Michael Gambon, best known for playing Harry Potter’s Dumbledore, dies at 82

LONDON – Michael Gambon, best known to global audiences for playing the wise professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movie franchise and was hailed by Arthur Miller and others as one of the greatest British actors, has died. He was 82.

Gambon’s family confirmed his death in a brief statement issued on Thursday through a public relations company.

“Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife, Anne, and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia,” the statement said.

Gambon began his acting on the stage in the early 1960s and later moved into TV and film.

His notable film roles include a psychotic mob leader in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover in 1989 and the elderly King George V in Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech in 2010.

But his best-known role was as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter franchise, a role he took over from the third instalment in the eight-movie series after Richard Harris died in 2002.

Gambon played down the praise for his performance and said he simply played himself “with a stuck-on beard and a long robe”.

Michael John Gambon was born on Oct 19, 1940, in Dublin to a seamstress mother and an engineer father.

The family moved to Camden Town in London when Gambon was six as his father sought work in the city’s post-war rebuilding.

Gambon left school aged 15 to begin an engineering apprenticeship. By 21, he was fully qualified.

However, he was also a member of an amateur theatre group and always knew he would act, he told The Herald newspaper in 2004.

He was inspired by American actors Marlon Brando and James Dean, who he believed reflected the angst of teenage boys.

The breakthrough that led actor Ralph Richardson to call him “the great Gambon” came with Gambon’s performance in Bertolt Brecht’s Life Of Galileo at London’s National Theatre in 1980, although he had already enjoyed modest success, notably in plays by Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter.

Peter Hall, then the National Theatre’s artistic director, described Gambon as “unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful”, and recalled in his autobiography how he had approached four leading directors to accept him in the title role, only for them to reject him as “not starry enough”.

After John Dexter agreed to direct him in what Gambon was to describe as the most difficult part he had ever played, the mix of volcanic energy and tenderness, sensuality and intelligence he brought to a role – in which he aged from 40 to 75 – excited not only critics, but also his fellow performers.

As Hall recalled, the dressing-room windows at the National, which look out onto a courtyard, “after the first night contained actors in various states of undress leaning out and applauding him – a unique tribute”.

That brought him a best-actor nomination at the Olivier Awards and, in another great role, as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge at the National in 1987, the award itself.

Again, it was his blend of vulnerability and visceral force that impressed audiences, with Miller declaring that Gambon’s performance as the embattled longshoreman was the best he had seen.

Ayckbourn, who directed, described Gambon as awe-inspiring.

“One day he just stood in the rehearsal room and just burst into tears – no turning upstage, no hands in front of his face,” Ayckbourn said. “He just stood there and wept like a child. It was heartbreaking. And he did angry very well too. That could be scary.”

The 1980s brought wider attention with the lead role in 1986 TV show The Singing Detective, in which he played a writer suffering from a debilitating skin condition whose imagination provided the only escape from his pain. The performance won him one of his four Baftas.

He also won three Olivier Awards and two ensemble cast Screen Actors Guild Awards - for 2001‘s Gosford Park and The King’s Speech.

Gambon was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1992 and knighted for services to drama in 1998, something he called “a nice little present”, although he did not use the title.

A mischievous personality, he often made up stories. For years, he showed fellow actors a signed photograph of Robert De Niro that he had, in fact, inscribed himself before ever meeting the American actor.

He revealed in an episode of The Late Late Show in Ireland that he convinced his mother he was friends with the Pope.

Gambon retired from the stage in 2015 after suffering long-term memory problems but continued to act on screen until 2019.

He told an interviewer in 2002 that his work made him feel “the luckiest man in the world”.

Gambon married Anne Miller in 1962, and the couple had a son. While they never divorced, in later years he also had another partner, set designer Philippa Hart, 25 years his junior, with whom he had two children. REUTERS, NYTIMES