“I’m at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mum,” Michael Gambon told his mother. “I’m playing King John.”
“Oh, that’s grand! But it must be awfully hot in that gorilla suit!” she replied.
“No, Mammie – not King Kong…”
Milly Ellis, who worked as “earwig” – essentially, prompter – for the great actor from 2010, has here assembled a properly hilarious stocking filler. This slim volume is not any sort of a formal biography. The author explains that she has been in contact with “many actors, directors and writers … who have generously contributed anecdotes about his impact on their lives”.
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Ellis adds a binding commentary that, in loosely chronological form, takes us from childhood in Dublin to working-class adolescence in north London, to an early career as an engineering technician and on to acclaim in theatre, TV and film.
Ellis is particularly strong, and touching, on difficulties towards the end of his career. Even here, the humour comes out. Struggling with lines fed via an earpiece, Gambon remembered Michael Redgrave, similarly wired up for an Ibsen play, receiving dispatches from a local taxi company. “Arfur, Arfur … can you go to Number 28 Battersea Rise and pick up a Mrs Hill,” Redgrave barked at a puzzled audience.
The Great Gambon (named for an informal title bestowed on him by Sir Ralph Richardson) is, however, most memorable for the polyphonic interplay between old colleagues. Among those contributing are Charles Dance, Simon Russell Beale, Tom Hollander and David Hare. We are, throughout, confronted with Gambon’s addiction to creative invention. On the set of Sleepy Hollow, he convinced Johnny Depp he was an intimate of Queen Elizabeth II. “I’m always nipping in with for tea with her every Thursday,” he told the younger actor.
In later life the pranks looked to be distraction from his fading powers. But, right from the start, he was flexible with the actuality. “I was a terrible liar,” he said, discussing a letter he wrote to Hilton Edwards, co-founder of the Gate Theatre, when angling for work back in the city of his birth. “For Michael, Ireland was a sacred place,” Ellis writes and, sure enough, The Great Gambon is packed with acknowledgments of how Dublin and London intermingled in his psyche. Not that he would put it so pompously. Not that he would fail to structure the observation as a joke.
