Sir Michael Gambon (1940-2023)

Yes he was sensational in that, I saw it the night Arthur Miller was in the audience. He had a very wide range - he was good as both King Lear (RSC) and in A Chorus of Disapproval (NT). Also good in Pinter - I remember him in The Caretaker. The Great Gambon as Ralph Richardson called him. 

For the majority of his career he was a very private person. I recall one actor who was in a long-running play with him saying after each performance Gambon used to just immediately head off in his sports car. After this happened one night the cast realised that none of them knew anything about him at all, where he lived, whether he was married, nothing.   

A lovely actor, so magnetic.

I was backstage once in the small green room bar of the Gaeity theatre in Dublin where he was starring in Juno and the Paycock and when he came in after the performance, I was totally awestruck. A very young Cillian Murphy was in the show and in the bar that night too.

RIP to the great Gambon.

My favourite performances of his were in the Michael Blakemore Uncle Vanya, West End, 1988 I would guess. A truly amazing cast and I can still hear his voice break as he cries 'I could have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky!'. Then there was another Ayckbourn, Man of the Moment, with Peter Bowles where Gambon plays a former have-a-go hero who meets the villain he tried to stop robbing a bank or something for some hideously plausible TV show. He walks into the guy's amazing garden somewhere in Spain and admires everything and so on, then the TV director asks him if he could do that again as they didn't get it on film and it looked so nice and natural. And of course he can't do it on demand - the sight of him trying and failing utterly to be his natural self for the camera is one of the most brilliant comic things I've ever seen. I was weeping.

Only saw him on stage once and genuinely the only actor I have ever stopped and thought: you’re like properly amazing as this lark. I mean it’s easy to look like that when playing an over the top character but he was just sitting in a chair and it was the way he was contorting his body. Sad loss but he had really stopped acting some time ago I think, he became concerned about memory loss…or so I remember.

The Great Gambon won Best Actor at TV Baftas 3 years in a row around the millenium. I'll have to rewatch The Singing Dectective. How Dennis Potter's work would be considered tday would be interesting. He got vilified by the press and moral campaigners but that last interview with Melvyn Bragg where he rounds on the hyprocacy of Murdoch was electrifying.

Hopefully we get a Great Gambon night on say BBC4 where some of his best work can be shown.

Was he in line for the Alun Armstrong role in Breeders? Only one I can think of.

Also one for the unique blessing of the country of his birth and never let the truth get in the way of a good story. He told a good yarn like all of Irish (except for obviously we all don’t.) Nearly bumped into him on the steps of the Gate theatre in Dublin too. He was non plussed chatting to whoever it was. I was mortified. 

He'd be lauded up to The Singing Detective and then immediately cancelled for Blackeyes. Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective absolute masterpieces.