Too much is never enough

SIMON CALLOW materialises out of the cheerless gloom of a church hall in south London. "Darling, lovely to see you again," he beams before announcing in a stage whisper, lest he disturb his fellow thespians rehearsing in the room behind us, "Now, I want you to go to the end of the street, where you will find a little restaurant called the Lobster Pot.

"The table is booked in my name. Tell them to serve the food I have ordered immediately! I shall be five minutes." As I scurry away, Callow calls after me, "By the way, I've taken the liberty of ordering for you - you're the monkfish."

This perfectly sums up Callow. For he is, according to the Yugoslav film director Dusan Makavejev, "toomuchismo". He is totally over the top. Certainly, he's a bibulous ("I drink gallons of red wine"), gregarious fellow of many appetites, who not only acts and directs, but writes biographies and screenplays, and moonlights as a literary critic for a national newspaper.

Callow eats and talks at a rate of knots. I'm so breathless I feel like a lie-down - and all I have done is rearrange the fish on my plate (I'm a vegetarian) and consume a few tiny, tortured vegetables, while occasionally managing to throw in the odd question when he comes up for air. Although I may be dizzy, dazzled by his talent to amuse, clearly he's on his second wind as he prepares to dash back to the Kennington church hall and emote as Gary Essendine, the egotistical charmer of Noel Coward's rarely performed play Present Laughter. The new production is directed by Michael Rudman, and is coming to Edinburgh this week. The silk dressing-gowned Gary is, of course, the Coward character who remarks, "Everybody worships me, it's nauseating."

Surprisingly, Present Laughter is Callow's first foray into the glittering world of Coward's comedies and, boy, is he relishing it. As he talks, he waves his arms around in dramatic, expansive gestures, twisting his upper body into knots, sometimes leaning so far back in his chair that you fear he will topple over. He talks about Coward, Dickens, Orson Welles (the second part of his long-awaited biographical trilogy of the great man, Hello Americans, is published in May), opera, theatre, film, books, politics, the work ethic that drives him, his mother, his life partner and his "utterly baffling" childhood.

Renaissance man doesn't begin to describe the Four Weddings and a Funeral star who, as Gareth, so memorably and enthusiastically over-indulged in Scottish country dancing that he keeled over with a heart attack and died. It was at the subsequent funeral that his screen partner, played by John Hannah, poignantly read W H Auden's heart-piercing poem that begins, "Stop all the clocks..." People still congratulate Callow on the funeral, which he points out that he obviously did not attend.

The garrulous Gareth is, of course, just one of many roles the 57-year-old has played. On stage he has been everyone from Mozart and Falstaff to Wilde and Dickens. In the one-man show devoted to the 19th-century novelist, written for him by the author Peter Ackroyd, he embodied 48 of Dickens's characters, including Miss Havisham, Mr Micawber and Fagin. Playing 49 people in the course of one performance is, of course, a mere bagatelle for this man. One moment he's acting in Shakespeare, the next he's making a Hollywood movie or starring in a television series - most recently he played "an alcoholic, chain-smoking, marijuana-puffing, womanising GP, who spanked his girlfriends with oak branches and then got bumped off", in Midsomer Murders. "Type-casting!" he declares.

A few days later he was pontificating on the TV politics show This Week, bemoaning the lack of "bottom" - in the good old 18th-century sense of the word - both in today's politicians and his fellow mummers. "It's the bland leading the bland," he sighs.

The next moment, though, you discover him directing a play or a film or an opera. In 2008, he will direct The Magic Flute in London, although he's unable to divulge where exactly. Then there are the musicals he has directed: Carmen Jones, My Fair Lady, The Pajama Game... Last year he even appeared in a musical for the first time, playing an all-singing Count Fosco in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White. He took some persuading, he says, because he has put it about for years that he can't sing, won't sing.

He was raised as "a devout little Catholic" in South Kensington, in the company of women - a great-grandmother, two grandmothers, a plethora of aunts and his mother, Vera, since his parents were separated. One of his grandmothers was a professional singer, "a fine mezzo with perfect pitch". It pained her deeply if someone in the family hit a wrong note. "Her signature tune was 'Softly Wakes My Heart', from Samson et Dalila," he says.

As a performer, therefore, he opted for the voice beautiful, influenced by John Gielgud, who was famed for his ability to 'sing' Shakespearean blank verse. "Of course, no one knows how to do this any more," Callow says. "Actors will try to be as staccato as possible; no one has the legato in speaking Shakespeare. No one."

Now, though, he has discovered a taste for musicals, and wonders whether a career as a hoofer might beckon. "My impulse was always to dance; I danced madly as a child. I was wild, a very innovative self-choreographer," he says, demonstrating by tossing his arms around and narrowly missing the waiter. "Of course, I was showing off; I was a dreadful exhibitionist, but I'm rather good at inventing steps - even Twyla Tharp admitted that when she choreographed me in Amadeus. Oh yeah, I got rhythm. Boy, have I ever. So you may yet see me tap-dancing. John Gielgud couldn't dance... As the critic Ivor Brown once noted, 'His legs were meaningless.'"

Callow also writes, and has produced 15 books - including the first part of the Welles trilogy, a book on Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, and Shooting the Actor, a wildly funny diary charting his unhappy experiences working with Makavejev (he of the "toomuchismo" remark) on the film Manifesto. His first book, though, was the confessional and contentious Being an Actor, in which he was the first high-profile British actor to come out as a gay man. He also wrote about his beginnings in the theatre in "dour Edinburgh", where he "writhed around" in the Assembly Hall during his first job, in The Thrie Estaites, yelling, "Noo!" and "Aye!" and banging away in Lallans.

By an uncanny coincidence, the day he began acting professionally was the day his father, an alcoholic, died in Africa, where Callow had lived with his parents between the ages of nine and 12. The police in Lusaka got in touch with the company in Edinburgh. The director said, "Simon, I would like to take you for a drive." The actor thought this strange, but since it was his first day he assumed that this was what people did in professional theatre. He hardly knew his father, so he had no real feelings of regret. He says, "Mainly, though, I was sad that a man could die and his son feel so little."

He has always been close to his mother, whom he called Mater. He visited her the other day, laden with gifts. "It's your birthday," he told her. "Would you like to know to what great age you have attained?" When he announced that she was 87, she asked how old he was. "I'm 57," he replied. "No! You look much, much older," she declared. Callow laughs loudly at this, then adds quietly, "I've become her parent; I suppose I'm her father now."

His childhood was "nouveau pauvre", although his secretary mother used to believe the family were Habsburgs. "Actually, they were just painters from Dusseldorf, which is as far from being a Habsburg as you can possibly be."

Nonetheless, his great-grandfather was a clown at the Tivoli in Copenhagen, then a ringmaster, then an impresario. Another grandfather coached Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Hamlet, and his grandmother ran away from home to go on the stage before the First World War. "This was all legend to me, of course," he says.

But it's not surprising that Callow became an actor and writer, after going to Queen's University, Belfast - "albeit briefly". He has written the definitive biography of Charles Laughton - "I simply cannot bear to read it now" - and some day soon he intends to write a memoir. "I know, I know, it's not as if there's a shortage, but I want to write about my childhood, which greatly baffled me. I think childhood is a baffling state anyway. I had rather a happy childhood, but I do want to write about it in order to make sense of it."

It never rains but it pours books by Simon Callow. "Or sorrows come not as single spies but in battalions," he murmurs, adding that he has already written one memoir anyway, Love Is Where It Falls, about the extraordinary friendship he had as a young actor with the legendary literary and theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay. She was his friend first, then his agent. "She was the most intense and thrilling individual I've ever met, just in terms of her ability to create adrenaline around her by the most elegant means.

"What was remarkable about her was that she judged by the highest standards. It was never last year's West End hit she would be comparing you with, it was Chekhov or Maupassant. What was the point of writing if you weren't the best, if you weren't extraordinary or 'touching' - the word she used more than any other?"

Had Ramsay been spared, she would have been kept busy by her protégé, because he is off on yet another project immediately after the 13-week tour of Present Laughter ends. He'll be fronting documentaries for the Australian series Classical Destinations, in which he tours to gorgeous locations and talks fluently about the likes of Schubert, Brahms and his beloved Mozart on their native heaths. He made his name, of course, as the scatological Amadeus at the National Theatre, playing opposite Paul Scofield.

There are those who dislike Callow's acting style. In his early days he was known as 'Wolfit on Speed' and he recalls an early review claiming, "This production is as bad as Simon Callow's acting - vulgar, coarse, crude and overstated." But he's far too busy to worry about "puerile criticism". Recently, he completed the first draft of a script for America's HBO, the company that produces The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. It's a film biography of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. God knows, he despairs, who will play either role. "Who has the style, the magic, that inherent glamour? No one. We've lost all that wit and witchcraft," he sighs. "But, yes, all these projects - all these little things keep on coming up. I blame my intellectual promiscuity."

So, is it all done with mirrors? He gives one of his rumbling belly laughs, then replies that he is certainly not Superman. "Now Charles Dickens was a Victorian Superman. The volume and quality of the novels, speeches, correspondence, acting and his sheer physical energy was extraordinary. I do have a fair amount of energy compared with him," he acknowledges. "But, yes, energy is probably my greatest gift.

"I suppose I also feel a need to prove myself in some sort of way. I was brought up to believe you had to justify each day on the planet, and if you didn't then that was a day wasted. My family was pleasure-loving and hard-drinking, but only as a reward for hard work done. The work ethic was very strong."

Acting still consumes him. "When it isn't good, you almost feel like crying. Sometimes it's beyond your control and you find yourself in awful things feeling physically uncomfortable. Now I'm only interested in theatre that really communicates," he says, twirling the ornate, heavy gold ring he wears on the third finger of his left hand.

Does the ring mean that he and his partner, the 29-year-old American-born director Dan Kramer, have married under the new Civil Partnership Act? "No. Dan and I haven't married and probably won't. Marriage doesn't have a very good reputation in my circle. Everybody in my family had disastrous relationships. I'm all for weddings, though. We've been to several - old friends, gay couples who have been together for decades. Oh yes, I do love a good wedding... Any reason to party."

As if all this hyperactivity were not enough, he has also taken up cookery. "I was always daunted by the brilliance of others, but I find cooking extremely rewarding and I'm a rather adventurous cook." You would expect nothing less.

Does this mean that there's a recipe book on the stocks? "Funny you should say that," he replies. "I do have a very good idea for a cookery book, which I'll probably write soon." Jamie Oliver, be afraid. Very afraid.

• Present Laughter, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, March 28 to April 1