The Great Gambon

I interviewed Sir Michael Gambon (1940-2023) in his dressing room at the Albery Theatre in April 2000. He was an extraordinary actor and an unusual human being. We had a number of good friends in common: he was an easy man to like, but not an easy man to know - or interview. Enjoy what follows.

Sir Michael Gambon has a new woman in his life.   At 38, she is twenty-one years his junior.  At almost 6 feet 1 inch she is his equal in height.   She is an African princess, granddaughter of the chief of the Kalanga tribe of Botswana.    According to her lover, ‘Her conversation is limited, but between the sheets she is extraordinary, quite frightening really.  I’ve never known anything like it.’

More of this excitement anon.   First things first.   We are here to talk about acting.   To general acclaim ‘The Great Gambon’ (so nicknamed by Sir Ralph Richardson - ‘I think he meant it in the circus sense’) has just opened in a new play at the Albery Theatre, London.   It’s a drama (with laughs) about a real man, one John Shank, a seventeenth century actor whose speciality was schooling the boy players who took the women’s roles on the Jacobean stage.   Sir Michael gives a big, fruity, physical performance - engaging, energetic, enjoyably eccentric - which may explain why, when I find him in his dressing room, he looks exhausted.   His thinning, wispy hair is all over the place, the bags under his eyes are hanging down in pleats.  He has the haunted look of a defeated bloodhound.  He is famous for his dislike of interviews, but today - perhaps because we have friends in common - he has decided not to show it.   He plays both good-hearted bloke’s bloke and self-deprecating charmer (Jack-the-lad meets Jack Buchanan) and, when I switch on my recorder, weary-but-willing, without complaint, he does the business.

‘Testing, testing.  Hello, hello.  Golf Alpha Tango Juliet Echo, approaching from the South East, 2000 feet.’  (His private passions include flying single-engine aircraft, making and mending clocks, collecting and restoring antique firearms.)

Why is he an actor?

‘It’s a compulsion.  It’s display, it’s showing off, it’s wanting, needing, to be someone else.’

Was he destined for the stage?

‘God, no.  I’m Camden Town Irish.  My parents came over from Dublin when I was eight.  Father an engineer, mother a housewife.  I went to St Aloysius School for Boys in Somers Town and left at fifteen, pig ignorant, with no qualifications, nothing.’  A rueful smile.  ‘That’s not quite true.  I could play the cello.  I played at the Royal Albert Hall in the Catholic Schools Festival and got told off for combing my hair as we came on.  My teacher, Mrs Baker, wrote to my dad and said, “You have to buy Michael a cello because he shows great promise”.  And my dad took me down to the Charing Cross Road, into all the music shops, and he asked, “How much do cello players earn?” and they told him, “Not much”, so my dad said, “I don’t think we’ll get you a cello then.”‘   Sir Michael gives a wheezy laugh and lights another cigarette.  ‘Terrible, isn’t it?

‘So I became an engineering apprentice at Vickers Armstrong and did seven years.  I like all that mechanical stuff, mending things, tinkering with machines.  But I got distracted, started going to the pictures, saw Marlon Brando, got hooked on James Dean.  I thought,  “That’s who I want to be, that’s what I want to do.”

‘I joined the Unity Theatre in Camden, the old socialist amateur theatre, and helped build the sets and started to act in plays.  When I was 21 my dad said,  “Why don’t you go to Ireland?  They like actors there, you’ll get a job easier.”  So I wrote to Micheal MacLiammoir at the Gate in Dublin - just because I’d heard of him - and he gave me a part walking on, a few lines, that’s all.  It was 1962, he was playing Iago.  He had an extraordinary quality, an amazing voice.  He could whisper in a great barn of a theatre and you’d hear every word.  And he used his whole body in his acting.   He’d play an entire scene with his arm crossed over his chest, his right hand resting on his left shoulder.   He did odd things that made you look at him.  Clever.

‘He wore make-up in the street and an absurd wig.  We took the production on a European tour and I remember walking round the edge of Lake Geneva with him in the sweltering sunshine.  He was beautifully dressed - immaculate suit, collar, silk tie - with his toupe curling up in the heat and his make-up running down his face,  just like Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice. 

‘When I got back to England I was twenty-two, frightened, unemployed.  Then I landed my first London role in the Christmas show at the Mermaid:  Rockets in Ursa Major.  I’ve never talked about this before.  I played a spaceman.’   More wheezy laughter: Gambon likes the absurdity of it.  ‘After that I did my first stint in the West End, as Assistant Stage Manager and understudy in a play with Spike Milligan.  He was quite mad, stood behind me in the wings making farting noises.   It was 1963.   Laurence Olivier was launching the National Theatre.  They wanted six six-foot blokes as spear carriers.  I went along, did the audition and that was it.   I’ve never done anything else for a living since.’

What was Olivier like?

‘He wore beautiful suits, Savile Row, with sharply dropping shoulders.  He wore his watch loosely, so that it fell down over his wrist.  He walked with rolling hips.  I thought, “God, I want to be like that.”   In the day, if he looked at you just once you remembered it - forever.   If he spoke to you, you would not be able to utter a word.   I am not exaggerating.  I remember the time he asked Anthony Hopkins where he came from, and Tony, in his native Welsh accent, stammered “Dundee”.  Olivier said, “How the f--- can you be from Dundee?”  Tony whimpered, “I’m not”.  That was the effect he had on us.  He threw you completely.  We were utterly in awe of him. 

‘Olivier came from a grand tradition that’s completely disappeared.  His Othello was brilliant.   People knock it now, but they’ve got no right to.  When I did Othello not long after at the Birmingham Rep, I simply copied him - the voice, the walk, the lot.  Ridiculous, but it seemed to work.  Actually, as an actor you do copy.   You turn what you see into you.’

Since his breakthrough at the National in 1980 (when Peter Hall cast him as Galileo: ‘Michael was unsentimental, dangerous, immensely powerful, the performance turned him into a star’) and his first TV triumph in The Singing Detective (1986) Gambon has scaled most of the heights and won all the big awards.  Is he satisfied with his work?  ‘Not really.  Not at all.’   Who is the actor he would most like to be now?

‘Robert de Niro, no question.   Last year, when I was filming The Insider with Al Pacino, I told him I really, really wanted to meet de Niro.   Al said, rather pathetically, “Aren’t I good enough?”’

Increasingly Gambon is appearing in movies, but he isn’t yet a film star.  ‘I’m not recognised in the street - well, perhaps for a week or two after a telly like Longitude or Wives and Daughters.  Olivier wasn’t recognised in the street either.   We were in Birmingham with the National and I remember standing in New Street with Sir Laurence looking for the Kardomah cafe.  I thought, “I can’t believe this, I’m here with Olivier - some of this glory is going to rub off on me.”   But he was wearing his hat and his glasses and nobody noticed him, not a soul.’

In the new play, Gambon’s character gives a spell-binding master-class on the actor’s craft.   Has he ever taken acting lessons himself?

‘Yes, in the early sixties at the Royal Court.  That’s where I learnt that I didn’t like improvisation.  I thought it was nonsense.  They’d give you a football, and another actor had to go up and get the football off you by persuasion.  Load of bollocks.’

If he had to give young actors just three bits of advice what would they be? 

‘On stage?  Use the voice.  Give it plenty of energy.  Fill the auditorium.  Make it big.  I hear they’re using mikes at the National now - for Christ’s sake.  What is the point of live theatre?  Anyone can come on and mumble.  Use the space.  Be aware of what the third eye is seeing.   Think about movement.  Be conscious of how you stand, how you plant your feet on the stage.  Let the audience feel your presence.’

Gambon is an interesting mix of old darling and gruff artisan.  He is admired by his peers.  ‘Massive talent, massive ego’ is the general verdict.  ‘Likeable, but fundamentally unknowable.  Like Ralph Richardson, he hides behind his eccentricity.  I doubt you’ll find a fellow actor who has ever been invited into his home.’   I tell Sir Michael I have done a ring-round to discover his faults and flaws.

He starts giggling and pulling silly faces.  ‘Tee-hee.  What have they said?’

‘Not much to worry you.  They say that when you’ve been in a run for a while your interest goes, your concentration slips.’

‘Oh God.’  He pleads guilty.  ‘I get bored and then I muck about.  Olivier would muck about too, you know.  As Othello, he’d walk on in the Senate scene and, under his breath, assume the voice of a West Indian bus conductor and hiss at us, “Any more fares, please.  No standing on the top deck.”’

‘I’m told you’re overly interested in money.’

This he resents.   He looks quite hurt.   ‘I wouldn’t be in the theatre if all I cared about was money.  Of course, I like money.  Who doesn’t?’

‘And some say you’re still chippy about your working-class background.’

‘Oh, no, not at all.   I’ve joined the middle classes now.  I’ve accepted a knighthood.  I’m a member of the Garrick Club, for God’s sake.  And my son, Fergus, he’s a smooth-talking gent if ever you met one, number two in the ceramics department at Phillips.  What do you say to that?’

I am surprised that Sir Michael mentions his son.  He is notoriously reluctant to mention his wife.

‘What wife?’ he says when I ask about her.

Her name is Anne Miller.  They were married in 1962.   For all I know, they may be married still.  I tell him she’s included in his entry in Who’s Who.

‘I don’t think so,’ he says slowly, furrowing his brow, shaking his head, twitching his nose.

‘She used to be.’

‘Really?’   He looks at me with a wicked charmer’s smile and, with his tongue, makes his cigarette slowly wobble from side to side.

Why is he so cagey about his private life?

‘The less people know about you the better.  Ideally an actor should be a blank canvas.  Otherwise you walk on as King Lear and the fellow in the front row whispers to his missus, “You know he collects antique guns, he’s got hundreds of them.”   What does it matter what we get up to off stage, off screen?  

‘I shouldn’t do interviews because I don’t believe in them and I can’t be trusted.   Years ago, when I did Oscar Wilde on the telly, a lad from the Birmingham Post asked me if I found it difficult playing the part of a homosexual.  “No,” I said, “it comes to me quite easily.  I used to be one.”   The boy said, “Oh, really?”  And I said, “Yes, but I was forced to give it up.”  He didn’t look at me.  He just scribbled away.  Eventually, he said, “May I ask why?”  And I said, “Well, it made my eyes water.”  He didn’t get the joke.  He didn’t know it was a joke.’

I tell Sir Michael that keeping his domestic arrangements under wraps is not a risk-free option.   I overheard a couple in the audience discussing him during the interval.  The woman said, ‘His private life is very dark and difficult, you know.’    The Great Gambon rumbles with delight.  ‘Oh, God, I like that.  Put that in.  That must go in.’  He is breathing hard now, banging the dressing table.  ‘In fact, go for it.  Put in anything you like.  Let’s have some fun.  Boys’ games.  If you haven’t got what you want, make it up.  Okay, Gyles?’   Okay, Michael, willco.  Anything to oblige.  Roger, over and out.