Being an Actor

359 Pages·2007·1.77 MB·English

by  Simon Callow

Being an Actor
Also by Simon Callow

Dickens’ Christmas
Henry IV Part Two
Henry IV Part One
The Night of the Hunter
Oscar Wilde and His Circle
Love Is Where It Falls
The National
The Road to Xanadu
Acting in Restoration Comedy
Shooting the Actor
A Difficult Actor: Charles Laughton
Jacques and His Masters, translator
Simon Callow
Being an Actor
For Peggy,
without whom this book would never have been written, and my grandmother,
Vera Guise, without whom there would have been nothing to write about.

BEING AN ACTOR. Copyright © 1984, 1995, 2003 by Simon Callow. All rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except
in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For
information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Callow, Simon, 1949–
Being an actor / Simon Callow.—1st Picador ed.
p. cm.
Includes index
ISBN 0-312-42243-1 ISBN 978-0-312-42243-1
1. Callow, Simon, 1949– 2. Actors—Great Britian—Biography.
I. Title.

PN2598.C17A3 2003
792′.028′092—dc21
[B]

2003048283

First published in Great Britain by Methuen London

First Picador Edition: August 2003

D 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Contents

Foreword, 2003

Foreword, 1995

Preface
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
PART TWO
Unemployment
Getting the Job 1
The Agent
Getting the Job 2
Preparation
First Readthrough
Rehearsal 1
Character 1
Rehearsal 2
Character 2
Rehearsal 3
Rehearsal 4
Rehearsal 5
Into the Theatre
The Dress Rehearsal
The First Preview
The First Night
The Reviews
The Run 1
A Good Performance
A Bad Performance
The Run 2
The Audience
Twenty-four Hours in the Life
The End of the Run
Unemployment Again
Manifesto
Gloomy Postscript
PART THREE
Thirty Years On
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Index
Foreword, 2003

Not so long ago, I was having my passport checked by immigration at JFK
Airport. Examining the document, the officer, an attractive young black woman,
said: ‘You’re an actor?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Still?’ she asked, without looking up.
It’s been a long time: thirty years.
Over the twenty years since it was written, through various reprintings and
one new edition, this little book has been amended with the addition of
previously unprinted material (too late for the first edition), a new foreword and
a coda. The main text has never been rewritten. I have resisted that because my
entire point in venturing on such a precocious theatrical autobiography in the
first place was to express the experience of acting as I was discovering it.
Hindsight has no place in such a testament: bliss was it, in that dawn, to be alive,
and to be a young actor was very heaven. Being an Actor came into existence to
express the carnal delight of a young thespian setting out on what seemed to be
the boundless ocean of a life in the theatre (while noting a few inconveniences of
that life along the way), and though the theatre has changed enormously in the
last twenty years, the essential challenges remain the same: coming to terms with
oneself and with one’s craft. Whatever current theories may prevail, acting is
always essentially the depiction of characters in situations, although the
depiction can of course take many and various forms. The primary impulse of
the actor—to stand up and say ‘Look at me! Listen to this!’—is a constant, the
sine qua non of the whole enterprise, and I see no diminution of that impulse.
More people than ever are drawn to acting.
I suppose the crucial thing that has changed is the sense of what it is all for:
why people become actors, and why other people want to watch them. At the
end of the book I have added, in the spirit of What Katy Did Next, an account of
my own subsequent career in the theatre since writing the book to show how that
change has manifested itself in the life of one actor. If the original book set out
to show what it’s like to be an actor, this supplement shows what it’s like to be a
middle-aged actor, and aims to show a little more of the way the world works (or
doesn’t) for actors. But first, please read what the thirty-something Simon
Callow had to say—eager, unformed, intoxicated by the possibilities.