Early Years
Beale was born to Lieutenant-General Sir Peter Beale, and Julia Winter in Penang, Malaya, where his father served as a physician, later going on to become Surgeon General of the British Armed Forces. Several members of his family had careers in medicine. He was first drawn to performance when, at the age of eight, he became a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral, and a pupil at the adjoining St Paul's Cathedral School.
Aged 14 he gave his first theatre performance playing Desdemona in Othello at the independent school Clifton College's Redgrave Theatre; in the sixth form he also performed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play in which he would later star at the National Theatre. After Clifton, he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and obtained a first in English, after which he was offered a place to do a PhD. He graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1983.
Read more about this topic: Simon Russell Beale
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man’s slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)