Michael Gambon, a craggy-faced fixture of the stage and screen who acquired a reputation as one of Britain’s finest actors — subtle, versatile, endlessly surprising — before winning over a new generation of viewers as Albus Dumbledore, the wise headmaster in the Harry Potter films, died Sept. 27 at 82.
Across a nearly six-decade career, Mr. Gambon appeared in more than 170 movies and television shows while working regularly on the British stage, starring in Shakespearean dramas as well as modern masterworks by Alan Ayckbourn, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Equipped with a gravelly voice and burly 6-foot frame, Mr. Gambon often played characters who were a little bent, a little twisted, explaining to an interviewer that he liked “being rough around the edges,” even if that meant he seldom played romantic leads.
Reviewers and peers widely recognized him as one of the finest and most versatile actors of late 20th century English theater. New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow wrote in 1987 that Mr. Gambon was “almost unrecognizable from role to role,” playing parts that ranged from the buffoonish butler Sprules, in the 1920s farce “Tons of Money,” to the turbulent longshoreman Eddie Carbone, in a 1987 revival of Arthur Miller’s drama “A View From the Bridge.”
Directed by Ayckbourn at the National Theatre in London, the Miller drama earned Mr. Gambon one of his three Laurence Olivier Awards — he was nominated for 13 in all — and featured a shocking scene in which he hurled a table against the wall as his character’s wife and niece cowered nearby. As an aid to his performance, he refused to allow his costume to be washed, taking it home with him during breaks in the production so that he could ensure it remained appropriately filthy, heavy with sweat and grime.
“You don’t want to talk about acting. You want to do it,” he told the Guardian in 1988, dismissing questions about his technique while preparing for his next role, as Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. “If you start explaining things, they lose their power.”
By then, Mr. Gambon had begun to reach a wider audience as the star of the 1986 BBC miniseries “The Singing Detective,” a brooding genre mash-up written by Dennis Potter. As Philip E. Marlow, he was a Raymond Chandleresque mystery writer who, frail and feverish with a chronic skin condition, slips between past, present and somewhere else entirely, imagining himself as the sleuth from one of his novels while occasionally breaking into song.
The character was profoundly cynical, wrote Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, “and yet you feel for him, partly because Gambon plays him without any groveling for sympathy, partly because even in his wild ramblings he keeps making sense. ‘Minute by minute we make our own lives; that is the point,’ he says in existential summation.”
The show helped propel Mr. Gambon to further screen work, including roles in acclaimed films such as Peter Greenaway’s darkly comic “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” (1989), in which he co-starred as the memorably crude thief of the title; Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” (2001), as a 1930s aristocrat whose murder sets the plot in motion; and the Oscar-winning historical drama “The King’s Speech” (2010), as King George V, whose heir struggles to conquer a stutter.
But he became best known for playing Dumbledore, the white-bearded headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, inhabiting one of the most beloved characters in a film franchise that has grossed more than $7.7 billion worldwide.
Mr. Gambon inherited the role from Richard Harris, who appeared in the first two film adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s novels before his death in 2002. While Harris dressed in heavy robes for the part, Mr. Gambon wore silks and carpet slippers, adopting a looser, more mischievous approach for six films in the series, beginning with “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004).
His performance won him legions of admirers, including children who stopped him in the street to ask if he was really Dumbledore, or who awkwardly confused him with Ian McKellen, another renowned British actor known for playing a wizard (Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies).
Mr. Gambon was far from thrilled with the attention, and he seemed almost eager to goad the franchise’s hardcore fans when he declared that he had little interest in reading the books. He rarely gave interviews (“I’m always astonished that people want to know anything about me,” he claimed) and when he did he sometimes stretched the truth, whether out of a desire for privacy or as a way to see if a reporter was paying attention, or perhaps as a means of clowning around to avoid talking about himself.
It was not true, for instance, that he had started his career in the Royal Ballet, only to give up dance after falling off the stage — although Mr. Gambon acknowledged that he liked to tell that story early in his career, complete with a detail about how he “fell through the timpani.”
But if Mr. Gambon had an aversion to the truth offstage, he seemed fully committed to it while acting in plays. Acting was a fixation, he told the Observer newspaper in 2004, a calling that was no less consuming than being a priest. And as he saw it, appearing in Harry Potter movies and other blockbusters was a vehicle for funding that work.
“Paul Schofield said something like, ‘If I’m not acting in a play, I don’t really exist,’” Mr. Gambon said. “Those weren’t the exact words, but he meant it’s only when I’m acting in a play that I’ve got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?”
Michael John Gambon was born in Dublin on Oct. 9, 1940. His mother was a seamstress, and his father was an engineer who moved the family to London to help in the city’s postwar reconstruction.
Mr. Gambon left school at 15 to work as an apprentice toolmaker, an experience that sparked a lifelong interest in machinery and mechanics. When he became wealthy, he collected a fleet of expensive cars — including a red Ferrari that he used “for posing around London” — and hundreds of antique guns and clocks.
A self-described “malcontent,” he completed his apprenticeship but decided to try acting in his early 20s, cobbling together a fake resume to land a minor role in 1962 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The next year, he returned to London to join Laurence Olivier’s newly founded National Theatre, then based at the Old Vic.
Mr. Gambon spent nearly four years working his way from spear carrier to secondary roles. Told that there were few prospects for further advancement, he left to join the Birmingham Repertory Theatre with support from Olivier and starred in Shakespearean plays including “Othello” and “Macbeth.”
In the late 1960s, his top billing in the BBC historical drama “The Borderers” led to an unlikely audition to play master spy James Bond. In an interview with the Independent, Mr. Gambon recalled that he was a poor salesman for himself in a role that required prodigious sex appeal, telling 007 producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, “I haven’t got nice hair and I’m a bit fat.” The part, for “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), went to Australian model George Lazenby.
The self-deprecating Mr. Gambon said he was barely adequate as an actor in those years and entirely unphotogenic. He saw his future mostly in theater and, beginning with a 1974 role as a dimwitted veterinarian in “The Norman Conquests,” he developed a long association with Ayckbourn, the playwright and director. He won two Olivier Awards for starring in Ayckbourn comedies, in 1985 for “A Chorus of Disapproval” and in 1990 for “Man of the Moment.”
His ability to play mercurial characters was later showcased in David Hare’s “Skylight,” which played in London’s West End before reaching Broadway in 1996. As a wealthy restaurateur conflicted about reconnecting with his mistress (played by Lia Williams), he received a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a play.
Mr. Gambon, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998, continued to embrace acting risks in later years, as when he deployed a shape-shifting accent (by turns Welsh, Irish, Cockney and Geordie) for a 2000 revival of Pinter’s “The Caretaker.” “I live in fear of being a contented passenger,” he said. “I’d rather get parts I can’t play.”
He also remained busy on-screen, starring as a pipe-smoking sleuth in the British miniseries “Maigret” (1992-93) before taking on more sinister film roles as a tobacco executive in “The Insider” (1999) and a crime lord in “Layer Cake” (2004). On television, he earned Emmy nominations as President Lyndon B. Johnson in the HBO movie “Path to War” (2002) and as the neurotic Mr. Woodhouse in the BBC serial “Emma” (2009).
In 1962, Mr. Gambon married Anne Miller, with whom he had a son, Fergus. They separated in the early 2000s when Mr. Gambon moved in with Philippa Hart, a set decorator whom he met while working on the TV movie “Longitude.” He and Hart later had two sons, Tom and Will.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
By his late 60s, Mr. Gambon was increasingly struggling to remember his lines. He was hospitalized twice with panic attacks he suffered in rehearsal and began performing with an earpiece, allowing him to get his lines fed by an aide. He continued to work in film and television but retired from the stage in 2015 — a blow, he said, after he had spent years embracing theater roles, the knottier the better.
“We’re all deeply complex, aren’t we?” he asked in the Observer interview, reflecting on his technique. “We’re all that much on the surface,” he continued, holding his hands close together, “and that much” — now he moved them far apart — “beneath: the subtext of life. And that’s the acting. The subliminal surface there and the vast, vast chasm of everything — bringing some of that to the surface, suggesting it.”
Adela Suliman contributed to this report.
