Failing to win a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, he went to Queen’s University, Belfast Why Ireland? “I wanted to get out of England I was very uncomfortable in myself. I absolutely knew that I was gay, but I didn’t know how to deal with it at all. I thought they were wildly glamorous.”Callow once made an undoubtedly glamorous appearance in church himself, but not in a manner of which the Society of Jesus would have approved. “I’d dressed up as a gypsy and raided my mother’s cosmetics, using her nail varnish.” Her punishment was to refuse to tell him how to take it off; he served as an altar boy the next day in surplice and painted nails.Callow left the booksellers after writing a long letter to Laurence Olivier telling him what an enlightened organisation he was running at the Old Vic. “There was, curiously, a little enclave of screaming homosexuality in one of the suburbs of Belfast.

I thought that if I got out of the country I would be freer – ludicrous, of course, in Ulster at that time.”Although Callow didn’t manage to “consummate” an affair in his nine months at Queen’s, he did discover a small group of freer thinkers. To his surprise, Olivier wrote back and offered him a job in the box office. Once he tried to break into the tabernacle in the school chapel to snatch the host stored there “I wanted it in my hands I wanted to have Christ’s body for my own I was also fantastically enamoured of the Jesuits. Recalling how his Arcadian expectations of working in a booksellers (his first job) were dashed, he says: “I found myself carrying round large piles of Mills & Boon from one shelf to another. They were mostly going to Pontypridd.” The prosaic nature of the contrast does not need to be elucidated.

It lands on the humour buds as softly as a delicate amuse bouche. He’s self-aware but physically comfortable with his presence: he repeatedly raises a hand to his large lower jaw and rubs it vigorously upwards, rumpling his nose, in which, at other times, he magisterially truffles for mucal barricades daring to obstruct the Callow nasal passages.The young Simon also had an extreme interest in Catholicism, admitting to displaying “symptoms of religious mania” and creating his own pious sodalities in which he led the prayers. In the flesh he seems slimmer, too; his slight paunch suggesting not the consumption of too many burgers but late-night bottles of red wine and feasts of the Proven? cuisine he enjoys. “I particularly like things like duck casserole,” he says, “that whole range of tastes that slowly… declare themselves in your mouth.” He describes his cooking as “clodding” and “clumsy”, but he is being modest.His personal style is refined, as is his wit.

Either I would, as it were, go native, and assume that perhaps not entirely lovely accent, or go even further in the direction that I already spoke to try to maintain the purity of my vowels.” Fascinated by this boy who had arrived “from home”, local whites would make him stand on a table and declaim “God Save The Queen” just to hear his accent.During our lunch, I notice a difference in the Callow tones, a swiftness and a clipped quietness lacking the roaring gravy one remembers from his screen roles. So they cultivated techniques to get what they wanted or needed.”Even as a child in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, where Callow lived from the age of nine to 12, he was conscious of nurturing this nascent Stradivarius of an instrument “There was a definite, clear choice. “My mother believed deeply that the voice was a passport to respect, and to many things you might want,” he explains. “My grandmother had an exceptionally musical speaking voice, and they did encourage me to think about the way I spoke. It wasn’t a straitjacket, but you must remember that the women I grew up around were powerless; they had no money, they had no men, they had no influence or authority. We were nouveau pauvre, and I suppose that’s partly what the Mater thing was about.