There are a few things that Michael Gambon, considered by many to be England’s most brilliant living actor, does not have in common with his late predecessor and onetime mentor Laurence Olivier.
One is an abiding admiration for American actors such as Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman.
Another is Gambon’s mad passion, as a private pilot with 800 hours logged, for Chicago’s now inoperative Meigs Field.
A product of Olivier’s National Theatre, and hailed early on in his career as “the great Gambon” by no less an acting talent than Sir Ralph Richardson, the British legend is probably best known to Americans for his manic performance as Philip Marlow in the daftly macabre Dennis Potter public television series, “The Singing Detective.”
Others may recall him as “Inspector Maigret,” in that public television series, or from his singular portrayals in the movies “A Dry White Season” and “The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”–the latter rather an acquired taste.
This fall, Broadway theater audiences have been exposed to his awesome acting talent first hand in the hugely successful British drama “Skylight,” which won him another “the great” from The New York Times.
The New Yorker has called Gambon “the most protean and prodigious of English actors,” adding, “today, there are many legitimate contenders for the acting crown, but Gambon, because of his virtuosity and his fearlessness in performance, has the clearest claim to it.”
Yet he’d like as much as anything to be cast in a big Hollywood film with Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman.
“I think all European actors look across the ocean and see Pacino, De Niro and Hoffman and Brando, and think of them as gods,” said Gambon, who grew up a starstruck fan of James Dean and Marlon Brando. “I don’t know who doesn’t.”
It was during a dressing room chat here with a visitor that he learned about (and was aghast over) the recent closure of Chicago’s Meigs Field.
“Meigs Field, by the stadium?” Gambon said, looking positively stricken. “He closed it?”
Yes.
“Did it interfere with O’Hare traffic?”
No.
“Can he do that?”
Oh yes.
“So Meigs Field is closed down.” He sighed. “I’m sorry about that. My God, that’s shocking. Disgusting!”
The great Gambon is as peculiar and idiosyncratic in real life as many of the remarkable characters he plays in films, television and on the stage.
He employed an elegantly delivered expletive in his acceptance speech upon receiving a recent and prestigious British acting award. His interest in flying is surpassed only by his obsession with the repair, restoration and complete replication of antique guns, cherishing them for their mechanical splendor and craftsmanship but loathing the idea of actually shooting one.
Born in Dublin 56 years ago, the son of a factory worker who moved to England and served as a policeman during World War II, Gambon lives quietly and circumspectly in London, keeping his private life (he’s married and has a son) intensely separate and his own.
Though he enjoys expensive restaurants and driving fast, expensive cars, he often goes about so unobtrusively dressed he might be mistaken for a tradesman. He never finished high school, dropping out to go to work sweeping floors in a factory, later becoming a tool-and-die maker for the Vickers armament works. He initially drifted into theater as a volunteer set builder for a provincial company. The thrill of subsequently going on stage in a bit part hooked him on acting for life.
“Skylight,” at Broadway’s Royale Theater, is a venomously political play by British author and director David Hare aimed squarely at the materialistic values of Thatcherism. But it’s built around a longstanding affair between an older, self-made rich man, Gambon, and a pretty young former employee, energetically performed by British actress Lia Williams.
The two abruptly ended their liaison when his wife learned of it, but now she’s dead and he wants the affair to resume. The girl actually does love him, but she has in the interim found a calling as a school teacher to slum children–an interest that utterly baffles the self-made rich man.
There are fireworks and sparks in all the places the playwright intended, but Gambon manages to provide them in the merest theatrical moment. In one scene, he fascinates just in the way he goes about emerging barefoot from a bedroom and putting on his socks.
He crafts his parts as he might one of his guns, adding his own creativity to that of the author.
“You do a play and then you build your own play on top of it,” he said. “It’s another play going on there that springs from the play you’re in.
“This play is full of rich stuff and gives you a lot to grab hold of. Lots of dimensions and layers. You can cry and you can shout and you can scream and you can laugh. You’ve got quite a wide range of functions. That’s what I like in plays–lots to do, lots of stretching.”
Gambon won his place in Olivier’s National Theatre through the strength of his performance of Richard III in an audition, but was given no major parts, as Olivier tended to favor such newcomers as the young Peter O’Toole, Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi and Albert Finney.
At Olivier’s suggestion, Gambon moved on to regional theater, making his mark in classical as well as contemporary dramas and returning eventually to the National as a major stage star.
Television advanced his reputation both in Britain and this country, though he was disappointed with his work in “Inspector Maigret,” which appeared here as part of public television’s “Mystery” series, hosted by fellow Brit Diana Rigg.
“There was nothing I could do with it,” he said. “He never does anything, Maigret. He sits there and thinks and smokes his pipe. Really the (Maigret) books are all about atmosphere, aren’t they? The feeling of Paris. Unless you can capture all that, which I didn’t think that show did, then you’ve got nowhere.”
He’d really love to have the part of Inspector Morse.
“Yeah, I’d like that. Policemen are great to play, aren’t they? I would like that–but they’re few and far between, well written series.”
One of his favorite television roles, after “The Singing Detective,” was that of a middle aged British intelligence operative who falls in love with the wife of a traitor during World War II. It was scripted by one of his favorite playwrights, Harold Pinter, from a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, but he can’t remember the title of it.
“I loved that,” he said. “I can’t remember what it’s called, but I remember all about it. It never got a proper showing. It was shown on TV in Britain at one o’clock in the morning.”
Still working class in much of his outlook–he remains amused that Queen Elizabeth had to ask an aide “What’s it for?” when she made him a “Commander of the British Empire”–Gambon admires David Mamet, actor John Malkovich and many of the plays to come out of Chicago.
But he particularly admires Arthur Miller, having performed the prize-winning American playwright’s “A View from the Bridge” and receiving a congratulatory letter from Miller.
Asked what great roles he’d still like to perform that he hasn’t yet, Gambon named only two: “Falstaff is a part I’d like to play, Falstaff in `Henry IV.’ And I’d quite like to play Willy Lohman, in Miller’s `Death of a Salesman.’ “
He would also like to break into American movies in a big way, if only as a villain–as fellow British acting greats Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons did in Bruce Willis’ “Diehard” films.
“When they employ an Englishman in American films, it’s usually as a criminal,” he said. “But I love it. I love the whole process. Unfortunately, I’ve never been in one that’s hit the jackpot.”
He played a bad guy in Robin Williams’ lamentable “Toys”–“a total disaster,” he called it. “Mobsters,” “Mary Reilly,” “Clean Slate” and “The Gambler” didn’t establish his American film stature much, either.
But he’s not about to decamp to L.A. and beat the bushes along Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards for bigger and better parts.
“I never actively seek anything,” he said. “I just always wait and see what happens. I get pushed along by the fates of life.”
Unless, of course, something piques his curiosity and fancy.
“I would like to come over here (to work) because I heard there’s a company in Florida where you can get a 727 rating,” said pilot Gambon. “For $14,000! I’d go down there just for fun, just to sit in this big thing.”
Of course, you never could land one of those things at Meigs.
