Post by petrolino on Jun 24, 2018 0:17:49 GMT
Michael Gambon (born 19 October, 1940, Cabra, Dublin, Ireland)
"You will gather that Sir Michael Gambon is not invariably and entirely truthful. Making Sleepy Hollow with Christina Ricci, he used to tell her elaborate stories about the clubs he'd been to the night before and the drugs he'd taken. 'Oh, yes,' he says fondly. 'I used to tell her terrible fibs.' Ricci thought it was a hoot. But it can also be a bit embarrassing if you're the hapless reporter who notes down 'fell through timpani'. So when his first words to me are, 'I had a car crash last night,' I am inclined to ignore him. I ask him instead about the play he is currently rehearsing, and only after about 10 minutes realise he really did have a car crash last night.
A big, bear-like man, Gambon slumps behind a cloud of cigarette smoke in the corner of a sofa in rehearsal rooms near Waterloo. His grizzled hair is long and his face is battered, baggy and jowly. He's wearing a scruffy suit, conveying a sense, overall, of someone a bit seedy, dissolute, tramp-like. But he's rehearsing Beckett's Endgame, in which he plays a man who is blind, in a wheelchair and dying, and whose parents live without legs in their own excrement in dustbins, so I assume it's just a matter of getting into the part (and is not the impression he seeks to convey, for instance, behind the wheel of his red Ferrari, his car 'for posing around London'). His cheeks are livid with bruises, although these turn out to be the result, not of the accident, but of dental treatment. He has, he tells me proudly, in the slightly slurry, old-drunk voice the treatment has temporarily given him, eight titanium plugs in his gums.
He was actually unhurt in the crash, which was the fault of the weather and only damaged the car. 'I'm not thinking about it,' he says. (Now, this, clearly, is a lie.) 'There's no point in losing sleep over it. It's a year old. Positive thinking.'
I am actually less worried that Gambon will tell me lies than that he won't tell me anything at all. He is notoriously publicity-shy, rarely gives interviews and, when he does, works hard not to give anything away. He is sometimes described as having a wife, or an ex-wife (Ann, or Anne, Miller), occasionally a girlfriend. At some point he seems to have lived in Kent, but probably doesn't now.
'Paul Schofield said something like, "If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist,"' he announces quite early on in our conversation. 'Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?' Acting, for him, is a kind of compulsion - 'overwhelming, like being a priest. Something you want to do."
A big, bear-like man, Gambon slumps behind a cloud of cigarette smoke in the corner of a sofa in rehearsal rooms near Waterloo. His grizzled hair is long and his face is battered, baggy and jowly. He's wearing a scruffy suit, conveying a sense, overall, of someone a bit seedy, dissolute, tramp-like. But he's rehearsing Beckett's Endgame, in which he plays a man who is blind, in a wheelchair and dying, and whose parents live without legs in their own excrement in dustbins, so I assume it's just a matter of getting into the part (and is not the impression he seeks to convey, for instance, behind the wheel of his red Ferrari, his car 'for posing around London'). His cheeks are livid with bruises, although these turn out to be the result, not of the accident, but of dental treatment. He has, he tells me proudly, in the slightly slurry, old-drunk voice the treatment has temporarily given him, eight titanium plugs in his gums.
He was actually unhurt in the crash, which was the fault of the weather and only damaged the car. 'I'm not thinking about it,' he says. (Now, this, clearly, is a lie.) 'There's no point in losing sleep over it. It's a year old. Positive thinking.'
I am actually less worried that Gambon will tell me lies than that he won't tell me anything at all. He is notoriously publicity-shy, rarely gives interviews and, when he does, works hard not to give anything away. He is sometimes described as having a wife, or an ex-wife (Ann, or Anne, Miller), occasionally a girlfriend. At some point he seems to have lived in Kent, but probably doesn't now.
'Paul Schofield said something like, "If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist,"' he announces quite early on in our conversation. 'Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?' Acting, for him, is a kind of compulsion - 'overwhelming, like being a priest. Something you want to do."
- Geraldine Bedell, The Guardian
"Dame Maggie Smith said she is glad Michael Gambon has given up stage acting because it was “hair raising” working with him when he kept forgetting lines. The 80-year-old actress played Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films and Michael Gambon, who played Dumbledore, recently announced his retirement due to anxiety caused by his failing memory.
"It was about time he admitted it, because it was hair-raising doing things with him,” Dame Maggie told The Sunday Times. “Mind you, I defy anyone to learn Harry Potter-speak. It'd probably be easier for him to learn Shakespeare."
Dame Maggie said she will continue working for as long as she is able. "When you're not working it's scary, and when you are working it's scary, because you don't know if you've got the energy to get through the day,” she said."
"It was about time he admitted it, because it was hair-raising doing things with him,” Dame Maggie told The Sunday Times. “Mind you, I defy anyone to learn Harry Potter-speak. It'd probably be easier for him to learn Shakespeare."
Dame Maggie said she will continue working for as long as she is able. "When you're not working it's scary, and when you are working it's scary, because you don't know if you've got the energy to get through the day,” she said."
- Camilla Turner, The Telegraph
'White' - Charlotte Hatherley
{Of the first single from Charlotte Hatherley’s current album, David Bowie said: ‘Behave’ is proof that Charlotte made the right decision to go solo…impossibly catchy’}
Charlotte's response : "I almost fainted, it was amazing! Just the fact that he remembered me, because I’d met him briefly a few years ago, and he said that he’s scared of girls with guitars! And he said I was easy on the eye…it’s astonishing really. He is my absolute idol – you know the way you obsess with someone in your teenage years, and I kind of grew out of it. I hadn’t listened to Bowie for a while, and when I met him and read that review it all came crashing back in a huge wave of nostalgia. The cool thing is that he’s always listened to new music and he seems to have his finger on the pulse. When I’m 60 I’d like to be like that!"
- Charlotte Hatherley at WearsTheTrousers
"Yeah, I like causing trouble. It's the teddy boy in me. I used to be a teddy boy. Feeling slightly inferior and wanting to cause a bit of bother and get some action going on in the room rather than get bored stiff."
- Michael Gambon