Words matter. These are the best Simon Callow Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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 outraged.
He always describes his characters’ voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They’re grotesques really.
I went to Queen’s University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.
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.
Having caught a glimpse of what I might be able to do with my talent, I feel a tremendous obligation to try to fulfill it.
Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in ‘King Lear.’
I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.
Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.
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?
He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It’s just such a curious thing.
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.
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.
I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.
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.
I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That’s why we do theatre, it’s because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.
When children have grieving parents it’s also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.
To live another person’s life is quite a weird thing.
