He wasn’t just a magnificent actor – he was also a raconteur, mentor, joker, engineer and pilot. Friends including Tom Hollander, Penelope Wilton, Simon Callow, Nicholas Hytner, Matthew Warchus and Rupert Goold pay tribute to the star
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.
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. 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!”
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 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.
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.” Drinks mix-up … Penelope Wilton and Gambon in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, directed by Peter Hall at the National Theatre, London, in 1978.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.
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.
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.
We went on to work together two more times, firstly with Eileen Atkins on The Unexpected Man and then with Lee Evans on Endgame . 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.
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.
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 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.
Matthew Macfadyen as Henry and Michael Gambon as Falstaff in Henry IV part one, directed by Nicholas Hytner, at the National Theatre in 2005.. 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.
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.
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