Michael Gambon

A major and definitive portrait of Sir Michael Gambon, one of the greatest actors of the last fifty years who died in 2023.

Jasper Rees, the acclaimed Sunday Times bestselling author of Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood, interviewed Gambon more than any other journalist alive, and has been granted exclusive access to Gambon's personal archive and effects. Rees is in the process of conducting over one hundred interviews with actors, playwrights, and directors who, across a career that spanned more than half a century, were witness to some of Gambon's most magnificent performances, including Penelope Wilton, Alan Ayckbourn, Brian Cox, Eileen Atkins, David Hare, Judi Dench, Christopher Hampton, Simon Russell Beale, Richard Eyre, Patricia Hodge, Simon Callow, Stephen Poliakoff, and his closest friend in theatre, Oliver Cotton.

The biography spans Gambon's epoch-defining roles on stage, television, and screen: the early years as a spear-carrier in Laurence Olivier's newly formed National Theatre, his pre-eminence as an interpreter of Harold Pinter and Alan Ayckbourn, the triumphs in The Life of Galileo and A View from the Bridge, the screen roles that won him global fame, from Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective to Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. It promises to be a deeply personal, moving, and surprising book that will enrich our understanding of an acting legend who was as hilarious and elusive off stage—renowned for spinning mischievously tall tales—as he was mesmerising and chameleon-like on stage.