Simon Callow attended the London Oratory School before going on to study at The Queen’s University of Belfast. He later gave up his degree to pursue acting at the Drama Centre London.

Simon Callow first appeared on stage in The Thrie Estates at the Assembly Hall Theatre, Edinburgh in 1973. After appearing in a multitude of stage shows and broadcasts, he went on to gain interest from a wider audience after starring in Channel 4 comedy, Chance in a Million and his part in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Simon Callow is a life-long admirer of Charles Dickens. He has written extensively about Charles Dickens. He has played Charles Dickens on numerous occasions; in the one-man show The Mystery of Charles Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; in the film Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale and on television several times, including An Audience with Charles Dickens and an episode of Doctor Who.

Simon Callow will be at Warwick Arts Centre on Saturday 11 February to read from his new book Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon said of Dickens, “When you find a writer that you love it’s like finding a best friend. Dickens never ceases to delight me. There’s something in him which chimes with me: the energy; the scope; the generosity; the endless inventiveness of it. There is in Dickens the spirit of the medieval carnival that just deeply turns me on. That sense of the world as one big body and a celebration and embrace of all its grotesqueness, the ugliness, the smell, the sweat.”