Michael Gambon obituary: Masterful actor and mischievous interviewee

Born October 19th, 1940

Died September 27th, 2023

The death of Michael Gambon, among the greatest actors of his generation, has been treated as a national tragedy on both sides of the Irish Sea.

He was born on the northside of Dublin in 1940 and emigrated to London with his parents aged six. In the 1970s and 1980s, Gambon, after a spell carrying spears for Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, gradually built his reputation as a theatre performer with no obvious peers. He was funny. He was sinister. He was broad. He was delicate.

Martyn Turner

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Plays by Alan Ayckbourn and (in a very different timbre) Harold Pinter brought out that comic side. Still in his early forties, Gambon delivered a famously volcanic King Lear opposite Helen Mirren for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Though he popped up on television throughout this period, it took his 1986 turn as Philip E Marlow, the fraught mystery writer struggling with psoriasis, in Dennis Potter’s series The Singing Detective to make him a proper screen star. Thereafter, he remained an unavoidable and untouchable presence. He shone in films such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Gosford Park (2001) and The King’s Speech (2010). He won three Olivier awards for his work on the London stage. He returned to Dublin often, delivering notable performances in the work of Pinter and Samuel Beckett at the Gate.

[ Michael Gambon: 'This is easy, acting. Standing there with a spear. Anyone can do that' ]

Still greater fame came when he took over the role of Albus Dumbledore from Richard Harris in the Harry Potter films.

Gambon was a mischievous interviewee who enjoyed manipulating his biography, but we can be fairly sure he grew up in a northern quarter of the Irish capital. Most reports say Cabra. He has also, however, made claims to an adjacent suburb. “He lived in Phibsborough. He told me he lived in Phibsborough,” John Kavanagh, who starred opposite him in Pat O’Connor’s film of Dancing at Lughnasa, said on RTÉ Radio after his death. We know that the working-class family moved to Camden Town in north London as that city was putting itself back together after the Blitz. His mother was a seamstress. His father was an engineering worker.

Gambon has said he recalls little about his childhood in Ireland. “I remember coming back on holidays with my parents, going to the seaside and all that, but I don’t remember anything else. It’s all a blur,” he told Fiona McCann for The Irish Times in 2010.

He was always able to slip back into a Dublin accent at the production of a microphone, but he was realistic about exile. In a 2010 conversation with The Arts Desk, he was asked if he felt himself English or Irish. “I suppose I can’t get away from it, I’m English, aren’t I? All my things are here,” he said.

Gambon began acting with the Unity Theatre near Kings Cross, but eyed an opportunity in the old country for his professional debut. His letter to the founder of The Gate has entered legend. “I hadn’t done any acting,” he told The Irish Times in 2006. “I wrote to Micheál MacLiammóir and I told him a lot of lies, as you do, because I was of the opinion that people didn’t really read letters.” He secured a small role in the company’s touring production of Othello (which actually opened at the Gaiety).

“I wrote to Micheál MacLiammóir and I told him a lot of lies, as you do, because I was of the opinion that people didn’t really read letters”

One can’t help but think of similar pranks Orson Welles played on MacLiammóir 30 years earlier, but Gambon’s ascent was slower than the American’s. With characteristic audacity, he chose a speech from Richard III for his audition before Olivier – who had excelled in the role – and managed to slash his hand bloodily during the turn. But he got the job at the National Theatre, then based at the Old Vic, and progressed from there to larger roles at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

Those who saw Gambon on stage in the 1970s and early 1980s speak as if re-experiencing a religious revelation. His hulking presence was always tempered by that taste for play. He certainly wasn’t a statuesque speaker of hospital-corners verse in the style of John Gielgud. But he wasn’t a buttress-leaping “king actor” (Welles’s phrase) like Olivier either. Tainted by no formal training or family heritage, he made the work entirely his own.

The wider world beyond the West End properly embraced him when The Singing Detective came along in 1986. Skin peeling from raw remains, Gambon was the perfect fit for Potter’s blackly comic dissection of creative blockage. Mary Whitehouse, feared president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, objected to the sex, but the show was a hit and Gambon leapt straight from cult hero to national treasure (both in the UK and Ireland). He followed that up with what may still be his best film performance, vile as the hoodlum gourmand in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

[ Gambon’s games: The mischievous actor has been known to spin the odd tall tale ]

[ Michael Gambon: Actor was both a cult icon and national treasure, on both sides of the Irish Sea ]

The public also got to know the extraordinary man himself. Or did they? He revealed a typical bit of creative reinvention to Jeremy Clarkson in 2006. Gambon remembered getting annoyed at an interviewer who wondered if it was difficult to deal with Oscar Wilde’s “homosexuality” when playing the writer on TV. “I said, ‘Well I found that very easy, because I used to be a homosexual,’” he explained. “He was so thick. I said, ‘But I was forced to give it up ... It made my eyes water.’”

He will have known that many obituaries would lead with his turn as Dumbledore, such is the power of the Harry Potter franchise. Tougher to deal with was his forced retirement from the stage in 2015 due to memory loss. “It breaks my heart. It’s when the script’s in front of me and it takes forever to learn. It’s frightening.”

Gambon is survived by mathematician Anne Miller, his wife since 1962; their son, Fergus, a ceramics expert on Antiques Roadshow; and by the two sons, Michael and William, he had with set designer Phillipa Hart, whom he met in 2000.