Simon Callow visits Chiswick to talk about his friend, novelist and playwright Simon Gray

Simon Gray (1936 – 2008)

‘Gray Matters’ – Season of Simon Gray films at Chiswick Cinema

The actor Simon Callow was in Chiswick on Sunday night (6 September) to talk about his friend of 25 years, the late novelist and playwright Simon Gray.

Over a period of 45 years Gray wrote five published novels, 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others’ works for stage, film and television.

The Smoking Diaries, his memoir in which he reflected on a life ‘filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love’ has just featured in Jake Kerridge’s list of ‘50 greatest books of all time’ in The Telegraph.

Yet he has become rather overlooked, almost forgotten. In an attempt to rectify this, Chiswick Cinema is screening a season of his films, called ‘Gray Matters’.

Simon Callow and Margy Kinmonth – photograph Chris Parker

“He had an extraordinary mind”

Sunday’s film was Femme Fatale (1993), a black comedy which starred Simon Callow in one of the leading roles – a vicar in a small Devon village in which every man lusted after the young Italian bride (Sophia Diaz) of the local shopkeeper.

The cast also included Donald Pleasence, James Fleet, Colin Welland, and Patsy Rowlands. Director: Udayan Prasad.

When he made Femme Fatale, Simon Callow was already known for originating the theatre role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the 1979 Peter Shaffer play Amadeus, and for his film role in A Room with a View (1985) – another vicar – but had yet to make Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

Before the screening, Margy Kinmonth talked to Simon Callow about their friendship. They first met, Simon told her, when he reviewed a book of Gray’s.

“He somehow managed to find me, in the days when emails were scarce, and he said:

‘What you wrote has given me more pleasure than anything I’ve ever read’.”

The playwright suggested lunch and they met at a French restaurant near St Martin’s Lane, and immediately hit it off.

Simon Callow Q&A, Chiswick Cinema, Sunday 8 September – photograph Torin Douglas

“He had an extraordinary mind that could veer about in all directions … a sense of the hallucinatory, something he had in common with Charles Dickens – a sense of the surreal.

“He was an anarchist, but also a formalist, an altogether extraordinary man!”

He was also given to “violent tirades about some of his best friends”.

Conversations with him, said Simon Callow, were “a wonderful rollercoaster that could take off in any direction”.

That’s a bit how the film felt. People kept dying in strange and unexpected ways.

Photograph – Torin Douglas

A shared love of Dickens

Simon Gray was a Charles Dickens afficionado, as is Simon Callow, who wrote a biography described variously by critics as ‘vivid and exuberant’ and written ‘with great authority and elegant insouciance’. Simon Gray supplied the introduction.

“His knowledge of Dickens was universal”, the actor told the audience. “I think he was a kindred spirit. Simon was fascinated by genius”.

Gray had a style of comedy “all his own”, he said.

“He sent me his plays to read. He would start them in a perfectly reasonable way and then it would just take off. It was so exhilarating to read a scipt of his for the first time”.

Actors liked playing his roles because:

“Each character he created had something original… You had to go on a journey with him. There was never any sense of it being schematic – these are the people I’m showing you, let’s just follow them. Like he’d taken a tab of LSD, but spontaneous and natural. He gave actors opportunities.

‘The character came dancing down my pen’ is what Dickens said. The same was true of Simon”.

Photograph – Bridget Osborne 

Rest of the Simon Gray season

The first film in the Simon Gray season was A Month in the Country (1987), shown as part of the Chiswick In Film festival in March, which featured Colin Firth in his first lead role, Kenneth Branagh in his first film role, and was Natasha Richardson’s second film.

There are two more Simon Gray screenings coming up in in Chiswick Cinema’s season:

Quartermaine’s Terms (1987) – Sunday 13 September, 4.30 pm

Through staffroom conversations and passing years, the lonely, quietly devoted St John Quartermaine watches colleagues marry, separate, and pursue ambitions, while his own life stands poignantly still. Wry, humane, and deeply moving, it is a subtle study of time, disappointment, and endurance.

Cast: John Gielgud, Edward Fox, Eleanor Bron, Peter Jeffrey, Paul Jesson, Clibe Francis, Tessa Peake-Jones, Eiji Kusuhara.

Tickets – Quartermain’s Terms

Alan Bates in Butley (1974); image IMDb

Butley (1974) – Sunday 27 September, 7.45 pm

A university lecturer, Ben Butley, shares his office and his flat with a former star pupil, Joey, now also a lecturer. Butley faces both the ultimate breakdown of his marriage and of his intense friendship with Joey. Butley’s painful discoveries are made against a background of petty university politics and unease about student dissent. He greets them with a blistering torrent of repartee and rhetoric.

Cast: Alan Bates, Richard O’Callaghan, Michael Byrne, Jessica Tandy, Susan Engel, Georgina Hale, Simon Rouse, John Savident.

Tickets: Butley