoming all consuming?

So when did you suddenly go,
I've got to do this?

SIMON: Oh, it already was, because by then,
when I left school, I had no idea on earth

what I wanted to do, but I just knew
I didn't want to go to university.

I was very bookish.

I was immersed in analysis and thinking
about literature and so on.

I just thought, no, because that would be
the only thing I could do at university.

I had no gifts,

mathematically or scientifically at all,
and so I just didn't know what to do.

So I went to work.

My very first job was in a bookshop,
slightly depressing experience

for somebody who loves books,
because it wasn't actually a book shop,

it was a library wholesalers,
which mostly involved me carrying around

huge piles of Mills and Boon
romances side to side of the shop.

And I did, on the other hand,

find in one of those Mills and Boon
romances, which I quickly read through

one of the greatest lines in the whole
of English literature, I believe,

which is said at the very end,
the last paragraph of this book.

"And so Sandy and Evangeline took each

other by the hand and walked off
into the horizon to human hovercraft".

This is surely one of the greatest
phrases ever written.

Anyway, so I was going to the theatre all

the time, completely theatre struck,
obsessed by it, read about it, massively.

Read all of Stanislavski
and all the critics.

And I read George Bernard Shaw's
plays from beginning to end.

The collected plays
and the collective prefaces.

I read all of Ibsen, all of Strindberg,

for some reason, partly because there was
no school drama at my school,

I had no idea that it might be
that I wanted to be an actor.

But anyway, one day I went to the theatre

all the time and I was at the matinee
at the National Theatre of the Old Vic

in the days when
Lawrence Olivier was running it.

And I said to myself,

there's something completely
wonderful about this organisation.

What it is, is that everybody who works

for it seems to believe in what's
going on, on the stage.

It's not just that the actors are

wonderful and the productions are
wonderful, but everybody in the box office

seemed to feel strongly that it was
an important organisation that they were

serving, even the people in the coffee bar
and the people in the bookshop and so on.

So I sat down and I wrote, rather typed,

three closely typed schoolscap pages
addressed to Lawrence Olivier,

explaining to him what a wonderful
theatre he was running.

And he wrote back by return of post

and said, well, if you like it so much,
why don't you come and work here?

There's a job in the box office.

So I got the job in the box office

of the National Theatre at the Old Vic in
it's palmy, palmy days.

Maggie Smith and Ralph Richardson
and John Gielgud and all of those.

And that's when I first came
into contact with the actual theatre.

And it turned out to be a completely
different place to what I'd imagined.

And Olivier was terrifically strong

on creating a company feeling
throughout the theatre,

hence the enthusiasm of everybody
who was working in front of house.

He sort of knew everybody's name and he

pottered around, being charming to people
just to make them all feel part of it.

And he'd very brilliantly

determined that the best way to bind
the company together is in food.

And so he'd knocked down two storerooms

in the basement of the Old Vic
and installed a kitchen and hired a really

excellent chef and charged
rock bottom prices.

And so everybody went there,
the whole of the theatre,

all the elements of the theatre,
the stage hands, the electricians,

the cleaners, the actors, the directors,
the designers, everybody.

So you had a terrific
sense of the community.

PAUL: It's funny you say that in a sense,

but it makes me think of something much
more European,

the kind of thing that would have been
at the Berliner Ensemble or something.

SIMON: Totally.
Absolutely.

PAUL: Well, I have to ask you, because it's an
amazing thing that you wrote this letter.

Did you think you would
get a reply from him?

Did you expect a reply?

SIMON:I shouldn't think so, no.

Although I had some success with writing

to the Great because at one point I wrote
a letter to the Queen,

not much before this letter to Lawrence O
livier because my great grandfather,

who was a stained glass window artist,
wrote monographs of the saints.

And when George V was crowned,

he wrote and dedicated to the King
a little monograph about St.

George and sent it to Buckingham Palace,
which certainly in those days,

but I think still now, basically, they
never accept gifts, they send them back.

But for some reason King George IV

accepted this gift and my grandmother was
haunted by the fact she hadn't got a copy

of it and so she wasn't able
to read it or judge his work.

And so I wrote to Buckingham Palace

explaining this story and saying, would
it be possible to have a photocopy of it?

But I addressed it to the Queen,
Your Majesty.

And again, one might as well have thrown
a letter in a bottle on the waters.

I mean, I had no real idea whether I'd

hear from her at all and some time passed,
but then about ten weeks after I sent

the letter, there was a knock at the door
from a completely gobsmacked postman

with a letter which said, on Her Majesty's
personal service, no stamp.

He regarded me with awe and respect.

And they said yes sir,

it was the librarian who said, her
Majesty has passed your letter on to me.

And she wished me to say how
fascinated she was by it.

And yes, certainly we'll
send you a photocopy.

PAUL: Obviously,

your passion for theatre continued
and then it became real in a sense.

And I was looking back up
on some of your early acting.

And when you talk about Olivier as part,

obviously loving the notion of a company
in a broader sense,

when I was reading some of your early
experiences and actually when I worked

with you later on at the RSC you directed
me, you always had placed a huge

importance on what it meant to be
a company and part of the company.

Did that feel like that to you when you

were working, say,
with Gay Sweatshop and Joint Stock?

That kind of.

SIMON: Gay Sweatshop wasn't exactly a company
because it was just a whole series

of lunchtime plays and they had their
own separate casts and not much overlap.

Joint Stock was indeed a company and had
been formed precisely to be a company.

And it was a cooperative.

I don't know whether technically, legally,

it was a cooperative,
but it certainly was - that was the idea.

And

this, I think,
was the first year of a whole year

of company work and it was run
by two very powerful directors.

One Bill Gaskill, now dead.

And Max Stafford-Clark, now still alive.

And I was terrifically keen
on this idea of a company.

I really have had this idea.

I don't know quite where I got it from,

but I've had this I suppose you're right,
it was from the old Vic.

It was from the sense of this,

as Dickens liked to put it,
it's a human pyramid; the theatre.

So is society, for that matter.

But the theatre very, very specifically,
and any weakness anywhere,

any lack of commitment anywhere,
will affect everything else.

As we all know, if somebody

doesn't play the first scene very well,
then whoever else comes on stage after has

got to build up extra kind
of focus in order to make it work.

And if it does go very well,

then the moment you come on stage,
you're riding a wave.

So I felt that very strongly and was a bit
inspired, because this was

'76 or something like that,
I joined maybe '77, I joined Stock,

and they were still very flush
with the ideas contained in the play.

And before that, the sociological study
fanshen, which was about democracy,

absolute democracy, and total candour

and openness and integrated group living.

And so that was the idea.

The reality of it was that two very

powerful directors were running
it and in the end what they wanted,

happened, and that the company thing,
and therefore the company never really did

quite take responsibility in the way
that we all should have been doing.

And it was, for me,
quite a disappointment in that regard.

PAUL: That's interesting.
That is interesting.

SIMON: I've never actually belonged
to a company except at The National.

When we were at The National

now, you said, it's funny to even think
that all these theatres, the RSC

and of course, all the repertory theatres,
had standing companies.

When I started to be an actor,
the great dream was to join a repertory

theatre and stay there for three years
and learn and learn and master your art

and all the rest of it,
but nonexistent now.

PAUL: It's interesting, because when you talk
about The National because I wanted

to come to something I mentioned
in the introduction, of course,

your appearing,
performance work on Amadeus,

and you mentioned all those amazing
actors that you saw on stage.

I'm just thinking now, as a fellow actor,

what does it feel like going
into a room with Paul Scofield?

Because all I could think of was that
must be one of the most daunting -

I don't know, do you remember
that, the early experience?

SIMON: Oh, God.
Absolute terror.

I'd already done As You Like It
at the National.

And with John Dexter,

who's a sort of terrifying figure,
like a regimental sergeant major gone mad,

but also
sort of a bit of a genius of staging

and a wounded human being that one became
quite fond of but it was much more even.

It wasn't a company of stars exactly,

although there were people like
Sarah Kestelman, who was playing Rosalind

opposite my Orlando, Michael Bryant,
who was just a wonderful company - they

weren't star stars like Gielgud or
Richardson or anything like that.

And so then we came to Amadeus.

There's Schofield, who was truly Godlike

to me, my early enthusiasm for Olivier,
which never completely disappeared,

but had been tempered
by exposure to Paul Schofield.

I'd seen him do so many things,

and this extraordinary capacity to bring
a world on with him,

but not draw attention to his own
virtuosity at all was terribly striking.

And and and I had a sense of him as a sort

of high priest of the art of acting,
whereas Olivier was always, you know,

Archie Rice somewhere
behind it all, you know.

But Paul was different.

It was art, you know, high, high level.

As it happens, he wasn't like that at all.

He was much more convivial and
modest, in a way, than that.

But I didn't know that.

I wasn't to know that we had to sit down

for this first read through and thank
God Felicity Kendall was playing my wife.

And I knew Felicity,
that I'd done a television play with her,

and we'd got on terrifically well,
so this was huge, huge relief.

And then there were some of the actors
who'd been in As You Like It,

because it was the Olivier company, but it
was also Peter Hall and Peter Schaffer.

And the way in which I got the part
of Mozart was so unexpected.

It was that John Dexter had been going

to direct Amadeus, not at the National,
just anywhere he was going to direct it.

And he had decided,

without ever seeing my acting,
that I was the person to play Mozart.

PAUL: Based purely on what he heard about you?
SIMON: Yes.

I mean, his boyfriend had seen me doing
a play at the Royal Court and said

to John, but I'd already met John
for another play, which didn't happen.

And we'd got on famously well over
kippers at the Savoy, and we bonded.

I mean,
the thing that bonded me to him

and to many other people in my career
was being stagetruck, basically.

If you scratch the toughest old kind

of gnarled warrior of the theatre,
if you scratch them a bit,

you generally find a love of what
the theatre can be and should be.

And that was deep inside John.
Anyway.

John blustering about,

like some demented regimental
Sergeant Major, I say,

finally fell out with Peter Schaffer,
and I thought, well, that's that.

I won't be playing Mozart anymore.

And then one day a phone call came
from the National Theatre to my agent

saying, there's this new play
that we're doing called Ama-Amaju?

I don't know!

Anywhere they want him to play Mozart
in it, and this will make you laugh,

they want him to play
Orlando in As You Like It.

I wasn't obvious casting for Orlando,

but anyway, so there I was,
I'd been given the part.

It turned out that neither Paul Schofield
nor Peter Hall, nor half of the people

in the room, or Peter Schaffer
had ever seen me act at all.

PAUL: I wonder, is that both a liberating thing

for you or a scary thing,
or a mix of the two?

SIMON: Well, I didn't know, you see,

I thought they must have seen me do
something, otherwise they wouldn't -

PAUL: Oh, this was revealed later on, okay.

SIMON: They just decided that I
was the right guy for it.

I had a couple of successes playing

Arturo Uni at the Half Moon
and Mary Barnes at the Royal Court.

I wasn't unknown, but I wasn't a high,
high flying superstar.

PAUL: I have to ask you as well,
did your love of Mozart precede getting

that part, or did it occur
more when you were doing it?

SIMON: Yes, it long preceded it.

I'd fallen in love with Mozart's music
when I was about twelve,

much to the dismay of my family,
who thought the Mozart was as many people

did in those days,
or the phrase was tiddly pom music.

It was all tiddly pom music.

It's not they wanted the hard
red meat of Tchaikovsky and Puccini

and Verdi and all of that,
but I discovered the limitless depths

in Mozart and the extraordinary
perfection and so on.

So I did actually know really
a lot about Mozart, thank God.

I think that was a huge, huge help.

But the greatest help for me of all was
after that first read through,

when of course, I went berserk, because
I really just decided to go for it.

I thought, I can't give a timid reading
of this, I've just got to go for it.

And I went for it like mad,

giggling and shrieking and farting
and all the rest of it.

And at the end of it, Peter Hall said,
thank you all very much.

And then he came over to me with his arm

on my shoulder, and I thought,
fuck that's, it.

The P45 is about to be delivered.

He said, that was a very brave reading.

And I thought, I'm really
am for the chop now.

And he said, it's all there,

everything you did here
that is in the part of Mozart.

And it has to be like that,
and it has to be there.

However, I have to believe at every single
moment that you're on the stage that you

wrote the overture
to The Marriage of Figaro.

It's a wonderful note.

Peter had his limitations as a director,

but he was wonderful at giving notes
that really change your entire attitude.

And I thought, fuck that's, right?

That has to be right.

And that's what I'd struggled
with all the way through.

But I think I got there eventually.

I think I might have got some of the way
there by the first night,

but by the end I really
did convey that I had written that music.

And that was the most important.

There was a revival at the National
recently, which was hugely acclaimed,

very energetic and busy,
but the actor who played Mozart,

who was incredibly daring and risk of it,
I never believed that he would have

written a note of that music,
not for 1 second.

And therefore it doesn't matter,

if he didn't write the music,
the play doesn't matter.

PAUL: No.
And it's an interesting thing, isn't it?

That kind of in a sense,

in a literal sense,
that juxtaposition between how someone

behaves and what they're capable of is
a really fascinating thing about him.

And about many, I suppose, are famous -
in some ways, through your career,

you've touched on, or worked with or
worked on some quite iconic figures.

Obviously, I want to talk not just about

your acting, because one of the joys I've
loved so much are your books

on Orson Welles
and they're absolutely unmatchable.

And clearly it became an enormous passion

of yours to try to tackle this
extraordinary, figure in Welles.

It made me laugh when I read that someone

when you first pitched it, you said
you wanted one volume to be a novel.

And one to be...

SIMON: The idea was that the first volume I said

to the publisher, the American publisher I
said,

the first volume will end
with Citizen Cain, the second volume will

end with Chimes at Midnight
and the third volume will be a novel.

And he said, Young man,

if you are very lucky,
you will be allowed to write this book

in two volumes, neither
of which will be a novel.

PAUL: Where are you at?

Because I read during Lockdown you
were working on the fourth volume.

Where does that sit at the moment?
SIMON: I wasn't.

That was a lie.

I couldn't face it.
I couldn't face it.

You know, like many people during

Lockdown, all I could manage
was small achievable tasks.

And writing volume four was just too

enormous and one felt so unsettled
and hemmed in and all of that.

So I'm just about to start
writing volume four, just about.

And it's a very, very difficult volume

to write because it's the last 20 years
of his life,

which should have been his absolute prime
as a director from the ages of 50 to 70.

And he made, in that whole 20 years,

just two films, 80 minutes each
one and both for television.

And one is called the Immortal Story.

It's a very interesting film.

And the other is called F for Fake,

which is a sort of brilliant,
dazzling, conjuring trick of a film.

But when you think that he'd achieved

Chimes at Midnight,
what he'd achieved and how he achieved it,

he came incredibly close to making a film
of King Lear, really, really close.

I have all the designs,

the breakdown of the props
and all that just never happened.

PAUL: And also, I suppose, that sense of

actually,
I totally get what you're saying,

and I can only imagine something
that's filled with a deep melancholy.

I think that sense of where whether
he felt that or not, I don't know.

But that's what he filled me with.

SIMON: He felt depressed, angry and ashamed.

He felt he knew what his talent was,

some might say genius was,
and he just hadn't fulfilled it.

I do know that to some extent, he felt
it might have been self engendered.

I think it was more self engendered than

he admitted to himself
for a whole complex of reasons.

But the loss to us
as film lovers is just immeasurable.

I have all the materials for at least six
films which were absolutely ready to go,

PAUL: And he just couldn't get the
finances for one reason or another?

SIMON: Couldn't cast them with -
he lives through what any of us who've

tried to make films
live through all the time is you're

absolutely dependent on getting
a bankable star, you know.

And he, they all said how much they adored

him, how they admired him, how he was a
god, he was the greatest filmmaker ever.

But unfortunately they were busy,

or unfortunately, they didn't quite feel
it was right for them now, or whatever.

Whatever.
PAUL: It's strange.

I remember persuading my wife and my five
year old daughter that we should holiday

in Essaouira in Morocco,
and it was primarily so I could visit,

some of those places, of which you'll know
and actually we have a lovely holiday.

Amazing place.
Anyway.

SIMON: Yeah, it's a wonderful place.

PAUL: But my reason was to go for
kind of odyssey.

Now I've got to ask my first
question around regret, because

you have astonishingly
excelled in so many different things.

Have you ever had any regret that you
didn't focus purely on your acting?

Or has one always fed the other
for you, the writing and the acting?

SIMON: I think there was a point when I was
when I'd been acting for, I started acting

in '73, around '82, '83,
I never stopped working.

It was just one of those
unbelievably lucky things.

And, of course,

the trajectory was absolutely up up
up with Amadeus and all of that.

And then when I left the National Theatre,
I did Christopher Hampton play called

Total Eclipse, which I adore,
and which David Hare directed superbly.

I did a world premiere of an Edward Bond

play, Restoration, which is a great,
great piece of work.

And I did less happily The Beastly
Beatitudes of Balthazar B by JP.

Donleavy, which I absolutely adored,
but the critics didn't at all.

And the producer kept it on for ten
and a half months, playing to, like,

20% audiences, which is
really a recipe for insanity.

And I just suddenly felt then I've just

spent myself in terms of that the impulse
to act has now become exhausted in me.

And then, by great good luck,

I was invited to go to Santa Fe
with a small group of actors

from the National Theatre and the director
to start an organisation which was called

then the British American
Theatre Institute.

But they didn't like the acronym very
much, so they changed it

to the British Academy of, the
British American Drama Association - BADA.

And it's very successful.

And I started teaching for the first time

and directing for the first
time as well as acting.

And at that same moment,

sort of out of the blue,
was a suggestion that I might write a book

about the theatre from Nick Hern
theatre publisher.

And so suddenly my horizons
opened massively.

And I'm a very greedy person.

And when I got sniff of all this stuff,
I couldn't stop going after it.

And you mentioned it earlier,
also got an offer to play in a sitcom,

which,
I'd appeared in a couple of sitcoms

in the very early days of my career,
but I'd not had much to do.

And this sitcom, which is called A Chance
in a Million, which is utterly brilliantly

written, fabulously original,
odd, marvellous people.

PAUL: I have to say.

I urge any listeners who do not know
the sitcom Chance in a Million,

which kind of ran, I think, for three
seasons, was it, in the late 80s?

It is a brilliant example of a sitcom,
I think, because it's so pure

in its structured, when you
talk about the writing.

Also, your character of Tom Chance
is such a brilliant creation.

I want to share it with you
and the listeners.

It was something about the way
your character spoke as well.

Yeah, very funny.

There's a line here where you're talking
to Alison, your girlfriend or whatever,

your wife, on the phone and you say,
can't talk, Alison, car being towed.

Problem with lawn furniture.

SIMON: You know what it's based on?
It's based on Mr.

Jingle from Pickwick Papers,
who talks exactly like that.

PAUL: I didn't know that.
But it's so brilliant, so wonderful.

It's such a brilliant idea
that everything, the fact that you get

into all these scrapes
and also you take those scrapes

and situations,
there's a positivity about it,

which means it remains relentlessly funny,
that sense of you -

to the point that the police sergeant
saying, do not arrest this man.

Whatever the... So I urge anybody.

Now, we touched on comedy, which,

of course, is close to my heart
and I know yours.

And when you wonderfully came to see our
current show, Charlie and Stan,

at Wilton's Music Hall,
and we were exchanging emails about this

podcast, you mentioned a thing I didn't
know was your love for eccentric movement

or eccentric dance and your
connection to the Max Wall society.

SIMON: Yeah, I've always been totally,
I saw Max Wall first in my very first job

in Rep in 1979 in Lincoln,
and we were a company,

but we were a company, therefore I think
I did four plays, maybe five with them.

And we all went off en masse to see
Max Wall in the Working Men's Club.

He'd come with his show and we all knew

him from, I suppose,
television or what, I don't know.

We all knew that he was a great,
one of the greats.

And so we went,
trooped into this and famously,

he played Professor Wallofski,
wearing tights,

sort of half ape and half man, actually,
with a dicky and dinner jacket.

Not a dinner jacket.

Tail jacket, curtailed tails.

Well,

many people know that, wonderful,
it was slightly surreal, the whole act,

but his physical life was absolutely
astounding because he was ape like.

And he'd do these walks,
these funny, funny walks.

And I didn't know so much about him.

So I looked it up and I discovered that he
was, technically speaking,

he started his work on the boards
in the sort of days of variety.

He wasn't, strictly speaking,

the music hall,
but it was very much the spirit of music

hall, doing what was known as,
technically speaking, novelty dancing.

And it was a huge movement.

There was a lot of all kinds of clowns,
comedians, dancers.

It's somewhere in between all of these

things,
pushing the extent of the human body

into bizarre shapes, but always
with a certain grace about it.

It was definitely art, you know?

And I've got a friend,
woman called Betsy Baytos,

who was an American novelty dancer
herself, or eccentric dancer herself.

That's the other term for it,
eccentric dancing.

And

she's made a documentary about eccentric
dancing and discovered Max Wall and was,

of course, totally in love,
after he died this is,

and then somebody said,
you should talk to Simon Callow,

because I did know a lot about Max
and had thought a lot about Max.

I never met him, but I
saw all his stage roles.

He was a wonderful actor,
especially in Beckett.

Absolutely extraordinary, but also as
genius as Archie Rice in The Entertainer.

I mean, when Olivier played Archie Rice,
the clapped out music hall comedian

Jack Lemon went to see him and said,
how did you manage to dance so badly?

And he said, by doing it as
well as I could, dear boy.

Max, it was quite the opposite.

He was such an extraordinary
physical creature.

He just had to do three moves and suddenly

you were in a different
world of expression.

PAUL: My connection to him, I remember,
was watching my father,

watching him when I was little,
watching my dad watch Max Wall on TV

and be crying
with laughter. And when I look

back at it, it's quite unusual,
it's not someone standing, telling jokes,

SIMON: not at all

PAUL: It's quite surreal.

It taps into a kind
of slightly bizarre world.

But my dad this electrician

from Birmingham,
thought it was the funniest thing.

And I have to say,

I'm going to admit a regret of mine now,
being a stupid, foolish young actor.

I remember being at drama school
and someone had a ticket to go and see

Max Wall in Krapp's Last Tape
at the Riverside Studios.

And foolishly, I was waylaid
in the pub and didn't go.

So that's my great regret.

Is there somebody that you
regret not having seen live?

A performer that you wished
you could have seen on stage?

SIMON: Donald Wolfit.

PAUL: Wow.
SIMON: Donald Wolfit.

Who, by the way,
and this all ties up exquisitely, as I'm

sure you intended, I worked out, was
my Captain Hook at the Scarla Theatre.

PAUL: Perfect.

SIMON: Donald Wolfit was,

when I started going to the theatre,
was widely regarded as a sort of a joke.

He was so much in the grand manner,

huge voice and projection,
and hewn out of wood and marble.

But I then got to talk to other people,
older people, who'd seen Wolfit in his

great days touring Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson unceasingly around the world.

And the programme, if you look at it,
he was playing King Lear,

Macbeth, all in one week,
Ben Jonson, blah, blah, blah.

And they said a number of people said
to me that his King Lear was

so beyond anything,
anybody they'd ever seen,

achieve with this part, the absolute
depth and breadth and rootedness of it.

And Peter Schaffer said,

he said the first scene when he saw it
wasn't particularly brilliant,

but from the moment that Lear was
liberated from being a king, Peter said,

you just had the absolute conviction,
not that you were in the presence

of an actor, but that you were
in the presence of King Lear.

No question about it.

It was himself.

And that's remarkable.

Everybody people who saw him during

the Blitz and all of that, playing Lear,
but many, many other things.

And there's a longing
in me for the archaic.

I'm very interested in what people did

before us, the opposite of the present
time, where the past is more or less

demonised by people as dirty
and the source of all our problems.

But in terms of the theatre,
the expressive power of an actor like,

shall we say, Irving,
or the mercurial genius of someone like

David Garrick or Keen,
this fascinates me deeply.

What did they do?
PAUL: I totally agree.

And I think, obviously,
working on Charlie and Stan was a huge

joy, because we were also, in a sense,
looking at a form that is kind of ageless

and it's also a performance form,
not a director's form.

It's passed on verbally or
physically for performance form.

Simon, it's been such
a pleasure talking to you.

We could chat all day.
We should do it again.

I need to finish by asking you seven very

quick questions, to which you give
whatever response - you'll get the idea.

Georges Feydeau or Eugene Labiche?

SIMON: Feydeau, I think.

PAUL: The Cotswolds or the Lake District?

SIMON: I don't know the Lake District at all,
so it'll have to be the Cotswolds.

PAUL: Stilton or Camembert?

SIMON: Stilton.

PAUL: Lucille Ball or Joyce Grenfell?

SIMON: Lucille Ball.

PAUL: Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot?

SIMON: Well, it depends who's playing them...
PAUL: You can choose!

SIMON: Margaret Rutherford's Miss Marple, then.
PAUL: Yes.

Touch of Evil or Chimes At Midnight?

I think I know the answer.
SIMON: Has to be Chimes At Midnight.

PAUL: Yes.
I thought you were going to say that.

Acting or writing?

SIMON: No, that's a cruel one.

What if I say directing?
PAUL: Exactly.

That's a perfect answer.

Simon, thank you so much.

It's been really lovely to talk to you
SIMON: Thank you Paul

PAUL: and let's get together soon.

Have a glass of wine or something.
SIMON: Sure.

PAUL: All the best.
SIMON: God bless.

PAUL: Dear listeners.

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