A new authorised biography explains how Daniel Radcliffe gave Gambon a helping hand to create some magic on the Harry Potter set and why work was always on his mind until his death in 2023
Acclaimed actor Michael Gambon had to surrender the final years of his life to dementia – but never lost the desire to work. The star of stage and screen was 84 when he died and lived his final months in care home.
But before that was a glittering career where he was known for making up stories or embellishing tales to amuse fellow actors – including making Harry Potter stars laugh on set with a fart machine.
Amongst his stock stories were that he had auditioned to be James Bond, been a dancer with the Royal Ballet and worked as a nuclear physicist. Once when he was late (again) to rehearsal at the National theatre, he claimed that his mother had died in the night. In reality she lived for another 49 years.
And his skill for deceiving people extended beyond his work, as he remained married to his wife Anne but kept her a mystery from the world whilst he had a long term relationship with the National Theatre administrator Lyn Haill and then years later a second extra marital affair with set designer Philippa Hart, with whom he had two sons whilst he was in his sixties.
But when Gambon was knighted in 1988 it was wife Anne and their son Fergus who accompanied him. And these most loved family members would be the two people by his side in his final days.
The last chapter of an authorised biography about Gambon released this week is titled ‘I’m Off On A Job’ and his family recall how he still regularly believed he was going off to work in the mornings, long after he finished acting.
He has been using an earpiece to be given his lines for a a number of years as his memory faded, but his final work was the film Cordelia, released in 2019. Several years before retirement, despite denials from Gambon in public, he had been diagnosed with dementia.
Son Fergus tells book author Jasper Rees how he accompanied his dad to St Thomas’ hospital and was seen by a geriatrician. “He showed Dad a circle on a piece of paper and asked him to mark it up as a clock face. He started with twelve O’clock at about two O’clock and by the time he got to eight O’clock he’d run out of numbers.”
A brain scan also showed “black bits” where parts of his brain was no longer working. After the appointment they went for a pizza and son Fergus told him “you’ve got what you mum had,” but in reality, he thought Gambon had already known but had been trying to hide it.
Gambon also had to stop driving in 2017 when police found him driving the wrong way up a one way street. Going out and trips away from his Kent home reduced and by 2019 he spent most days watching television, eating and sleeping but would “sometimes remember what he had been”.
Wife Anne recalls: “He’d start standing up and say ‘It’s time I got dressed, the car’s coming in half an hour’. Luckily because I’ve always dealt with agents about what time he’d got to go and all that he believed me when I said ‘No…It’s not today, maybe tomorrow’.”
One day after a fall he broke his hip and was unable to do the physio afterwards which meant he lost his mobility.
“I’ve got to work,” he said one night and wouldn’t let go of the idea. Son Fergus recalls three hours of explaining again and again there was “no work tomorrow” and making him lie back down, scared he would injure himself further if he let him move around off the bed. He eventually moved to a care home early in 2023 and grew to enjoy the activities there until his death in September with his wife Anne and son Fergus by his side.
The dementia was seemingly already affecting his memory in terms of remembering his lines towards the end of making the Harry Potter films, as Daniel Radcliffe and Imelda Staunton remember. Gambon worked on six of the eight movies from 2003 until 2010, with the last one released in 2011.
By the fifth film he struggled with long passages of speech. “He was struggling with his lines and that was a shock to me,” Imelda recalls. “I thought that’s the man who played all these big parts, and it’ll happen to all of us.”
But help was at hand in the next few films, thanks to Harry Potter himself.
“It became starkly apparent to him in the scenes they had alone together. When dialogue boards were deployed, they needed to be in Michael’s eyeline. There was only one practical solution to this.
“I would sit behind idiot boards for a lot of scenes and just hold them,” says Radclife. “He would be apologetic, because the board has to be in front of my face. I loved Michael, so I didn’t give a s***. It was also an amazing lesson in that he’s still so f***ing captivating.”
Radcliffe is one of dozens of actors who line up in the book to talk about Gambon and his work in the highest possible regard.
As a young actor he found success in Laurence Olivier’s newly formed National Theatre, leaving in 1967 and wowing audiences in plays by Harold Pinter and Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. In all he would win three prestigious Olivier Awards for his stage roles. Later, screen roles won him global fame, from Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective on the BBC in 1986 which made him a household name, to Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films.
Dame Helen Mirren recalls: “He could be very, very present on stage and very committed and yet at the same time have this parallel universe going on. And I think this was his magic in a sense as an actor. He could be utterly committed and believable and truly ‘in’ the scene and yet there was a part of him standing aside going ‘no you idiot, what do you think you’re doing?’. He was a great, great man. We all loved him very much.”
Judi Dench says simply that he “was sublime” to work with which Sir David Hare describes him a a “genius”. Jeremy Clarkson who hosted Gambon on Top Gear says: “A guest like Michael Gambon was perfection…he was like the internet, because some things on the internet are true, but most of it isn’t true. That’s broadly speaking what I thought it was like talking to Michael.”
The one co-star who saw Gambon in the final stages of his illness was Dame Penelope Wilton, who visited him in Kent after his retirement and met wife Anne for the first time. She says: “Michael adored his son. You could see the trio when he was at home was a very contented little group. He certainly knew who I was and followed the conversation we were having.”
After she reminded him they had starred in Pinter play Betrayal together in 1978, he asked “did we have a nice time?”. “Yes,” she replied. “We really did have a nice time.”
Her assessment of Gambon’s acting is that he had “the best timing of anybody”. “You either have it or you don’t, and he had it in spades.”
* Michael Gambon The Authorised Biography by Jasper Rees is released on October 29 published by Century.
Alzheimer’s Society offers expert advice, practical help and emotional support through information, dementia advisers and an online community at alzheimers.org.uk .
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