MICHAEL GAMBON

(19 October 1940 - 28 September 2023)

The Anglo-Irish actor Sir Michael Gambon, who has died from pneumonia at the age of 82, enjoyed a long and fulfilling career. He never disappointed in whatever role he undertook, and he well deserved his knighthood for his services to drama in 1998. He was a great actor but also bit of a rogue who never sought fame, guarded his privacy, turned down most interviews, and invented fake stories about himself and his career. Michael John Gambon was born in Dublin to Edward Gambon, an engineer, and his wife Mary Hoare, a seamstress. When Michael’s father went to work on the rebuilding of the capital after the war, the family moved to London and then to Kent, where he attended Crayford Secondary School, leaving without qualifications. He became an apprentice toolmaker and a qualified technician with an interest in antique guns, clocks and classic cars, a hobby he pursued all his life. 

His first taste of theatre was a small part in Othello in 1962 when he was 24. He contacted Micheal MacLiammoir at Dublin’s Gate Theatre who believed Gambon’s cv, a litany of parts he had never played – so he was hired. Two years on, when Laurence Olivier saw him audition for his new National Theatre at the Old Vic, Gambon went from small roles to named parts. That was the beginning of a splendid career that led to more theatre, films and TV work. In 1967, Olivier suggested he gain experience in a provincial theatre, so he joined Birmingham Rep and played lead roles in Coriolanus, Macbeth and, his own favourite, Othello.

In 1974, Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, moved from Scarborough to London. The director, Eric Thompson, cast Gambon as a miserable veterinarian. From Table Manners, with Tom Courtenay, Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal, I remember Gambon, who was a tall, rangy man but this role made him squeeze himself into a tiny, child’s chair and his discomfort was constantly hilarious. Well-established as a fine actor, Gambon joined the National for Peter Hall’s production of Pinter’s Betrayal, in which he, a big man, seemed at home in a delicate performance given on the enormous Olivier stage. The National also gave him Brecht’s Galileo, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge and more Pinter: Old Times, No Man’s Land, Mountain Language, The Homecoming, and David Hare’s Skylight – in New York Gambon secured a Tony nomination.

He was in Yasmina Reza’s The Unexpected Man, a revival of Pinter’s The Caretaker, Caryl Churchill’s A Number, and he played Falstaff at the National. He excelled in Beckett’s Endgame, Eh Joe and All That Fall, which he also played in New York. Gambon then returned to the Gate in Dublin for Krapp’s Last Tape. By 2015, however, he had difficulty remembering his lines, so left the theatre. Still, he had started to build a career in films and TV. He was in Pinter’s screenplay of Turtle Diary, David Hare directed him in Paris by Night and he was a doctor in The Rachel Papers, from Martin Amis’s book. With Brando he did A Dry White Season and he made a mark in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, top-billed as the mobster Albert Spica.

He was another gangster in Mobsters (1991), appeared with Albert Finney in A Man of No Importance and The Browning Version, was in the film of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and joined an all-star cast for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. After Richard Harris died in 2002, Gambon took over the part of Albus Dumbledore in six Harry Potter instalments, and it is probably the part for which Gambon will be best-remembered, if only for his imposing figure and long white beard. Other later films included The King’s Speech, as George V, Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet, as a dreary old director, and the Paddington duo as the voice of Uncle Pastuzo. He was a villain in King of Thieves on the Hatton Garden heist and his last film was Judy, playing the impresario Bernard Delfont.

Early on he took to TV and will perhaps be best remembered for The Singing Detective, Dennis Potter’s extraordinary series about a writer in hospital with psoriasis and writer’s block, dreaming about his characters, their plots and setting them to songs of the 1930s and 1940s. It was an amazing series and Gambon won awards from Bafta, the Royal Television Society and the Broadcasting Press Guild, while the Irish Film & TV Awards gave him a Lifetime Achievement gong, while the series became one of the BFI’s Greatest British Television Programmes. In his time Michael Gambon won three Oliviers, five Baftas, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Honorary Richard Harris Award in the British Independent Film Awards, plus two Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards and three Evening Standard drama awards, at one of which he opened his acceptance speech with "Fuck me!"

Michael Gambon married the mathematician Anne Miller in 1962 and they have a son, Fergus, a ceramics expert. During Gambon’s affair with the set-designer Philippa Hart, 25 years younger than him and who had two sons, he left his wife but was later reunited with her. Ralph Richardson dubbed him “The Great Gambon” - not bad coming from another great performer, but who could argue with that?.

MICHAEL DARVELL