‘The impact he had on my life, and others’, was profound’
Daniel Craig, actor
Learning of Michael’s death was a shock. I wish I had seen him more, and I wish I had told him what I thought of him. He was such a magnificent human being and the impact he had on my life – and that of many others – was profound.
When I was at the National in 1995, he wasn’t even around and people were in awe of him. [Gambon was one of the original members of the National Theatre company.] His presence strode the corridors; I imagine it still does. Then, in 2002, we did a two-hander at the Royal Court: a one-hour Caryl Churchill play about cloning called A Number.
The rumours were true – to an extent. He was a very powerful and intimidating man: fierce, loud and always ready to challenge. He understood how power works, the impact of being gentle as well as vicious, and what it means to explore your flaws without apologising for them.
But he was less tough than I expected, because he was smart and secure enough to know he didn’t have to muscle it out with anybody. And most importantly he was playful, which made him an expert at keeping it loose on stage as well as an absolute joy to work with.
Acting can be an ephemeral, elusive thing that sometimes escapes the greatest. Michael understood that, and if he didn’t feel it, he didn’t do it. He never forced emotion, he would allow it to creep up and overwhelm him. It was mesmerising to watch and born of great experience and a deep well of emotional understanding.
He reminded me of a really cool kid doing tricks on a skateboard, or a surfer entertaining the whole beach, captivating his audience. He’d walk out to the end of the stage and sort of hang 10, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
We hung out a lot when we rehearsed A Number. He loved telling stories: that famous one about how he first met Olivier at his audition for the National and accidentally put a nail through his finger. And how he went to see Olivier when he was bedbound, near the end of his life. “What are you up to, dear boy?” Olivier asked. Michael told him about The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. “Fucking hell!” said Olivier. “Call my fucking agent! Why the fuck don’t I get jobs like that?”
Michael also loved spinning yarns and could be really mischievous. We were once at a tedious fundraiser – both nursing pints of lager and wondering when we could go home. Then Michael started to twinkle. “My mother used to drive cranes in Belfast,” he told everyone. “In fact, she was part of the construction of the Titanic.” They bought it: “Wow! My goodness!” He carried on and on. Having her fly sorties with the RAF during the second world war deep into enemy territory. Just delicious yarns.
However serious he was about acting – and he was extremely serious about it – Michael was very humble, perhaps because he remained deeply rooted to what was quite a modest background. That groundedness had a marked effect on me. I think he believed you had to highlight all the glorious absurdity of our profession, not in a cynical way, just enough to keep you on tip toes. Someone once asked what he did for a living. “I stand up,” he said, “I put on makeup, and I shout in the evenings.”
Michael had a beautiful masculinity with a big feminine side. There was a section of A Number in which he’d lie on stage smoking -–he’d get through most of a packet of Benson & Hedges in 60 minutes. He was tall and long-limbed, his feet were big and his hands were large, yet he could hold himself like a ballerina. The smoke would spiral up from him into the light. I’d just stand and watch. It was very seductive.
He was very aware of his own physicality. Sometimes those long fingers were like hooks; other times, like a dancer’s, lithe and expressive. He told me that he was once in a restaurant when Francis Bacon passed his table. “God, I love your hands,” said Bacon. “I’d love to paint them.” So Michael cleared the table, put his hands down on the cloth, drew round them and said: “There ya go!”
After we’d done the show, we’d always have a quiet pint together, then he’d jump on the tube and I’d ride home on my bike. I miss him. I hope he knew he was beloved.
‘Simply the greatest raconteur of our time’
Simon Callow, actor
I go back a long way with Gambon. We first met in 1968, when I was manning the box office at the Mermaid theatre while figuring out how to become an actor. He was established, though not yet famous, and was stepping out with the secretary of the Mermaid’s production manager, who introduced us. I was struck by his physical presence – not tall but somehow massive. Huge ribcage. Great big feet and long-fingered, ever-active hands. He was attired in what appeared to be a khaki bush-ranger’s uniform. Unruly sandy hair. Cigarette in hand. His demeanour was infectiously humorous, sly hilarity in his eyes, mouth always on the point of laughter. When the laugh came, it was big – a great guffaw. His accent was indeterminate, a hint of Irish, then posh in an almost comically overstated way. He was charming, interested, funny and curiously sexy.
There was also something ungraspable, will-o-the-wisp-like about him. Much later, when we had come to know each other well, he told me that as a young actor, he used to do the rounds of his local pubs of an evening, and would be a totally different person in each one.
I didn’t meet him again for over 10 years, by which time he was a huge West End star, especially noted for his delicate and bewildered vet in Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests, which I had seen more than once, trying to fathom the nature of Michael’s comic genius. Then I joined the National Theatre, and witnessed his staggering performance in Pinter’s Betrayal, with its final sexually-charged outpouring of love. This was a new Gambon, romantic, lyrical, almost operatic.
Shortly after I was cast in Galileo, which was a massive, very exposing challenge for Michael: four-and-a-half hours of high seriousness, its hero broken by the Church of Rome but somehow surviving. Undaunted, Michael just got on with it, filled it, filled himself, somehow, with titanic power and fierce intellectual energy, but also tenderness and generosity. He never, to my knowledge, discussed the part, certainly not in rehearsal; he just did it. His single-minded demeanour only faltered once, and that was on what has since become the legendary occasion when the whole acting company applauded him after he got back to his dressing room. He wept, he said, like a baby, but we never again saw any other form of surplus emotion from him.
Au contraire: while never for a second compromising the part, his antic side kept breaking through. I was playing Fulganzio, the little monk, who, about two hours into the play, addresses a lengthy speech to Galileo, begging him not to disturb the time-honoured order of the universe. Michael listened to this heartfelt plea with undivided attention, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw his long, tapering middle finger slowly, over the course of the seven-minute speech, extending, so that by the time I finished, it was fully erect. Not a single member of the audience would have noticed this slowly-evolving obscene gesture; I, of course, did, and struggled quite hard to maintain the little monk’s deep seriousness.
We next worked together on Ayckbourn’s Sisterly Feelings. His full capacity for anarchy emerged during the run of the play, carrying onstage with him a concealed water spray with which he would randomly douse his fellow-players. Not so long after, he played Eddie Carbone in A View From the Bridge, which absorbed every ounce of his energies, a staggeringly powerful performance in which, by some alchemy, he appeared to be bull-like, all his habitual delicacy excised. Shortly after that came Skylight, in which he revealed layers and layers of complexity with that mille-feuille delicacy he and Ralph Richardson shared.
It was during the triumphant run of this play in New York that he negotiated a deal with a Manhattan garage, whereby during the day he could work on their cars. It focussed him for the show, he said. He was a man of many skills – an expert on watches, firearms, aeroplanes, the latter of which he flew, cruelly teasing his passengers with life-threatening swoops and circlings. His impishness knew no bounds. When the US TV series in which he played Lyndon B Johnson [Path to War] was aired, a very serious journalist asked him which of the many books on the subject he’d consulted. “All of them,” he replied. He had, of course, read none; he’d just done it.
His later difficulty with remembering lines was tough for him, though he carried on as long as he possibly could. Perhaps most poignant was that, unable to recollect names or places, it became difficult for him to tell stories. He had been simply the greatest raconteur of our time, a genius of the art; people wept with laughter when he hit his stride. There has never been another actor, in my lifetime, who commanded such universal affection in the profession. His very existence was a blessing; the fact that such an actor as Gambon – powerful, delicate, dangerous, anarchic – lived and breathed among us cheered us all up no end, and the memory of him will continue to do so.
‘He made up some of Falstaff’s speeches’
Nicholas Hytner, director
Mike’s fame as a hoaxer spread far beyond the theatre, but his delighted victims often saw that it masked a piercing sweetness and vulnerability. He was a titanic presence, but when he held his power in reserve he radiated astonishing delicacy, a grace that was entirely loveable.
In Nicholas Wright’s play Cressida, he played an old actor from Shakespeare’s company whose job – 20 years after Shakespeare’s death – was to teach the boys how to play women. In its climactic scene, Mike tried to persuade the boy who has been cast as Cressida to play her the way he played her when he was a boy actor, with the strange hieratic gestures they used back in the 1590s.
For a few spellbinding minutes, this great bear of a man seemed physically to transform into a teenage girl, his long fingers conjuring desire, his voice high and breathless. Behind the volcanic authority, there was exquisite fineness, even daintiness.
At the National, Mike played Falstaff in the two parts of Shakepeare’s Henry IV. I allowed too little time to rehearse a gargantuan part and it took him a while to master all of it. And there were speeches that he never saw the point of, so he made them up (which was an entirely Falstaffian strategy).
Previews were hairy. “Valour is the better part of discretion,” he announced one night. Pause. “No, that’s not right.” He appealed to the audience. “What should it be?” Howls of delight. “Discretion is the better part of valour? That’ll do.”
Once he got the whole thing under his belt, there was nothing he couldn’t do, and he’d often do it for a dare with the Earl of Westmoreland (Elliot Levey, who adored him, as did everyone else). One night he spent three minutes slowly eating a full English breakfast I’d dangerously suggested he might pick at queasily while he spoke to show how hungover Falstaff was (I’ve had better ideas). Three minutes of total silence, the audience riveted, while Matthew Macfadyen as Hal looked on helplessly. Then: “Now Hal, what time of day is it?” Thunderous applause, not least at the total mastery of an actor who could hold them for as long as he wanted without saying a word.
He rehearsed Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art for a week, and it was obvious to all of us that he was unhappy, subdued by the insecurity that ultimately defeated him. One morning he collapsed. He went suddenly grey: we all thought he’d had a heart attack. He was stretchered into an ambulance and a stage manager went with him to St Thomas’ Hospital. He came round in the ambulance and the stage manager asked him if he’d like a message taking back to the rehearsal studio. “Don’t worry about those bastards,” he said. “They’re already on the phone to Simon Russell Beale.” Which (the theatre being far less sentimental than is generally assumed) we were.
‘He hit his teeth on the glass and spilled beer down his front’
Penelope Wilton, actor
In 1978, Michael and I were in the first production of Betrayal at the National. The preview was nerve-racking, not only because we were opening a new play by Pinter but because the backstage crew were on strike, so we didn’t know if it would actually happen. The country was going through a sort of nervous breakdown – as we are now.
The opening scene takes place in a bar where we have a couple of drinks. Michael comes to our table with the first round: wine for me and a pint of beer for himself. But out of nerves, he put the beer in front of me and wine in front of him. And I thought: “Fuck, I’ve got to drink two of those!”
The first line is, “Cheers!” Just before we said it he swapped the drinks, but then, rattled, he hit his teeth on the glass and all the beer went down his front. It could only go up from there.
I worked with Michael many times and he was a dear colleague and wonderful man. I’ve never met anyone like him. He was very surprising and not what he seemed. A complicated man, particularly in his private life.
But I understand why young men venerated him because he was so charismatic. You were naturally drawn to him. He was witty, entertaining and also extremely nice - a really sweet man in many ways. He could also be naughty.
We were once in a production of Sisterly Feelings: I played Abigail and Michael was my husband, Patrick. Halfway through the play, someone tosses a coin and that determines which sister’s story is told in the second half: Dorcas’s or Abigail’s. Michael was a precision engineer before he was an actor, and he made a coin with two heads. I didn’t know this, but most of the men in the company did, including the one who tossed the coin.
So every time, it was heads – which meant ‘Abigail under Canvas’, which meant taking my clothes off in a tent with Michael, with all the boys getting to go to the bar in the interval, because they wouldn’t have a costume change. I found out about the fix and so, the next night, I called tails. They weren’t expecting that.
Michael made acting fun. That made him easy to work with, because he was so quick and instinctive. He was also very generous - when you were in a scene with Michael, he looked you in the eye. On stage, his concentration was excellent. Off stage, it wasn’t always so good. Yet he’d take direction extremely well if he admired the director – and not so well if he didn’t.
Timing and a light touch are things you can’t teach; you either have them or you don’t. Michael had them. That’s why he was wonderful in comedy but also why he was wonderful in Pinter, which requires you to be very deft, and in Beckett, who is also very funny.
He was aware of what he did to an audience and knew when he’d scored. On stage, he was a big man – yet he wasn’t actually that tall. Nor was he the greatest looker of all time, but he had a sort of sex appeal. He created a lot out of very little. And for someone who was for a lot of his life quite large – he got much thinner as he got older – he was extremely light on his feet.
Other than his size, he didn’t change at all. He stayed just the same and told a lot of the same stories – and they were still very funny. I saw him last year at his beautiful house in Meopham in Kent, with his wife, Anne, and eldest son, Fergus. Michael collected vintage cars and 17th-century pistols, and had a wonderful tool shed where he used to do his precision tooling.
He still knew who I was. I said something about Betrayal and he said: “Did we have a nice time?” I said: “Yes. We really did have a nice time.”
‘He was a wonderfully extravagant liar’
Matthew Warchus, director
I was a very wet-behind-the-ears 29 year old when I walked into the huge rehearsal room at the National Theatre to direct Volpone with Michael Gambon and Simon Russel Beale in the lead roles. It turned out to be one of the most joyful experiences of my life. Michael was not only the iconic barnstormer I’d seen melting the TV screen in Dennis Potter’s mind-blowing The Singing Detective or giving a performance for the ages as Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge, he was also one of the funniest and most mischievous people you could ever hope to meet. I spent a large proportion of our rehearsal time hooting with laughter.
As an actor, he was an unfathomable mixture of titanic strength and tender delicacy. He said he always wanted to be a ballet dancer, but I’ve no idea how accurate that was because he was an intensely private person and a wonderfully extravagant liar. His inspired maxim when doing press interviews was: “Remember you have no obligation to tell them the truth!”
The role of Volpone was a kind of playground for him: a crook in his vigorous prime who feigns imminent death from a mysterious terminal illness in order to leverage gifts and donations from various sympathetic and wealthy visitors. To see Michael instantly transform himself, at the sound of a footstep in the hall, from bounding around with energetic glee to shrunken and quivering, tucked up in bed, was just endlessly hilarious.
Whatever he was in he was a riveting actor to watch, and often did both power and feebleness in the most vivid and extraordinary way. He was undoubtedly a great physical clown – shades of Tommy Cooper – with mesmerising long-fingered hands and a body he loved to contort in unpredictable spasms of voltage. His voice, too, had so much impact, being somehow three-dimensional with an orchestral range of variation from sonorously booming to the daintiest fluting plus everything in between.
We went on to work together two more times, firstly with Eileen Atkins on The Unexpected Man (again I had to pinch myself to be the presence of such brilliance every day) and then with Lee Evans on Endgame (another one of my all-time favourite experiences). As the wheelchair-using master to Lee’s cowering mongrel of a servant, Michael’s performance as Hamm was an audio banquet. I’ll never forget him bassooning the word “Hollow” as he thumped his fist against the dilapidated wall. Or his many nasal, oboe-like complaints about the pervasive inertia. Or the soft, deep cello sound of his disconcerting “You’re a bit of alright, aren’t you?” … all played in a fabulous Irish drawl.
In many ways he was an introverted, shy, even antisocial person, which is ironic given how immensely popular he was among his peers. He really was widely adored. I found it a genuine treat to be in his presence and I grew as a director each time I worked with him. Selfishly, I would’ve loved to have had more opportunities for that.
He will be hugely missed.
‘His performance was a three and a half minute masterclass’
Michael Mann, film director
Michael has one scene in my 1999 film, The Insider. He plays Thomas Sandefur, the CEO of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, attempting to silence former research head Jeffrey Wigand, played by Russell Crowe. Sandefur insists Wigand sign an expanded confidentiality agreement, threatening his family’s circumstances should he not sign – which he doesn’t.
When casting, I knew I needed an actor with a presence that was sinister, ironic and dangerous but also so dimensional and dynamic you couldn’t perceive his outer limits. That was because the character has only one scene in which to personify Big Tobacco, the hostile force against which all else conflicts for the length and scale of the 2hr 45m picture. Michael’s performance is so riven with irony, threat, middle American contempt and malice-as-sport that it radiates throughout.
He became the face of unbridled, corporate capitalism’s ability to destroy Wigand’s life. How Michael’s Sandefur moves his fingers, luxuriates in parodies and mock flattery, his posture is, for me, a masterclass in acting in three and a half minutes.
Gambon was absolutely a joy to be around, albeit dangerous, because you could sit for a quick dinner and four hours and three bottles of wine later, you were still there, four hours away from an early call. Christopher Plummer [who played TV journalist Mike Wallace in the film] was the same. Their tales were fabulous, and I regretted not recording them.
We worked together again on HBO’s Luck along with Dustin Hoffman and my late friend, Dennis Farina. Artistically, Michael had no fear. He populated a character and moment with total focus and intelligence and that unique quality of his. What a terrible loss.
‘When I go out on stage and feel frightened of the darkness glittering with eyes, I think of him’
Tom Hollander, actor
I played Michael’s estranged son once, in a BBC adaptation of Wives & Daughters. I died in a field. He had to carry my body back to the house, weeping. I was too heavy. For the wide shots I was replaced by a dummy. For the closer coverage, I lay on a sort of trolley, Michael bent next to it and put his arms under me and shuffled forward keening with grief.
They shot upwards. A blurry bit of me lolling. His arms, his chest, his face, the sky behind. Michael started giggling at the absurdity. Initially between the takes. Eventually during them. Still weeping. But also laughing openly. Weeping with laughter you might say. He got a Bafta for that one.
That voice: that was a theatre actor’s voice. We don’t make them like that any more. Why? Because it is no longer normal to spend decades on stage in the way that generation did. Because people no longer smoke with that level of dedication. And because actors are now routinely microphoned in the theatre and so are not forced to develop that power. With his passing some of our cultural inheritance goes too.
He loved to speak of his other lives. How as a young apprentice at Holland and Holland, he worked with his long craftsman’s fingers on a gun for Khrushchev. How a piece from his treasured antique gun collection (merely a good fake) was on loan to a museum in Canada. As a pilot, of taking a friend up and faking a heart attack at the controls somewhere over Biggin Hill. Of landing the notoriously difficult Zurich approach on a flight simulator in his friend’s back garden. He loved machinery and mechanics. Cars. Real stuff.
People said he was careless with his gifts. Mostly directors and writers who found him difficult to control. But it wasn’t true. Michael cared so deeply about his acting that when his powers started to leave him he hid it by playing the clown. The anxiety made him ill. But he covered it. There was a lot of cover with Michael. He was a complicated, unknowable man. And he was an artist. Though he would have scoffed at the idea.
He once told me he couldn’t be bothered going on holidays because it was better to imagine them. He played his parts like that. He didn’t research them. He imagined them. If you could imagine it well enough it was true. “They’ve asked me to play a 12th-century German-speaking one-legged pope. You know what? Turns out he’s just like me.” “I’m going to be playing a Mongolian shepherd who dreams of being a trapeze artist. You know what…?” Et cetera. His performances emanated from inside him. From his great, pained, humanity.
He used to say: step out there, look up and out and throw your shoulders back. When I go out on stage and feel frightened of the darkness glittering with eyes, I think of him. Great Gambon.
‘There were water balloon fights before each show’
Matthew Macfadyen, actor
My first encounter with Gambon was seeing him in an Alan Ayckbourn play, Man of the Moment – it was in the West End and my parents took the 15-year-old me as a treat. I was entranced with it, and especially him. He was so gloriously detailed and funny. Properly, deftly hilarious. There was an actual swimming pool on stage into which Michael fell at the end. Bliss.
Years later, in only my second or third television job, we played father and son in Stephen Poliakoff’s Perfect Strangers. It was a wonderful cast – Lindsay Duncan, Timothy Spall et al, but I couldn’t quite believe I was acting with Michael. And he was just so warm and lovely: wicked, elegant, twinkling, soulful, rackety. We had a few weeks of night shoots at Claridge’s early on and we’d stand outside on Brook Street at 3am, smoking, me utterly enthralled and weak with laughter – and he could render you helpless with laughter – him freewheeling his “greatest hits” anecdotes, all about his spear-carrying days at the new National Theatre under Olivier.
He was so kind, too. I had to cry in a take at one point, as I watched his character (as my dad) drunkenly making a fool of himself at a family reunion. Michael wasn’t on camera but he saw that I was nervous and came over very discreetly and quietly to talk to me and encourage me. I was overwhelmingly moved by that. So of course my tears just flowed in the take.
In 2005 we played Hal and Falstaff at the National, in Nick Hytner’s production of Henry IV one and two – another father/son relationship of sorts. Again such fun, but a little wobbly with the lines, a little more rackety. I could sense a nervousness in him. It’s exhilarating playing those great big canonical roles, but frightening too. There’d been a good deal of silliness among the cast throughout the run – water balloon fights before each show in the internal courtyard space of the National. But I won’t forget those flashes of fear in his eyes, standing with him in the wings of the Olivier stage, waiting to go on.
There’s a magnificent painting of Mike by Stuart Pearson Wright. He’s sitting down, half Falstaff, half him, in his dressing room at the National. He sat for it during the run of those shows, and I love it because I see him in it. Or maybe just the bits I want to see, the bits I recognise. Swirling depths, something uneasy, something tender, great heart and rage and wit. An actor to the tips of those long elegant fingers.
I adored him. They say you ought not to meet your heroes but I did, and I’m so glad and so grateful.
‘Watching him, Pinter and Friel were on their feet in tears’
Rupert Goold, director
I caught the sunset of Michael’s career. His performance as Bernie Delfont in my film Judy was, I think, his last on camera; Hirst in Pinter’s No Man’s Land was one of his final on stage.
He carried his legend lightly but I felt his incessant mischief was cover for a deep shyness. He’d always be by the door or the window at a party, half in and half out, like a badger ready to slink off into the undergrowth again.
Like many actors of his generation who had been brought up under Olivier’s spell there was the sense that they could never be as good as ‘Sir’ and, unlike Olivier, he was uneasy around hagiography. He hated awards ceremonies or platforms; even the rehearsal room for him was really only a means to get back to his natural habitat, the backstage corridors and wings of a theatre, wreathed in smoke and nervy camaraderie.
He was reluctant to talk about his craft though I remember him once quietly telling me that when he stepped out on stage in Alan Ayckbourn he knew he had to keep moving like an ice-skater but when he stepped out in Pinter it was as though knotty roots grew from his feet down through the stage with every step. Then he blew a raspberry and started the scene.
Maybe it was the mystery of his genius that drew such wistful adoration from his colleagues. Like the man, it was liminal and evasive, rehearsals and performances could pass with muttered jokes and barely grasped lines in a rustling murmur. On an off-night there was only the hollow of the tree, the woody might of that incomparable voice, gently sighing through the stalls.
Like the Northern Lights, one went to Gambon in hope not expectation. Both Pete Postlethwaite and Anthony Sher had spoken of a legendary rehearsal run of his RSC King Lear where they had cowered at the back of the Ashcroft room, Cornwall and the Fool both dead for Act 2, and watched him erupt with that volcanic power that the greatest actors can command where, however huge they storm, there is always the sense that they have a gear further they may still find.
“Like acting next to a bloody cinema screen,” marvelled Pete and on the opening night of No Man’s Land, packed into a tiny bar before the show with a dying Harold Pinter and Brian Friel, I realised we were all only there in the hope we’d catch him on one of those nights where his endless hands conjured dreams in the air, where that huge face, always caught between the wonder of a child seeing the sea for the first time and the fury of a King losing his crown, broke into laughter and sorrow, and when that many-stopped organ of a voice filled the entire room with its overwhelming richness.
Some actors create, their work is in the details and additions, but for Michael the play passed through him, like air through a flute, and watching Pinter and Friel both on their feet and in tears at the end made one realise why writers revered him. I’m not sure he entirely understood his genius but then again perhaps that is one of its definitions. He simply was and the rest of us bore witness.
