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.
