He was a great actor without any of the nonsense that sometimes goes with it. He could have breezed through Question Time, but he preferred to do Top Gear.
By the time Michael Gambon appeared as Tom Sergeant in my play Skylight in 1995, he was already having difficulty learning lines. It wasn’t for lack of effort. Every morning he drove in with the script on the wheel of his car. After Princess Margaret came to see the play, she said rather sourly that it was a very good play, but that I was overly fond of the F-word. I didn’t like to explain to her that most of the Fs were improvised. Michael simply used that same familiar word over and over, vamping to give himself time to think what the next line might possibly be.
Once the text came more easily, Michael liked to show off his mastery by inserting swathes of Skylight into the performances of Volpone, which he was giving in repertory at the National Theatre. He remarked to a fellow actor that nobody understood a word of Ben Jonson anyway, and that if he chucked in some Hare, people would be none the wiser.
Michael took Skylight into the West End in Richard Eyre’s production, and then we all went to Broadway, always with Lia Williams playing opposite. But in spite of huge financial offers, Michael refused to extend. He was slightly superstitious about success, always wanting to move on and do something else. The whole world knew him as Dumbledore, but I can’t say I ever heard him mention it.
I first directed him in 1987 in Paris By Night when he featured as the drunken, useless husband of a Conservative politician played by Charlotte Rampling. In those days people used to say Michael wasn’t a cinema actor, but he already had the special balletic grace of the big man, a loose physical flow that the camera adored. It’s true that his greatest performances were probably for the stage. One of his two high watermarks was when he played Brecht’s Galileo. The tender glutton and the intellectual were held in perfect balance, and he reached into the 1,200-seat Olivier as if it were his living room. And Arthur Miller told me that in A View from the Bridge he was the best Eddie Carbone ever. Miller said, in what for the author was the highest term of praise, that Michael “was like a Russian”. He came on as a large man, and by the end left as a small. He’d shrunk in the course of the evening. How the hell did he do it?
For Michael, laughter and tragedy were inseparable. That’s why he was so at home in the work of Alan Ayckbourn. Often he couldn’t complete one of his favourite anecdotes because he was laughing so much that, like a child’s, his eyes had filled up and tears were running down his cheeks. I remember an awestruck young actor once asking him what the secret of stage acting was. Michael replied: “You try to open the door, ignoring the sweat on your back. Then you try to step through the door. Then you try to close it. Then you get your first line out and you try not to look like a cunt. Then, if that works, you say your second. And you go on from there.”
He had a useful sideline in voiceovers, usually doing what he called his “posh voice”. It was that slight distance between the boy from the working-class Dublin family and the characters he played that gave him a distinctive edge of veiled imposture. In Pinter, he used the posh voice to scare the hell out of you.
He appeared in Page Eight, a spy film that is still happily trending on Netflix 12 years after we made it. He played the head of MI5. One night we shot a long scene in which he apologises to Johnny Worricker, the central character, played by Bill Nighy, for not having trusted him more. I already knew from Skylight that shame, regret and a sense of honour were among Michael’s strongest suits. But nobody could have foreseen the spell he cast over the entire crew who were pin-drop silent for two hours while he worked. At the end of the evening, Bill Nighy said that Michael had always been the only available pathfinder for a young actor aiming to do the job properly. Playing that scene with Michael, he said, was the supreme moment of his career.
Finally, great acting is about aura as well as command, and, in the case of the greatest, about mystery. Around Gambon on stage there was an air, a scent – composed of humour, mischief, and buried, humane injury. He remains irreplaceable.
