How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Simon Callow: ‘Scottish reeling almost killed me.’

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

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. 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 [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go to happymammoth.com and enter the promo code FAIL on the checkout page. Go to happymammoth.com and enter the promo code FAIL on the checkout page. Welcome to How to Date, the pod class that teaches you what you need to know about navigating modern romance. I'm podcaster and author Elizabeth Day. And I'm Mel Schilling, relationship coach. Every week, we aim to give you the skills you need to show up as yourself on the apps and in real life. Join us for frank expert advice, brilliant guests and practical exercises that will leave you feeling empowered to make the changes you need to meet the person that

is worthy of you. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. 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 call-outs 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-viveur in the 1994 hit movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. 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 Schaffer's play Amadeus. When it was later made into a film, Callow took on his first movie role as Immanuel Schickander. He went on to appear in many of the most iconic movies of the last thirty years, including A Room with a View, Howard's End, and Shakespeare in Love. He is currently filming Étoile, a new Amazon drama from the creators of the marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which follows the dancers and staff of two world-renowned ballet companies. As a director, Callow is 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 Streatham, South London, he simply didn't know anyone in any other kind of profession. He wrote a fan letter to Sir Lawrence Olivier, then artistic director of the National Theatre, who suggested Callow

joined the box office staff. While watching the actor's rehearse, he realized that was his path. In the years that followed, he's 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.

Hello. Do you still feel that? 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. 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. Yeah, I mean, they were very odd about it. One woman said to me, rather racially, said,

I hear you're bisexual. I said, that's an absolute lie, a barefaced 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. There's no drama in that. So I sort of, as it were, got away with it because people had warned me in the most baleful terms about what might happen that I would never work again as an actor. In fact, what turned out

that the book in which I told the world that I was gay work again as an actor. In fact, what turned out that the book in which I told the world that I was gay, much, much more controversial because I attacked directors. And that was, that then people started saying, 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, 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, director's theatre had become a stranglehold, you know. It really was a daring person who would quarrel with a director's interpretation. And so I staked my claim for some sort of contribution to the artistic, to the creative process. 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? Well, 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 me.

When Ian McKellen, who's most famously came out and has done so enormously much, probably more than almost anybody else, to normalize 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 and Stratford and all the rest of it.

And I can absolutely understand that it might have been a puzzle for him, but later he came up because he was so enraged by Section 28, or Clause 28, of 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. 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.

Let's talk about Gareth, if you don't mind indulging me. Four Wonders 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?

Yeah, absolutely. That was the remarkable, daring and originality of Richard Curtis in his screenplay. Remember, this was the time, AIDS was still rampant at the time of making the film. And there had been the film Philadelphia, which is a very mournful and sentimental film 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 the particularly sexually transmitted illness, which was, you know, one of the things was said about homosexuals, oh, they're filthy and they spread diseases

and all the rest of it. And what was absolutely wonderful about the character of Gareth, who was just a wonderful character generally, was A, he was in a beautiful relationship with Matthew, 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 Scottish, I nearly died doing it, I can tell you. What was it like filming for weddings? Was it as fun as it seems as a viewer? Nearly as much. Nearly as much. I mean, films are quite hard work 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 we

were stuck on the set, 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. Final question before we get on to your failures. Amadeus is one of my top five favourite 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? 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 the 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 Felicity Kendall and I and the others in the company, we would see Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman. 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 Milosz also rather

interestingly said that he was going to cast unknowns in the two central parts. rather interestingly said that he was going to cast unknowns in the two central parts. Eventually, I did get a call with an 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 Cornholt Hotel where he was in a very civilized way doing the casting and the delightful and last much lamented Richard Griffiths was there. And I knew Richard, Richard introduced me to me, me to strode into the room with a big cigar in his mouth, exactly what you expect

from, from Hollywood director. And he said, Richard said, this is Simon Callow. He said, oh, you are Simon Callows. 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 Mozart's and you are the best by far.

You're both asshole and genius. 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? I have no idea Mr. Foreman. What kind of actor you're looking for. Like a bird, like a little bird.

Anyway, eventually they offered me the part of Shiggyn. So 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 Trichin,

I knew a lot about Mozart, obviously, because I'd been playing him, but also even before I played him, I knew a lot about Mozart. 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 crisscross quiz. What is junior crisscross quiz? Well, I think there must have been a crisscross quiz, but this was the junior edition of it. And there was a question master called Jeremy Hawke, who was an actor, very trim and elegant. And it was really, I can't even remember what the device of the crisscrosses 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. How old are you at this age? I should think about 12, something like that, 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. 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, how can it be that Winston Churchill wasn't as famous as a politician? I still don't know how that happened. But 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.

I just thought, I don't know how I can show my face anymore at all to anybody. Well, of course, I wasn't transmitted. I had the same thing when I did that quiz that Alexander Armstrong does. Pointless. 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. The second set was the films of Steven Spielberg. And it just named 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. Oh, which one was? E.T.? And Jaws. Okay. 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 public, on camera. 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. 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 Abramovich had the same thing, sort of failure at a chess contest, which 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.

I would like to know more about 12-year-old Simon and what he was like, other than believing he was a polymath. Was he happy? 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. When you were nine. When I was nine and then that, you know, it 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 did never send me presents at birthdays or anything like that. And then wrote a letter saying, did you get the check I sent you or which he never sent you and all that kind of thing. So I was, 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 grandfather's had died, my mother's brother had died in the war, my father's two brothers lived in, one of them in Nassau, in the Bahamas, the other in Australia, there was really almost no man at all around. 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 a mankind 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. And I really didn't feel attractive at all at that time. It took a long time actually, I'm not sure I've 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.

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to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary. Now you did go to university, fascinating me in Belfast. I went to school opposite Queen's University, Methodist College. No, Methodist? Yes, yes. My God. I know.

How about that? I know where you live. Right? Fantastic. But you didn't complete your degree, is that right? And then you went to drama college. Yeah. 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, Queens 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 working at the National Theatre in the box office under Laurence Olivier. And for the first time in my life had thought, oh, well, I saw the acts rehearsing. I thought, this is wonderful. This is, you know, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith and John Gielgud rehearsing, and I stood at the back of the stall 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 on the wrong track? I thought this is fantastic. This is problem solving. And it's a wonderful way to earn a living. And then I thought, well, I should try and see if I can become an actor. 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 RSC production of Les Enfants du Paradis. Why did you choose this as a failure? It was a massive critical flop. No, I'm sorry.

It was absolutely the most savage reviews that I've ever had in my life. What was so awful about it was that Adrian Noemore was running the Royal Shakespeare Company and he 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 I, 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 the artist, a wonderful, wonderful cast. Just couldn't have asked for a better cast. And we had the most wonderful time rehearsing this play. And so then we headed to the theater. On the way to the theater, I bumped into John Mortimer, the great John Mortimer, Rumpola the Bailey, etc. And John said, well, what are you doing, Simon? And I said, well, I'm doing Les Enfants du Paradis for the RSC. He said, oh, 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, the use of revolver. I said, thanks, John. I went into the theater, the Barbican theater, 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 to do. 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. And the revolve, sorry, it's just a revolving stage. Yeah, so with a big structure on a turntable, basically. Which meant, because there are many, many, many scenes, 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. So we started the technical rehearsal and the revolve kept sticking and we couldn't move forward from it. And we were desperately trying to, in the rehearsal room, the stage manager just made it whiz around 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. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most sophisticated revolve which has ever been seen in the British theatre, and it isn't working. Anyway, we managed finally to get a couple of previews where it did work, but it was still unsteady and everybody was somewhat unsteady and the first night was not what it should have been. The good news is that once the revolver 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 straight revolve at any single point. But the one thing nobody thought to do was to look at the wheels. The press was just hostile 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, a journalist, had been sent to me for The Guardian to interview me before the first night. And his questions were extraordinarily aggressive and I said, 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. How strange. It's not unknown in the theatre and I suppose in other 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 probably not quite right about this production. Well, let's go for it. Is it difficult not to take those things personally? 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 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, well, a bit sort of cross with me for going away. But as far as I knew, it was by the first night working with people, all in all, it seemed 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. The other thing was very maddening, as I would constantly get letters from the public saying, this is what the RSC is all about. This is what we want to see. We want to see great epic scenes of people on stage, of big crowds on stage, life, representation of life and so on. And I think they did get that. And I do think it was, if I thought it was a 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. What do you think it ended up teaching you, if anything?

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. Life throws challenges at all of us, but how do we cope? I'm John Robbins, and on my podcast I sit down with incredible people to ask the very simple question, how do you cope?

We explore the moments that shape them and the ways they've learned to move forward. Whether it's mental health, grief, or overcoming fear, we talk about it all honestly and openly. So if you're looking for real conversations about resilience and finding light in the dark, follow How Do You Cope? Brought to you by Audible wherever you get your podcasts. 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? Well, this is another, but this is a childhood. It isn't recent. I've been painting, unlike Sir Winston Churchill. Well, exactly, famed painter. I come from a line of painters on both sides of my family. My great-great-grandfather, Flois, came to England in the 1850s or something to be the art teacher at Marlborough College. And there's still an arch in Marlborough College, which is called

Flois's Arch, which is where people went to make up their differences, you know. 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. And the third brother was more of a sort of scientific explorer, but he also was a very distinguished painter. And I've got examples of their work. They were very academically

skillful. They weren't great creative artists by any means. My uncle Tony, who died in the war, saving someone else's life, was the only person 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 Callot side, William Callot was a very, very distinguished water colorist and his past is up there on the Watercolor Society. He taught the children of the French Empress Eugénie's children to draw and paint and so on. And I always felt I should be able to do this.

And I have a sort of, I can do sort of cartoon things 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, Eamon McDonough, was brilliant. He really was brilliant. He was a fantastic draftsman. He had a wonderful sense of colour and colour combinations and things like this. I fought against it for 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, when I come to think 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 effect to me. But I then was embarrassed by that and confessed to everybody what I'd done. 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 there's all my family sort of looming over my shoulders. Yes, you must. Maybe it's the next phase of your life. Yeah, bring it on.

What do you think of acting now? Because you are, as well as being an actor yourself, a sort of an observer of and a writer of all of the different phases in the histories. What phase do you think modern acting is in? There are many wonderful actors around, there always will be, you know, but as if you're asking about in general, the general drift of acting at the moment is less, I sense, a kind of retreat from the idea of giving great performances. I think there's a sort of ironing out, it's this kind of leveling up thing. But a great acting like great anything, like great piano playing or great dancing, is inevitably egregious. It's exceptional. It's an aspiration towards the exceptional. And I've always said that one of the principal

said that 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 our actors. Well, it's what I want from actors. 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 Failing 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? 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. 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 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 You cannot forget a performance of Charles Norton's in its complexity, its depth, and the gesture of it, the shape of it. This is acting as a creative art. And Marlon Brando, of course, one would say exactly the same thing of. And you know, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, they all, they pushed the boat out as far as they could. 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 so much for coming on How to Fail. It's a great pleasure. 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. Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Welcome to How to Date, the pod class that teaches you what you need to know about navigating modern romance. I'm podcaster and author Elizabeth Day.

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