Simon Callow

The British actor, author and director, Simon Callow CBE, studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, and then trained as an actor in London. He joined the National Theatre in 1979, where he created the role of Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s ‘Amadeus’. While still at the NT, he gave a one-man performance of all of Shakespeare’s sonnets – a show with which he has subsequently toured internationally. As well as numerous theatrical roles, he has appeared in many films and TV dramas, including ‘A Room with a View’, ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, ‘Shakespeare in Love’ and ‘Dr Who’. He directed the film of ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’, among others. His many one-man shows include his famous ‘The Mystery of Charles Dickens’ which had its world premiere at Campbell College, Belfast. He has also written several acclaimed biographies.

Belfast was a shock in many ways to someone who arrived from London in 1968 – the London of shops like Mary Quant, I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, and Biba - that was briefly the capital of style and sex. Belfast, on first encounter, was grey, net-curtained, uptight, with it seemed, a church on every block. Setting foot in it was like stepping out of a time machine into a Britain of half a century earlier.

My destination was Queen’s University, and that is where I spent most of my time, acting, drinking, making firm friendships, occasionally even attending lectures. Slowly, I began to venture outside of the campus and into the mirrored pubs where a different Belfast was evident – witty, convivial, sometimes rough but warm-hearted and full of ripe characters. Then I got to know the city centre – not beautiful, but not without nobility either, of a formal civic kind – the great markets, then the winding Lagan and the still busy and majestic docks.

Then, after nine months, I was gone – ran away to become an actor. I came back as soon as I could, at the height of the bombing, and again and again over the years, and watched its face change almost out of recognition until it finally stepped out of the shadow of both Dublin and London and became a great European city in its own right, almost a beauty. But if its face has changed, its identity hasn’t – it’s still witty, captious, cussed, tenacious and defiant, which is of course why one still keeps coming back.