Michael Gambon, a British-Irish actor best known for playing the wise professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter film series and whose career began with his mentor Laurence Olivier, passed away on Thursday at the age of 82. According to a family statement cited by PA Media, he passed away peacefully in the hospital.
Early in the 1960s, Gambon started acting on stage before transitioning to TV and films. In 1989’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway cast him as a sadistic mob boss, and in 2010’s The King’s Speech, Tom Hooper cast him as an old King George V.
His most well-known performance, however, was as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. He took over the part beginning with the third film in the eight-movie series after the tragic death of Richard Harris in 2004. With a “stuck-on beard and a long robe,” Gambon played down the plaudits for his portrayal, claiming that he merely played himself.
On October 19, 1940, in Dublin, Michael John Gambon was born to an engineer father and a seamstress mother. When Gambon was six years old, the family relocated to Camden Town in London as his father looked for employment in the post-war redevelopment of the city.
Gambon dropped out of school at age 15 to start an engineering apprenticeship, and by age 21, he had earned his full degree. He did, however, participate in an amateur theatre troupe and admitted to The Herald newspaper in 2004 that he always knew he would act. He took his cues from American performers James Dean and Marlon Brando, who he thought captured the agony of adolescent lads.
He went to the Old Vic in 1962 to try out for the legendary Shakespearean performer Laurence Olivier, who hired him and other young up-and-comers like Derek Jacobi and Maggie Smith to start the National Theatre.
With the starring part in the 1986 television series The Singing Detective, in which he portrayed a writer with a crippling skin ailment whose only solace came from his imagination, he gained more recognition in the 1980s. He received one of his four BAFTAs for the performance.
Gambon was knighted for his contributions to theatre in 1998 and named a Commander of the British Empire in 1992, both of which he referred to as “a nice little present” but did not use the title.
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