My Life in Pieces (61 page)

It may not strike you that love scenes have figured heavily in my curriculum vitae, but you would be wrong. I have tumbled with the best of them, and it has not always been easy. Partly, I suppose, in my case, the problem has been to imitate heterosexuality convincingly. Is one getting it quite right? Just what
do
heterosexuals get up to in bed? But in truth, it’s always tricky, whatever the orientation.

With neither drink nor drug nor meal nor relaxing social ambience to blur things, there you are, face to face, in all your unadorned physicality. The feeling is more morning-after than night-before. There was a scene in
Shakespeare in Love
which was particularly unlovely in that way. The character I played, Sir Edmund Tilney, is having a quick poke when he is interrupted. It’s a brief scene, but it needed to be urgent, animal, groiny. The schedule was behind, it kept getting pushed further and further back, it looked as if we wouldn’t get to it, then suddenly it had to happen and
it had to happen NOW. The actress and I were hurtled through make-up. The shot list was very simple, the action obvious – so much so that they were already discussing the next shot while we rehearsed. I was introduced to the actress, there was a brief, practical discussion about how much would be exposed (my bum, her tits) and how long it should last (thirty seconds), the furniture was quickly adjusted, the director called ‘Action!’, whereupon, like a couple of mating dogs, we leaped on each other, our climax topped by the director’s ‘Cut!’ Great satisfaction all round, lens checked, hands shaken, and off we went, as the crew raced to the next set-up. I never saw the actress again, and indeed, to my embarrassment, I can’t quite remember her face, let alone any other part of her anatomy. A typical one-night stand, in fact. At least it all happened so quickly that there was no self-consciousness.

Passionate scenes at least have their own momentum. Romantic encounters are a different matter. It needs a special kind of trust to express physical tenderness with a stranger. Some people, of course, have a gift for instant intimacy, and it’s never quite who you might expect. Thirty years ago, I was in a BBC production of
La Ronde
, Schnitzler’s famous play in which each character has sex with someone and then moves on to another person who, in turn, moves on to someone else. So all the actors have two sex scenes. Mine were with the very young Amanda Redman and that remarkable and distinguished actress Dorothy Tutin, then nearly sixty. I was naturally very relaxed about Amanda and very anxious about Dottie: the idea of embracing her seemed like
lèse-majesté
. In the event, it was Dottie who hurled herself at me with thrilling rapacity, while Amanda was rather shy. These differences are clearly visible in the finished product. Not that Amanda looks at all reserved: but with her it was technique, whereas with Dottie it was feeling. As in life, so on screen.

Sex on radio is something else again. In the 1970s, Anna Calder-Marshall and I played lovers in a play by Fay Weldon: as soon as her husband left home, I slipped between his sheets. These were the days of Method Radio, so there was a bed, and blankets, and pillows. Anna and I duly clambered into the bed and set about us with gusto, puffing and grunting and lip-smacking, all the while trying to turn the pages of our scripts noiselessly. The result was a cross between sumo wrestling and origami. The trick was not to catch each other’s eyes, or we would have collapsed. So far so good. Unfortunately, the scene was not just between the two of us: there was a dog in it, trained by the jealous husband to stop us from making
love. The production couldn’t run to a real dog, but we had a barking Jack Russell on a separate speaker, held by a rather tubby stage manager, who attempted little jumping-up-and-down movements, scampering around the studio, running at us, speaker in hand, every time we essayed a little passion. Tears of laughter spurted out of our eyes as we squealed our lines, the hysteria quickly reaching orgasmic heights. The director leaped out of his booth to berate us savagely, like schoolchildren. When we finally did the scene, the lovemaking was – how shall I say? – tight-lipped.

And then there was the play I did, very early in my career, for Gay Sweatshop. It was a two-hander, a simple romantic (but for the time radical) tale of two young men who fall in love with each other and then drift apart. Inevitably, perhaps, a rather torrid offstage romance developed between us. In the central scene, we were in bed together, naked. Then we had to get out of bed. The ingenuity expended on concealing the very obvious pleasure we took in each other’s proximity led to rather baffling improvised choreography involving cushions and hats.

Well, we were young. Nowadays, the problem is much more one of engendering arousal than of suppressing it. You’re doing this in front of other people, remember – the director, the camera crew, props, make-up, continuity – for other people, sometimes millions of other people, and it’ll be up there for all time, to be watched dozens, even hundreds of times on DVD. For some, that might, in itself, be a turn-on. But, like everything else in film – and, one is tempted to add, in life – it boils down to technique. And it’s astonishing what can be done with mirrors and smoke and a little smart editing.

During the tour of
The Holy Terror
, I appeared, as the stage directions
required, naked, but I think we all decided that I was getting a little old for
it. Y-fronts were firmly in place by the time we hit the West End. But one
never learns. I wrote the following for the
Sunday Times
in 2003
.

In
Through the Leaves
at the Southwark Playhouse I play Otto, an alcoholic steelworker who is engaged in a sometimes clumsy, sometimes brutal attempt to thrash out some sort of relationship with Martha, a woman offal-butcher. Things, for the most part, do not go well, but after the most savage scene of the play, there is a curiously haunting scene in
which Otto takes a bath. Martha comes into the bathroom while he is flannelling himself. It is evidently the first time she has seen him fully naked. The following exchange occurs: Otto: ‘What you staring at?’ Martha: ‘Nothing.’ Otto: ‘Like what you see? Shoulda seen me when I was younger. What a physique. I was quite the athlete.’ Martha: ‘Pity you don’t do more outdoor sports instead of you know what.’ Otto: ‘No blubber anywhere you look.’ Martha: ‘What’s that there – on your tummy?’ Otto: ‘Don’t talk crap. That’s sheer muscle.’

The scene proceeds with her gently scrubbing his back. For perhaps the only time in the play their defences are down and a kind of ease prevails between them. So: a delicate, intimate scene, which the designer and director have staged behind a gauze, warmly and rather dimly lit. There was no question in anyone’s mind but that I should have to be naked for the scene: indeed, Otto’s nakedness is the point of the scene. No reviewer so much as bothered to mention it; it is a seamless, integral part of the whole production. The day after the first performance, the
Evening Stan
dard
Diary carried a piece whose headline blared ‘NAKED CALLOW LEAVES TOO LITTLE TO THE IMAGINATION’. With lewd innuendo the writer claims that theatregoers ‘are getting a tiny bit more of Simon Callow than perhaps they bargained for’, describing a nude scene ‘so protracted it proved too much for at least one member of the audience’ who allegedly left the theatre during the scene. (In fact, the individual in question left during the previous scene to go to the loo, thus missing the offending scene, returning in time for the next one.) ‘The expansively built actor suddenly stripped naked under the spotlight, leaped into a bath and enthusiastically kneaded his flesh,’ the piece continues. A seasoned theatregoer was questioned about ‘the ordeal’. ‘It didn’t really add to the drama, it was highly disgusting and at least three minutes long,’ said the unhappy customer.

Now, regular readers of the
Standard
Diary would not for a minute have supposed that this item bore any resemblance to the truth. We all know that the Diary of any newspaper is its crèche, where infant journalists – not old enough to be exposed to real news yet – totter about with their building bricks, desperately trying to engineer Stories where none exist. The genre has its laws, as inflexible as those of the syllogism or the Zen koan: first invent a scandal, then invent someone outraged by the scandal, then invent their complaint. It is quite whimsical, rather
Alice in Won
derland
, like life seen upside down. I don’t complain; it’s just a bit of
bunting that comes along with being in the public eye in whatever capacity. The follow-up to the story in the
Daily Mail
was in the same vein, but somewhat more unpleasant, of course. Having rehashed the supposed outrage, the
Mail
diarist invented a ‘Lady Bracknellish’ companion who remarked: ‘How strange that a man with such a big voice should have such a small endowment.’ The
Standard
returned to the fray the next day, quoting from a satirical book by Nigel Planer called
I, An Actor
, whose glossary contains the line ‘Callow, verb, to expose one’s genitals in the name of art.’

Boys, boys, boys!
Get over it
. The eleven-year-olds seem to have taken over. We are now out of the crèche and into the playground, where body humour is the staple of all discourse. ‘Fatgut, fatgut, fatgut,’ is the cry of the eleven-year-old wit. As a desperate protection against the self-consciousness of adolescence, every body part is remorselessly denigrated, regardless of its actual dimension or shape. The
Mail
item started – my personal trainer is suing – ‘Flabby fifty-three-year-old actor Simon Callow…’

It is true that it has chanced that in the thirty years of my career I have appeared four times on stage without clothes (the late Jack Tinker, with delicious hyperbole, if also with underlying tragedy, once remarked that he was more familiar with my genitals than with his own), and once, rather memorably, on film, with the equally naked but rather lither Julian Sands and Rupert Graves – two gazelles pursued by a hippopotamus. The last time I did so on stage was in Goethe’s
Faust
, emerging from the cauldron divested of age and scholarly gown as a newborn babe. It seemed absolutely the right image – and besides, this being a David Freeman production, everybody else was naked too, at one time or another. Fifteen years on, I thought I had put all that, so to speak, behind me, until I read
Through
the Leaves
, and realised that there was nothing else for it. It never occurred to me that a press now exposed to, among others, a nude Kathleen Turner, Jude Law, David Haig (whose penis was repeatedly fondled and prodded in
Dead Funny
), Stephen Dillane (as Hamlet), Ian Holm (as King Lear) and the entire football team in
Take Me Out
at the Donmar Warehouse, would even notice the gentle four-minute scene at the Southwark Playhouse.

The playground banter is getting seriously out of hand. In
The Times
last year, that fine and serious actor Willem Dafoe, founder and co-director of the radical Wooster Group, ventured to express himself on the subject of acting. The interviewer utterly dismissed his views and indeed his right
to have any. So what
did
the journalist want to talk about? Why, Dafoe’s genitals, of course. Was it true that because of the hugeness of his penis, some takes of
The Last Temptation of Christ
had been spoiled when the unruly member slipped out of his loincloth as he hung on the cross? Willem pleasantly declined to answer, but the interviewer persisted. Nothing, it seemed, could have been of more interest to the readers of
The Times
. It sometimes does seem as if our culture, in Harold Wilson’s memorable phrase, immatures with age. Or is it just journalism?

Our attitudes to bodies have of course changed radically in the last ten
years or so. I wrote
Actors and Their Bodies
for the
Sunday Times
in 2003:
Kate Winslet had shocked the world by putting on a few pounds.

There is a curious paradox best expressed, in one of her finest
aperçus
, by the late Bette Davis: ‘You don’t have to be neurotic to be an actor,’ she said, ‘but nobody who
liked
themselves ever became one.’ She’s right, and it’s a safe rule that the lovelier or more handsome the actor, the less likely they are to like themselves. And yet here we all are, hauling ourselves – our tired old bodies, our hated faces – in front of the cameras and the footlights for close inspection at every available opportunity. This inevitably gives rise to a certain gloomy narcissism in the profession; when your face is your fortune, or at the very least, your living, you are compelled to take note of its evolution, the processes of decay, the evidence of excess. Bags and jowls appear, eyes get smaller, brows furrow permanently, lips lose their firmness, and with each development, another whole line of parts disappears. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, am I holding it together at all?’ There is nothing that can be done at a deep level to arrest this melancholy progress; only superficial transformations can be wrought, and even to the miracles of
maquillage
there are limits. Occasional resort is taken to the knife, but – quite apart from the ultimate unreliability of almost all facial surgery – the results are doubly unhappy, firstly because even the smallest tuck or nip limits flexibility of expression of the single most communicative part of the body, and secondly, because it’s not you any more.

And that’s the nub. Another of the paradoxes of acting is that in order to play another person, you have to be very fully in touch with yourself.
You 
have to be the starting point. If the starting point is an artefact, all you can do is to superimpose another artefact on top of it, and so become doubly unreal. The body of the actor, every bit of it, has to carry information and expression. It does not necessarily have to be beautiful. Charles Laughton was a famously ugly man – ‘I resemble,’ he said of himself, ‘a departing pachyderm’ – but his amorphous, blubbery bulk was alive with meaning: an astonishing range of intention is conveyed throughout his physique. This capacity for revelation is the heart of the actor’s skill. Fatness or thinness has nothing to do with it, until either becomes a block to expression. Orson Welles, trying to fill an awful void in himself with food, became too fat to act with anything except his voice and his face – which still left quite a lot, but not enough. He was trapped inside himself. Somehow, Welles’s outer self had lost touch with his inner self, a thing which never happened to Laughton.