Description:
In the summer of 1980, actor Simon Callow met the legendary playwrights' agent Peggy Ramsay--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 succinctly puts it. But love it was--an intense, passionate affair that lasted several years during which Ramsay showered Callow with gifts, spiritual and material, despite his continuing relationship with his Egyptian lover, Aziz Yehia. 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 ultimate death with a remarkable lack of sentimentality. Reading the openhearted love letters of an intensely private and at times vulnerable woman makes for some discomfort, 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
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