Personal Life
While at university, West was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and later briefly the Socialist Alliance; West has been a left-wing activist for many years; he was a critic of Tony Blair's New Labour government.
As a choral singer, West participated in the May 2006 Choir of London tour to Jerusalem and the West Bank, where he also gave poetry readings as part of the concert programme. In April 2007, he again joined the Choir of London in their tour of Palestine, directing The Magic Flute. West became the patron of Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus in February 2008, having been the narrator for a concert of theirs in February 2002. He is also a patron of London children's charity Scene & Heard, Eastside Educational Trust and Mousetrap Theatre projects.
Between 2007 and 2011, he lived with playwright Laura Wade.
West has appeared alongside his actor parents on several occasions; with his mother Prunella Scales in Howards End and Stiff Upper Lips, and with his father Timothy West on stage in A Number, Henry IV Part I and Part II. In two films - Iris (2001) and the 1996 television film Over Here, Sam and his father have played the same character at different ages. In 2002 all three family members performed in Stravinsky's The Soldiers Tale at the St Magnus Festival on Orkney and in 2006 they gave a rehearsed reading of the Harold Pinter play Family Voices as part of the Sheffield Theatres Pinter season.
He is an Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, vice-chair of the National Campaign for the Arts and a member of the council of the British Actors' Union, Equity. He frequently speaks in public on arts funding issues.
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“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To ‘see the light’ too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)