Award-winning actor regarded as ‘the Great Gambon’ for iconic performances on screen and stage for the likes of Harold Pinter, Dennis Potter and Alan Ayckbourn, who won a new generation’s affections with his warm performances in the Harry Potter movies
Admired by his peers and adored by audiences, Michael Gambon, who has died aged 82, was one of the finest actors of his generation. A founding member of the National Theatre, he achieved wider fame on television in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective and on film as Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series.
Self-effacing and guarded about his craft, Gambon’s most memorable performances owed as much to his meticulous attention to detail as to the controlled flamboyance and compressed, combustible passion of what Peter Hall referred to as his “unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful” presence on stage.
To the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, Gambon was “a wonderful, limitless machine, like a Lamborghini”. To Ralph Richardson he was simply “the Great Gambon”.
Born in Dublin, he spent his first six years there before his father, seeking work in England’s post-war building boom, moved the family to London. Raised a strict Catholic, Gambon’s first experience in front of an audience was as an altar boy in the rarefied theatricality of Mass services.
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Leaving school at 15 without any qualifications, he served six years as an apprentice toolmaker with Vickers-Armstrong. In his free time, he kindled his interest in theatre, building sets for amateur productions before taking walk-on and bit-part roles with the Unity and Tower theatres.
Having sent a wholly fabricated acting CV to actor-manager Micheál Mac Liammóir at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, Gambon’s chutzpah paid off. Invited to join the company, he made his professional debut as Second Gentleman to William Marshall’s Othello and Mac Liammóir’s Iago in 1962.
Gambon would later resort to similar exaggerations in the few interviews he reluctantly gave, explaining: “I hate interviews, so I just tell lies.” Among the more outrageous claims he made, always with the straightest of faces, was that he had been a dancer with the Royal Ballet until falling off the stage into a kettle drum. On another occasion, piqued by a journalist’s questioning about his portrayal of Oscar Wilde on television in 1985, he mischievously declared: “I used to be a homosexual, but had to give it up because it made my eyes water.”
‘Gambon was a peerless giant of the British and global acting community, demonstrating huge versatility, craft and emotional heft, with deep intelligence and a wicked sense of humour’ – Rufus Norris, National Theatre
Auditioning for Laurence Olivier, Gambon’s audacious choice of Richard III’s opening soliloquy led to his joining the National Theatre’s inaugural company at the Old Vic. After four years in which he took on ever-larger roles, on Olivier’s advice he departed in search of broader experience in regional repertoires.
Early evidence of what was to follow came with his Othello at Birmingham Rep in 1967, although his breakthrough came in 1974 as the procrastinating vet Tom in Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests at Greenwich before transferring to the Globe (now Gielgud), in which he revealed himself to be an adept physical comedian.
Before the decade was out, he was back at the National (now on the South Bank) creating the role of Jerry alongside Penelope Wilton and Daniel Massey in Pinter’s Betrayal in 1978, which earned him his first Olivier award nomination. Another dozen such were to follow.
Throughout the 1980s, Gambon’s growing reputation as a formidable actor was secured by a series of memorable performances on stage and screen, beginning with Brecht’s The Life of Galileo at the National. In 1982, he stepped up again as Antony (opposite Helen Mirren’s Cleopatra) and King Lear (with Antony Sher’s Fool) for the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Stage hailing his Lear as “a splendid creation by one of our best younger actors [that] certainly puts him in a new class of distinction”.
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Gambon’s collaborations with Ayckbourn were to earn him three Olivier awards, the first for A Chorus of Disapproval in 1985, the second following two years later for his Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge, directed by Ayckbourn, of which the Guardian declared “it shows Michael Gambon shaking hands with greatness”.
A third Olivier came in 1990 for Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment that opened in Scarborough before transferring to the West End. Gambon delivered a “brilliantly observed and delicately executed” portrait of a former bank clerk unexpectedly meeting the violent bank robber he had thwarted years before.
Moving seamlessly between the classics and contemporary work, Gambon continued making impressions, notably in Pinter’s Old Times alongside Liv Ullmann at the Haymarket, as Ben Jonson’s Volpone at the National and, in 1996, in David Hare’s Skylight.
‘Gambon just had to walk on stage and he commanded the whole audience’ – co-star Eileen Atkins
Opening on London’s South Bank, it transferred to Wyndham’s and then on to Broadway, in the process Gambon adding an Evening Standard award and a Tony nomination to his trophy cabinet.
Paying tribute, Hare said Gambon’s performances were always “immaculately constructed; you learned to respect his mystery but behind it was iron discipline about technique”.
The National Theatre’s current
, Rufus Norris, described Gambon as “a peerless giant of the British and global acting community, demonstrating huge versatility, craft and emotional heft, with deep intelligence and a wicked sense of humour”.Gambon returned to the RSC for Yasmina Reza’s two-hander, The Unexpected Man, with Eileen Atkins in 1998, having earlier recorded Reza’s Art for BBC Radio Drama.
As the century turned, Gambon’s run of remarkable late performances continued with Nicholas Wright’s portrait of backstage life in the 16th-century theatre, Cressida, at London’s Albery (now Noël Coward) in 2000. As John Shank, procurer of boy actors to play female roles, he was “magnificently harried and harassed, one of the few actors who can simultaneously portray seediness and greatness”.
The same year he was seen in Patrick Marber’s revival of Pinter’s The Caretaker at the Royal Comedy Theatre (now the Harold Pinter, London), with Michael Billington praising him as “the most physically repellent Davies I have seen”.
Similarly touched by revealing grotesquery was his blind, wheelchair-bound Hamm, an arch manipulator whose suffocating emotional arsenal included roaring threats and whimpering pleading, in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Albery in 2004.
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There was a last return to Shakespeare with a multi-faceted Falstaff, by turns “witty, selfish, delightful, cruel, wistful and lecherous”, in both parts of Henry IV for Nicholas Hytner at the National in 2005. And a last Pinter, the alcoholic Hirst in No Man’s Land at the Gate, Dublin, and Duke of York’s, London, in 2008.
Failing health and growing concerns over his ability to remember lines saw Gambon limiting his stage work, lit up by a late flourish of Beckett – a revival of Krapp’s Last Tape (the Gate, Dublin, and Duchess, London, 2010), Trevor Nunn’s staging of the radio play All That Fall (Jermyn Street, 2012), and Eh Joe (the Gate, Dublin, and Duke of York’s, 2013) before retiring from the stage in 2015.
His swansong was as the pre-recorded voice of the Guard in Pinter’s Mountain Language at the Harold Pinter in 2018.
Atkins, who appeared with him in All That Fall, recalled that Gambon “just had to walk on stage and he commanded the whole audience. He was a great actor but he always pretended he didn’t take it very seriously, but of course he did”.
On screen, successive generations of viewers will variously remember him as a menacing hoodlum in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), as the titular French detective Maigret in the early 1990s, or, indelibly, as the hospitalised, psoriasis-afflicted thriller writer Philip E Marlow caught between chronic pain and fevered fantasy in Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986), for which he won the first of his four BAFTAs.
The others came in rapid succession at the turn of the century, for his Squire Hamley in Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Wives and Daughters (1999), as John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer, in Charles Sturridge’s Longitude (2000), and as a stroke-afflicted son reluctantly attending a tense family reunion in Stephen Poliakoff’s Perfect Strangers (2001).
He was twice nominated for Primetime Emmy awards, for Path to War (2002), in which he played American president Lyndon B Johnson, “a performance of fire and brimstone” the Washington Post approvingly noted, and Emma (2010). He won two Screen Actors Guild accolades, for Gosford Park (2001) and The King’s Speech (2010).
‘Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. I’m not really a character actor at all’ – Michael Gambon
Later films were typically varied, including a curmudgeonly director in Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet (2012), Private Godfrey in the remake of Dad’s Army (2016), the Renée Zellweger-starring Judy (2019), and as the narrator of the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016) and supplying voice-overs for the two Paddington films (2014 and 2018).
As Albus Dumbledore, the sagacious headmaster of the wizarding school Hogwarts in the phenomenally successful Harry Potter film franchise, a part he took over from Richard Harris following his death in 2002, Gambon attracted a legion of new admirers over the course of six films.
Characteristically, he refused to indulge an interviewer’s queries about his approach to the role, deferentially insisting: “I just stick on a beard and play me. Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. I’m not really a character actor at all.”
Appointed a CBE in 1990, he was knighted for services to drama in 1998.
Michael John Gambon was born on October 19, 1940, and died on September 27. He is survived by his wife, Anne, and their son, Fergus, and two sons, Tom and William, from his relationship with Philippa Hart.
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