Michael Gambon began his acting career with a preposterous bluff. Applying for a job at Dublin’s Gate theatre, the young toolmaker from the south-east London suburbs embellished his CV with entirely fabricated theatrical experience. It was a gamble, but it worked.
In 1962 he made his professional debut as the Second Gentleman in Othello. The following year he was hired by Laurence Olivier for the brand new National Theatre. Gambon carried on telling tall tales long after there was any need.
Some were self-aggrandising: he had been a dancer with the Royal Ballet, worked as a nuclear physicist and auditioned for James Bond. To be fair, this last one was half-true – producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli had once called him in for a chat. Others were absurdities for the sake of it: he was thinking of buying a house in Hanoi, his mother had operated cranes in Dublin.
Occasionally, the lies were intended to save his skin. Terrified of being sacked for turning up late yet again to rehearsal at the National, he claimed that his mother had died in the night. She went on to live for another 49 years.
More often, he lied to make other people laugh, claiming that he had worked with the Russian director Dmitri Shagyerarsoff. Gambon’s compulsion to invent and conceal presents obvious challenges for Jasper Rees, the veteran stage and showbiz journalist who interviewed the actor several times before his death in 2023 and reports always coming away feeling puzzled. Rees’s authorised biography draws on the archive held by Gambon’s wife, Anne, a woman whose existence was unknown to most of his colleagues.
For years Gambon had a relationship with the National Theatre administrator Lyn Haill and was later photographed with set designer Philippa Hart, with whom he had two sons. Yet, apart from a brief period in the early 1970s, he remained in the marital home in Kent. That marriage lasted 61 years, and Anne and their son Fergus accompanied Gambon to Buckingham Palace when he was knighted in 1998.
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