The Great Acting Blog: “What Acting Could Be – I Review My Life In Pieces By Simon Callow”
I stumbled, some years ago, upon Simon Callow’s Being An Actor, an autobiography of his first nine years as a professional actor. It revolutionised how I understood my own experience as an actor, leading to a comprehensive re-think about my approach to building a body of work. Callow had voiced an aching dissatisfaction with my lot – I felt I had a lot more to offer artistically, but at the same time I lacked the creative independence required to unlock this potential. My own psychology had been bound up in the notion of the great actor as a dominant, inspiring figure, and yet I was shuffling in and out of castings almost apologising for my existence. After reading Callow’s book, I had decided to cast off the shackles, determined to be more ambitious in my artistic choices, and to be more articulate when speaking about the work. Later, I read his biography of Charles Laughton, “A Difficult Actor”, and had been dazzled by it’s examination of Laughton’s life and work, it viewed him as a serious, creative artist, very different from the vast majority of actors’ biographies I had read up until then. Simon Callow had taken some of the ideas he had expressed in Being An Actor and showed them in action via Charles Laughton.
My Life In Pieces offers a collection of Callow’s writing, drawn primarily from his newspaper articles, reviews and previews. It’s a truly remarkable journey which covers the careers of almost all the great theatre actors of the last 100 years or so, including Gielgud and Olivier, Alec Guinness and Paul Schofield, and that’s not to mention the likes of Michael Gambon. Later in the book he covers comedians such as Tony Hancock, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd. I don’t think anyone can quite de-construct a performer’s work as powerfully as Callow. He offers some of the best insight into what the art of acting actually is and how it functions. You’ll come away from the book with a new clarity of thought and a sense of new possibilities. Crucially, Callow continues to press his view that actors are not simply pawns in a director’s game or slaves to a system, but “autonomous creative artists” who have control over their own futures and responsibilities to their audiences. By describing a Golden Age of acting in the first half of the twentieth century, Callow points to a time when actors embodied these ideas, when they lead companies and defined styles. This however, is not merely some dewy-eyed nostalgia, but a glimpse of what actors might become again.
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