Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is an actor and director brought up in South London by his mother,

grandmothers and great-grandmother and any number of aunts he was he says always

destined for adulthood he managed this transition with ease and flamboyance, turning up to rep

rehearsals in Cape and Fedora, his sonorous voice and extensive vocabulary carrying all

before him. As Mozart in the National Theatre production of Amadeus,

he became one of the great young hopes of the British theatre.

But in a long career since then,

including a dazzling performance in the film Four Weddings in a funeral, his versatility got the better of him.

Far more than just an actor, he now says of his first profession,

I've lavished my entire being on it, but I've never felt that it has loved me back in quite the same way.

He is Simon Callow.

That implies that you feel acting has let you down Simon has it?

Well, there's certainly when I wrote that I did have a feeling

that somehow I hadn't quite fulfilled my destiny as an actor as you said people

were kind enough to say at the time of Mozart that I was you know going to be the very thing that I

dreamt that I would be whatever and that was what I expected you know that was all I

wanted that was my my dream when I was at drama school I thought well if this works out

what will happen is that I go into Rep. I then perhaps graduate into the West End maybe go to the

National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company will play a sequence of roles one

after another will become one of the

...