JK Rowling & Harry Potter

Olivier, Dumbledore and two broken ribs

SIR Ralph Richardson called him the Great Gambon. "Sounds like a circus act," notes the actor. Indeed, in the flesh Sir Michael has more than a passing resemblance to a slightly moth-eaten circus lion, with a resonant baritone of oddly gravelly beauty, filtered through what appears to be permanent sinusitis.

He sits down with exaggerated care. Last week in Venice, he says, he went out for an evening’s drinking and fell over in the street. "I was all right, just a bit shaken up, but three days later I’m in London and the pain just got worse and worse and worse and the doctor told me I’d smashed two ribs. There’s no cure, you just have to sit properly, take painkillers and wait for them to knit. And try not to laugh too much."

For an actor as famously physical and mischievous as Gambon, this must be a painful straitjacket; even Professor Dumbledore, Harry Potter’s magisterial head teacher, has now been incarnated with Gambon’s sly sense of fun. The actor adores pranks, especially the ones that require a straight face and his familiar lugubrious delivery. On the set of Open Range he made Robert Duvall crack up before a take by mimicking the intense method actor’s bowlegged gait, and Christina Ricci was completely beguiled by one of Gambon’s prankish tall tales on the Sleepy Hollow set, when he arrived late one morning and told her he had been kidnapped by a gang of teenagers, fed E, dragged to a rave and then taken to a body piercing parlour ("Would you like to see?").

A journalist who probed too deeply into his early career was convinced that Gambon had originally been a ballet dancer until his career was brought to an abrupt halt when he fell off the stage and into the orchestra pit. One suspects these sallies are a form of bluff for Gambon, and that he throws them out in much the way aircraft in the Second World War dropped strips of metal to fool radar. If you pick up on them, he may distract you from seeing his real purpose. Unjustly, probably, I wonder whether I should ask to see his doctor’s sick note.

But illness has not impeded his workload. He’s just finished a three-month stint in the Beckett play Endgame with Lee Evans, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is one of seven upcoming films.

"I only did three weeks as Dumbledore, so I’ve forgotten everything about it," he says. "I come from the generation that’s frightened not to take the jobs that are offered. It’s been bred into me, you know. All I remember was that the costume was two layers of silk and quite light. I think I’m a very physical, very visual sort of actor. My first task in rehearsal is to discover what the person looks like, what he wears, how he does his hair. And if you’re thinking the way the character thinks, your face and body will change. My Dumbledore is quite light so he capers around, he has beads because he’s a bit of a hippy, and he has an Irish accent, because Richard was Irish."

Richard Harris was the first headmaster of Hogwarts, a role Harris was hugely proud of since it gave him new credibility with his grandchildren. Even in hospital, dying of Hodgkin’s disease, he hissed to the film’s producer: "Don’t even think of f***ing recasting."

But, of course, the Potter show had to go on. The first offer went to Sir Ian McKellan, who felt that playing one bearded, white-haired authority figure in a film series was quite enough, and turned the role down. Gambon, an old drinking friend of Harris, although they had never worked together, was the next choice.

His debut as the second Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series only premiered on Thursday but already he has had letters from hundreds of children all over the world asking for signed photographs. "They won’t recognise me without the beard and wig, so I don’t think I’ll get stopped in the street much," he says. Won’t his distinctive voice rather give things away? "Then I won’t speak to ’em."

It wasn’t until 1988 that Gambon found fame - with another Potter. His pained, hallucinating, psoriatic patient in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective won him his first Bafta, although, of course, Gambon managed to bring filming to a temporary standstill when he surprised his co-star Joanne Whalley (as the nurse who rubs ointment on his flaking skin) by painting gold stockings and suspenders on his legs. Gambon hasn’t seen the recent Robert Downey Jr film version but just the idea of reducing seven hours of Potter to a two-hour film is clearly not to his taste.

On the other hand, television, too, has changed. By the end of his life Potter had been vocal in opposing the increasingly commercial mindset of terrestrial television and was aware that the daring work he had created in the Seventies and Eighties would not have been welcomed in the Nineties.

Gambon agrees. "Film in Britain seems to have taken over from television, we don’t do television plays. Television is appalling here, it’s bad. We’ve stopped doing proper drama, instead we do low-budget movies. We wouldn’t have done The Singing Detective nowadays because they’re driven by ratings now."

The son of an Irish factory-worker, Gambon was heading for a life in engineering when he happened to walk past the open-scene dock doors of the Shaftsbury Theatre. One glimpse backstage, he says, made him resolve to give it a go. Despite no drama school experience, he wrote to the Irish theatrical impresario Michael MacLiammoir at the Dublin Gate, listing an impressive string of fictitious credentials, and was invited to join the Dublin Gate tour of Othello with instructions to grease-paint his knee-caps to cover the holes in his red tights.

From there he moved to the National Theatre as a spear carrier in Olivier’s first company in 1963 and for four years shared dressing rooms with other upcoming stars such as Sir Anthony Hopkins and Nicol Stephen. When Gambon realised that he was rather far down the waiting list for the better bigger roles, Olivier helped find him work in the big English regional theatres. Sir Laurence remains, he says, a huge influence on his life.

"We all copied Olivier like mad, because he was marvellous. No disrespect to Tony but you can see him in Hopkins now in some of his gestures and mannerisms. And if I find something hard to act, I do it like him. It seems to work."

Web links

• JK Rowling (official site)
  http://www.jkrowling.com/
• Harry Potter (official site)
  http://www.harrypotter.co.uk
• The Leaky Cauldron (fan weblog)
  http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org
• HPANA (fan site)
  http://www.hpana.com/

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Last updated: 29-May-04 00:39 BST