Love is Where IT Falls: An Account of a Passionate Friendship - Softcover

Callow, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140290052 ISBN 13: 9780140290059

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

When Simon Callow first met Peggy Ramsay he could hardly have suspected that his encounter with the near-legendary theatrical agent would blossom into passionate love. There was the age difference for one thing: Callow was barely 30, Peggy was in her seventies. And then there was the matter of Aziz, the handsome but mercurial young man with whom Callow was already in love. In this extraordinarily revealing memoir, Simon Callow tells the story of their all-consuming absorption in each other, quoting freely from their passionately unbridled letters. He captures the fiery intensity and reckless gestures, the bliss, the tenderness, the anguish of their love. A love which during its compulsive course was to reverberate with tragedy...

About this title

Review:

In the summer of 1980, actor Simon Callow met the legendary playwrights' agent Peggy Ramsay, and it was love at first sight. A strange sort of love, given that it was "between a 70 year-old woman and a 30-year old gay man, and was never going to be consummated physically", as Callow puts it succinctly. But love it was--an intense, passionate affair which lasted several years during which Ramsay showered Callow with gifts, spiritual and material, despite his continuing relationship with his Egyptian lover Aziz.

Like creatures from a bygone era, Ramsay and Callow were bold, huge personalities; their almost daily letter writing filled with histrionic emotion and grandiose discoursing on Art and Life. Callow manages to turn the letters into an elegant, riveting narrative, exploring the complex triangle between himself, Ramsay and Aziz, Aziz's depression and eventual suicide, the affair's inevitable cooling off, and Ramsay's decline into dementia and eventual death with a remarkable lack of sentimentality.

Reading the open-hearted love letters of an intensely private and at times vulnerable woman makes for uncomfortable reading, but there is no doubting Callow's love and tenderness for his irascible subject, nor the sincerity of his emotion for her, and his enduring respect and responsibility for her memory. --Alan Stewart

Review:

"'This extraordinary memoir brilliantly evokes one of the most formidable and influential figures in recent British cultural history, Peggy Ramsay, muse, patron and scourge of the post-Look Back in Anger generation... Those of us who loved her will be astonished by the vivid accuracy of Simon Callow's portrait; but even those ignorant of her existence will surely be touched, fascinated and challenged' Christopher Hampton, Sunday Times 'Callow has allowed Peggy to play the leading role in this book and she emerges triumphantly: perceptive, funny, unexpected and passionately devoted to her truth about the art she loved the most' John Mortimer, Observer 'The best theatrical memoir of our day' David Hare, Sunday Times"

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140290052
• ISBN 13: 9780140290059
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224