I
love actors. It’s a weakness in a producer, but it explains why I jumped
at the chance to be involved with the book you’re now holding. The vulnerability of actors is extreme. Their power is also extreme. I find it impossible not to love the people who create this world of such extreme highs and lows. And you can see how Simon also loves them, how he documents the way they travel from living as themselves to inhabiting someone else, how he frames them in situ, in cramped dressing rooms and crowded corridors, or peering into their mirrors as if they are trying to identify the people they’re about to become. When Simon and I first discussed this book we saw it as an extension to The Half, his first essay in demonstrating the passage of the actor from street to stage. We couldn’t have known how his photographs would also be permanent records of a world that may, I fear, never again exist so exuberantly. Treasure this trove, please.
Peter Wilson Producer, The Woman in Black, An Inspector Calls