Gambon’s games

On a beautiful spring afternoon this week, shortly after the final rehearsal for Eh Joe, Michael Gambon slipped back into his small dressing room to admire his handiwork. On a greeting card, he had pasted a photograph clipped from his morning newspaper, of someone who might pass for Michael Colgan’s brother, squinting in the Iranian sunshine and speaking on a mobile phone. Below it Gambon had mocked up a news report in his large black pen: “Rammer Colgan was pictured last night complaining to his brother Michael, the artistic director of the Gate Theatre, about his latest production of Beckett’s Eh Joe, which Rammer described as a ‘pile of s***e’. Rammer was hired in Iran for the last 25 years, where he runs the National Theatre. He told the press yesterday that his brother’s work was ‘a f***ing disgrace’.”

Sir Michael Gambon (as he hates being called - he prefers "Mike") has a mischievous sense of humour and a heavy, relaxed laugh. His features, which seem to droop down from his hairline, form a natural hangdog expression - one he plays up to convince the unsuspecting journalist, publicist or artistic director he is an irascible grouch. That expression changes utterly - usually mid wind-up - with a minute smile or a sly, secretive wink. Almost as famous for his pranks as his varied roles on stage and screen, around Mike it's best to be on your guard.

For all the chutzpah of his card, the message is nothing compared with a letter that Gambon sent to the previous artistic directors of the Gate, in 1962. Gambon, a 22-year-old factory worker and part-time amateur stage actor, was then considering leaving his job to take up acting full-time.

"I hadn't done any acting," he recalls. "I wrote to Micheál MacLiammóir and I told him a lot of lies, as you do, because I was of the opinion that people didn't really read letters."

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Among his false CV credentials were several starring roles in West End productions and a note to say that he was passing through Dublin en route to New York. "That wasn't true at all. So I came over here specially, letting him think I wasn't that bothered. And that was it."

He was offered a role in a touring production of Othello, to open in the Gaiety, playing the Second Gentleman of Cyprus - hardly a fitting role for such a fictitiously established star of the West End. "I didn't understand it. I told him I'd done all this work - it was all lies - so to accept the Second Gentleman of Cyprus must have seemed strange."

Did MacLiammóir see through him? "I'd imagine so," he says. "Well he'd have to, wouldn't he? He must have done."

FOR A LONG time, Gambon had a hard time being taken seriously, least of all by Gambon himself, as he led a long string of roles in West End comedy. "Yeah, I was really a bit of a clown as a kid," he admits. "Some kids are like that, aren't they? They want to be the centre of attention. Or maybe it comes from an insecurity. If you're at school and you don't feel very confident, you become the butt of people's jokes, don't you? You play up that side of you to protect yourself. I think that must be what I was."

I start to ask him when he grew out of that, but then I catch sight of the Rammer Colgan card again. Do you ever grow out of that? "For an actor to remain a child is rather important," Gambon responds. "It's a childlike, dreamy thing, acting, if you think about it. It's the sort of thing children fantasise about, playing cowboys and Indians in the street. I think that acting is just a highly refined development of that."

Born in Dublin in 1940, Gambon moved with his parents to Camden Town when he was six years old. Then a predominantly Irish, working-class area of London, Camden felt as though the family had never left Ireland.

Coming from such a background, a self-educated actor in a profession that was then beginning to churn with Cambridge and Rada graduates, he had an earthy and unpretentious view of theatre. He still abhors research, insisting that the only thing an actor should be concerned with is the script itself. (Not that he reads that many plays.) For years, his professional colleagues have admired the genius of his simple approach, while also despairing over his apparent flippancy: he tends to describe the soaring and mysterious journey of the actor as "just mucking about".

HE IS SIMILARLY candid when explaining how he approaches a role - reading with an open mind, and trusting his intuition to discover the character. "That's how I've always felt," he says. "I think it's just simpler, isn't it? And yet sometimes I think I'm just using it as an excuse for laziness. But it's not true. See, you build the blocks yourself from your own data. Then your own subtext begins to live on that. So the whole process begins." He readily admits that this makes some roles easier to play than others.

"When you read a script, the character immediately goes 'boom' sometimes, and you feel it inside," he says. "If it doesn't, you're in trouble, and then you have to make it up. Most of the time, as a working actor, earning a living, you play a part and you sort of fake it in a way."

As we talk there comes a knock on the door and in walks Michael Colgan. Both Colgan and Gambon have a tendency to modify their accents to suit a given situation (Gambon's natural voice has an Irish softness, but the underlying blunt edge of working-class London), and this exchange is played out like a pair of oul' Dubs direct from a Seán O'Casey play.

"Are you having your dinner now?" asks Colgan.

"I'm having an interview with the newspaper," Gambon responds, with flustered irritation.

"Will you come over for a bowl of soup to the Gresham?" Colgan continues, oblivious.

"Yes," snaps Gambon, handing him the Rammer Colgan card. "But after the interview. Now get out!" Colgan leaves the room without glancing at the card. "That's the kind of relationship we have," Gambon tells me when the door closes. He pauses. "We'll hear him laughing now." We listen. Precisely five seconds later, Colgan's laugh comes booming down the hall. Well played.

BECKETT, ON THE other hand, seems to afford him less leverage. Having performed as Hamm in Endgame, both on stage and screen, now Gambon finds himself in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's bold stage adaptation of Eh Joe, Beckett's short television drama, in which he is given no lines and few movements and - in keeping with Beckett's directions - his face is "practically motionless throughout".

Projected on to a scrim that fills the Gate's proscenium arch, Gambon ends in such tight close-up that he can't even move his head a fraction. Similarly restricted when he played the psoriasis-ridden Philip Marlowe in Dennis Potter's brilliant, ground-breaking TV series, The Singing Detective, Gambon could at least exploit the natural expressiveness of his face and his voice. Does Eh Joe feel like a prison?

"I think if Beckett was sitting here now with us, he wouldn't agree," says Gambon. "He'd say, 'Oh, use the face'. I'm just guessing now. Maybe he wrote that down to protect his work. He didn't want actors mugging it, or acting too much, or bringing their own stuff into it. He didn't want any fooling about."

Gambon can be self-effacing to the point of erasure, placing writers at the top of a theatrical hierarchy and the actor somewhere far below. "Ah," he shrugs, "I'm just an actor. I'm lucky to get the work, amn't I? The instigator is the man who writes. Because without the writer you have nothing. Nothing."

Considering the writers he has worked with - Alan Ayckbourn, Harold Pinter, Dennis Potter - you could understand such deference. "I always feel subservient to any writer," Gambon says. "Well, you have to be. Harold is very firm with everyone. He's actually a bit frightening."

Making the transition from contemporary farce to classical drama, largely through Peter Hall's decision, in 1980, to cast Gambon squarely against type in a National Theatre production of Brecht's Galileo, the actor has since preserved a stage career that, like Beckett's, seems best suited to the slalom-pole shifts and bridged emotional gaps of "tragi- comedy".

His film decisions, ranging from such accomplishments as Dancing at Lughnasa and The Insider to curios such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, to outright dross such as Ali G Indahouse, The Actors and Layer Cake, have been far more erratic.

'WELL, THEY'RE NOT decisions, really," he replies. "If you're a working actor like me, of my generation, and you're offered a film, you say, 'How much money is there?' Then you say, 'I'll do it'."

He originally turned down Mel Smith's execrable High Heels and Low Lifes until he worked out how many Irish-made antique guns he could acquire - Gambon is an avid collector - with the pay cheque.

No wonder, after playing a series of East End gangsters and bewildered codgers, he is now content to be known for his role as Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies, a part he inherited from Richard Harris, and one he plays as "slightly Irish" in tribute to him.

Awarded the CBE in 1990 and the KBE eight years later, Gambon received a still greater honour when he became the only knight of the realm to have a particularly treacherous corner of the Top Gear race-track named after him.

"All four wheels off," he says, bristling at the suggestion that he only popped a side-wheelie while losing control of his car flying around the wet track at tremendous speed. "I've got a video still of all four in the air."

An actor who has worshipped Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro - performers, he says, "who are totally truthful" - Gambon himself is surrounded by ever taller tales and a gyre of mythology. Even this meeting came with a caveat: interviewer beware.

So, one last question: Should I trust him? For the first time he falls silent. "Oh," he finally replies, dropping his gaze to the floor and seeming slightly wounded. "I haven't said anything to you today that would be a lie. There's nothing worse than telling a lie."

He looks up again. "No," he says, reassuringly. "I think you could trust me."

Eh Joe is at the Gate Theatre until Apr 15 as part of Beckett on Stage. www.beckettcentenaryfestival.ie