Fail again, fail better
Audiences love him, playwrights want him – so why is Michael Gambon never happy with his performance? Emma Brockes meets the actor as he limbers up for Beckett
Emma Brockes
Wednesday June 28, 2006
Guardian
The last time Michael Gambon played a non-speaking part was in the late 1960s, at the National Theatre, when he walked on stage carrying a spear, trying to look innocuous. When he advanced to speaking roles, he earned a reputation for treating the script with a certain levity, something that the more sensitive playwrights found mortifying (of which more, later). Now, at 65, he is silent again, this time in a production of the Samuel Beckett play Eh Joe, in which the entire 25-minute script is delivered as a voice-over by Penelope Wilton, while Gambon’s face describes the action. You would think he would lose concentration, sitting up there alone with nothing to say; but it’s quite the opposite, he says, “because you are so frightened”.
It is a source of some amusement to Gambon that, after a career of playing sadists, malcontents and the great Shakespearean anti-heroes, what comes up when you type his name into Google these days is pages of Harry Potter fanmania, analysing his role as Dumbledore. “It could be anyone under there,” he says, of the heavily bearded role, which was fun to play but unrepresentatively twinkly.
Gambon is not twinkly – or rather, his twinkliness has an edge to it, like a bad Santa. There is something rueful around his eyes that suggests apology-in-advance, a sort of weary recognition that whatever he is about to do, it will probably piss somebody off. He looks partly sorry, and partly indignant that he is supposed to be sorry.
Gambon’s ability to cause upset is legendary, and the glee with which he recounts his own misdemeanours is made funnier by his attempts, a second later, to soberly chastise himself for them. In the rehearsal room, he is always the ringleader of any seditious mutterings about the director. After a performance at the Gate Theatre in Dublin of Eh Joe, an American academic asked him what he imagined his character was doing up there on stage. Gambon replied “watching EastEnders”. He looks delighted, then abashed, and says: “It’s cruel, I shouldn’t have. He didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, ‘I’m only joking.'”
Gambon has a pilot’s licence, and his most famous gag – accounts of which have been doing the rounds for years – was pretending to have a heart attack at the controls of a light aeroplane, knowing full well that his passenger, the actor Terence Rigby, was afraid of flying. When I ask if he has been up to anything lately, however, he looks innocent and says: “No, I don’t know where this reputation comes from. I’m quite serious, really.” Then his face lights up and he recounts being in the audience at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival last month and feeling compelled to grab the microphone at the end of a “quite heavy” talk by David Hare. The questions from the floor had been mainly reverential, about the influence of politics on Hare’s writing and so on, so Gambon said: “David, in all your years in showbusiness, have you ever met Diana Rigg?” It brought the house down. “He was quite cross,” says Gambon, “but he’s OK now.” He starts giggling. “Good question, wasn’t it? ‘Showbusiness’ – that would’ve hurt.”
Reverence is not, to Gambon’s mind, a particularly helpful attitude, in acting or in life. He thinks Samuel Beckett is treated a good deal too reverentially and that it puts people off him, obscuring how funny he is. Eh Joe was originally written for television in 1965 and depicts Joe, devastated in his dressing gown, reacting to a woman’s disembodied voice as it summarises his life. His face is projected on to a scrim that covers the whole proscenium, so every twitch is magnified; it’s this that makes the character so terrifying to play, Gambon says.
What Gambon loves about Beckett is “the formality, the frame” of his writing, which Harold Pinter for one might find bitterly amusing; Gambon is notorious for monkeying around with the “formality” of the script. At a recent gathering in honour of the playwright, Gambon told his audience that Pinter had told him not to worry too much about the pauses – which even Gambon had to admit, in retrospect, sounded unlikely. When he played King Lear for the RSC, it came out differently every night. “Some performances, I used to play it at the beginning as if he had Alzheimer’s, but that’s a crude way of finding a device for his behaviour. Then I’d play him the next day with my hand over my face for the whole scene. It’s interesting, the routes.”
Cast members have likened acting on stage with Gambon to being in an unstable dinghy in the middle of the Atlantic. When he played Falstaff in the National Theatre production of Henry IV last year, it came out differently every night, too – “miles differently”, says David Harewood, who played Hotspur in the same production. “People were just coming off stage in fits of laughter, or looking at each other like, what on earth? Other actors might find out what works and stick with it, but Gambon never did that. He always tried to find something new.”
He is never satisfied with his performance. Shortly after his run as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, he says he saw Derek Jacobi do it to perfection and sat there thinking, “Derek, fuck! How could I have missed this?” One of the only parts he thinks he did justice to was Eddie, in the 1987 revival of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge. Of his Falstaff, he says: “I don’t think I was very good. I kept losing my way. Everything I do that’s quite big, I want to do again – I want to learn how to control it. It’s almost as if I don’t know how to use rehearsal time properly. It slips away from me. There are some actors who are rehearsal actors, and some who are not. I’m not. Having said that, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Gambon was immensely popular with the younger actors in Henry IV. He didn’t want the same awestruck relationship he had had with Laurence Olivier, when he worked with him as a young man at the National, although, he says, “all that sort of deference we used to have, for Olivier and Ralph Richardson, has gone out of the window. It’s a thing of the past and that might be a good thing.” And so, he says: “I cared for them all a lot and tried to make them into a happy company by having lots and lots of jokes.”
“People just loved him,” says Harewood. “He was open and vulnerable and generous.” He also instigated a series of water fights that got so out of hand that theatre security raided the dressing rooms, looking for water balloons. “We were threatened with having our windows locked at the height of summer,” says Harewood. “All started by Gambon.”
Gambon grew up in Camden, north London, one of three children of Irish-Catholic parents. He remembers getting Hamlet out of the library as a small boy and learning one of the soliloquies, which he would recite to himself as he walked down the road. “I just liked the sound of the words.” Before he became an actor he was an engineer for seven years at Vickers-Armstrong. He was good, he says. “Very careful. People say how can you be an engineer and then become an actor. I think they’re quite close, actually. Both quite creative. Building blocks. The way a part is structured. Find your way through this maze by routes.”
I ask what he is like when he is not working and he says: “Well, in a way, the truth of the matter is, when you’re not working you don’t really exist. It’s all right for a couple of weeks, cos it’s quite exciting and the kudos of what you’ve just done is still lurking. But any longer than that and you begin to go … ” – his shoulders sag – “… you come into nothing, you become like a shell.” He laughs. “And then you get jealous. I meet Tom Hollander and we go and have a drink and talk about being jealous of other actors.” Who is he jealous of at the moment? “I’m very jealous – he’s a dear friend – of Bill Nighy. Bill’s such a handsome, successful actor. I’m jealous of him.”
In 1992, Gambon thought he was going to hit the big time. He has always been happy in the theatre – “because it makes me feel more legitimate” – but of course Hollywood is hard to resist. He won a part opposite Robin Williams in the big-budget, 20th Century Fox film Toys. Before long people started whispering that he was likely to be Oscar-nominated for his role. “And then, halfway through the shoot, everyone started to get a bit anxious about this movie. I didn’t, because I’m totally thick and didn’t realise what was going on.
“And then one day I was outside my trailer and this guy came up in a golf buggy. And he stopped and said, ‘Excuse me.’ He said, ‘Tell me, what is this movie about?’ I said, ‘Well, er.’ He said, ‘I mean, is it for children or adults?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I got a bit frightened then. I said, ‘It’s more for adults.’ He said, ‘Oh, I see’. And off he went. “And then the director, Barry Levinson no less, ran over and said, ‘What the fuck did you say to him? What did you say to the head of 20th Century Fox?’ I said, ‘Oh,’ and told him he’d asked, ‘What is this film about?’ He said, ‘Oh, fuck.’ By which time they were $100m in.” When the film came out Gambon thought his telephone would ring off the hook with offers. But it didn’t. “What can you do?” he says.
He has just made a film with his idol, Robert de Niro, Steven Soderberg’s The Good Shepherd, the most enthralling part of which was getting to call De Niro “Bob”. Of Peter Greenaway, in whose film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Gambon played one his most famous roles, as a murderous gangster, he says: “Oh, he was great. He’s like a school teacher. He wears an overcoat. He’s intuitive, I liked him very much. That was a good film – weird.”
Gambon is reticent about his private life. He was married, a long time ago, to the actor Ann Miller, and they have an adult son called Fergus. “If there was any way to be an actor and not become well known, I would like it. Does that make sense? I wish you could be an actor and nobody knew about you.”
Fergus works at Phillips, the auction house. “He’s one of their ceramics boys, quite senior. He’s brilliant about Welsh porcelain.” He is also an expert in 18th-century dolls’ houses. “He’s the only male member of the dolls’ house society,” says Gambon, raising his eyebrows. “He’s one of those lucky people that found the job of his life. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
The older he gets, the more Irish he feels, he says. He is going back to his roots. “I feel at home in Dublin, although it’s changed a lot. It’s like every other bloody city now.” When Gambon goes there, which he does, frequently – one of his best friends is Michael Colgan, who runs the Gate theatre – he lets his accent slide into Irish. Last time he was there, he went to a function at Trinity College and for a laugh used his Irish accent all night. At the end of the evening, one of the university professors called him over and said, “Michael, don’t speak like that, in that accent.” Gambon said, “Why not?” The man replied: “It’s common.” Gambon looks thoroughly pleased by this and bursts into peels of laughter.
