Devil with a child inside

Despite successes such as The Singing Detective, Michael Gambon still feels that theatre is dressing up and saying 'look at me'

Peter Lewis|Daily Mail

5 April 2012

When Michael Gambon was playing Oscar Wilde for a television film, he went back to his Bristol hotel after shooting to find that his room had been re-let and his clothes had disappeared.

The citizens of Bristol were then treated to the sight of Oscar Wilde, in full wig and costume with silver-topped cane, rampaging through the streets pursued in a car by the offending TV production manager at whom he was shouting obscenities.

Oscar vaulted over the crash barrier of a motorway, crossed the traffic, reached the station and got away on a train to London. He spent the journey drinking in the buffet car. At Paddington the BBC handlers were waiting for him at the barrier. Oscar threatened to kill them before leaping past, running for a cab and vanishing.

At the next day's shooting the director merely said 'good morning' and never referred to the episode. 'So,' concludes Gambon telling the story, 'there's a bit of a prima donna in me.'

He emerges from this entertaining book as a master of understatement but not of underaction, as anybody knows who has experienced his elemental force in the theatre - as Galileo, Lear, Eddie Carbone, or most recently Hamm, the dying tyrant of Samuel Beckett's Endgame.

He is also currently on view as the headmaster of Hogwarts, in the new Harry Potter film, succeeding the late Richard Harris. Both wild Irishmen, but wild in different ways. Gambon has never been able to resist clowning to liven up a long run or putting a bit of dramatic fantasy into an interview.

Gambon told one interviewer who wondered if it was difficult to play Oscar as a homosexual, that it was easy for him since he used to be one himself. After the shocked pause - 'I had to give it up. It made my eyes water.'

He told another interviewer that he used to be a ballet dancer (in truth he wishes he could have been), but unfortunately got carried away and fell off the stage, 'into the bass drum', he added as the journalist scribbled away.

So beware of Gambon interviews - except for those by Mel Gussow, the New York Times theatre writer and critic who over ten years conducted the interviews which formed this book. Gambon's preservation of his privacy is obsessive but, like Pinter and Beckett, he was prepared to open up a little to Mel.

He is a compulsive prankster. On stage this often takes the form of 'corpsing' in order to test fellow actors' ability to keep a straight face. I've often wondered why it is that the most serious actors have this compulsion to giggle - Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh and Gambon made a notable corpsing trio, as one TV director found out in Ghosts of all solemn plays.

In one poorly attended matinee of Uncle Vanya, Gambon took exception to the presence of a painter and his easel in the front row, doing a portrait of Greta Scacchi during the performance. In Vanya's wild scene, Gambon picked up the weighty samovar, rushed across the stage with it, feigned a trip and emptied it over the painter - who was never seen again.

As he says more than once, actors have to be childish because acting is a childish thing, showing off, dressing up and saying 'look at me'. 'I can't think of any other reason why people do it.' As a boy he had no ideal or likelihood of becoming an actor. But he used to carry a banjo case. There was no banjo inside.

No drama school or university for him, but an engineering apprenticeship with Vickers, which he enjoyed. He is a skilled mechanic still in love with his workshop, where he reproduces and engraves antique firearms.

The acting began as stage carpentry for an amateur company which led to small parts, a secret that he concealed from his fellow apprentices.

He learned his craft by observation, after bluffing his way into Olivier's National Theatre Company as a spear carrier. He had picked a good model from whom to study acting on the large scale, which is now so rare that many people don't know what it is. So much television acting isn't acting, he says, it's behaving.

A wicked streak seems to be a necessary factor in a big- scale actor's make-up. He used to fly small planes for recreation from Biggin Hill airfield.

One day he took up the actor Terence Rigby, who had a fear of flying. 'I got over the Thames and went into a very slow drop. Then I had a heart attack. I did the whole thing, gasping, collapsing against the side, then I said: "Just a bit of indigestion." He was furious.'

Gambon laughed loudly at this story. 'It's like a devil in you that f***s up in a play. I don't think I'm the only one. You take risks.'

You don't learn much about the Great Gambon in his private life from this book - he carefully preserves his mystery. But you get some illuminating flashes of what makes a great actor tick.

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