Gambon

Though increasingly active in films - eg the Harry Potter series - Michael Gambon is still best-known for his television Singing Detective, where, amidst a lot of on-screen sex, he played a man suffering from the same disfiguring illness which afflicted its author, Dennis Potter. Born in Dublin in 1940, Gambon served a 7-year engineering apprenticeship before joining Olivier's National Theatre in 1963 aged 23. His breakthrough there was in 1980 with Brecht's Galileo. Then came an unconventional Lear at the RSC, with Antony Sher as his Fool - and a lot of Ayckbourn. Recently he has taken the leads in the premieres of David Hare's Skylight, Nicholas Wright's Cressida and Caryl Churchill's A Number - and in a notable revival of Pinter's The Caretaker. Gambon has a passion for vintage cars and antique firearms. His acting can be similarly both epic and intimate. He has been ranked 'amongst the finest, and most consistently surprising, actors of his generation'. He was knighted in 1998. Mel Gussow has interviewed Gambon on many occasions and wrote an extensive New Yorker Profile of him in 1991. This material, plus three new, unpublished conversations, forms the bulk of this book. Gussow has also talked illuminatingly to some of the people who have worked with Gambon, including Potter, Ayckbourn and Pinter, Peter Hall, Deborah Warner and Simon Russell Beale.