Michael Gambon, best known for his role as Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in six of the 'Harry Potter' movies, has died. He was 82.
“We are devastated to announce the loss of Sir Michael Gambon,” his family said in a statement. “Beloved husband and father, Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife Anne and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia.”
But Gambon was just as likely to play a gangster as an eminence grise: He recurred on David Milch’s HBO horse-racing drama “Luck” in 2011-12 as a powerful adversary of Dustin Hoffman’s mobster Ace Bernstein, but if there is a single film role for which Gambon should be remembered, it is his thunderous, sulfurous foray as the thief of the title — a gangster if ever there was one — in Peter Greenaway’s 1999 “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
Gambon took over the role of Albus Dumbledore after the death of Richard Harris, who had played the role in the first two films. Gambon admitted that he had never read the Harry Potter books, and, he told the U.K.’s the Independent, “I’d never seen any of the previous films, but working on the series was huge fun — and for lots of dosh.”
His TV career also included starring as the legendary French police inspector in the Granada Television series “Maigret,” which aired on PBS in early 1990s, and more recently included starring, in 2015, in the Scandinavian series “Fortittude,” airing in the U.S. on Pivot. In his long and illustrious stage career, he was, in addition to Shakespeare, most associated with the works of Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter.
Michael John Gambon was born in Cabra, Dublin, Ireland. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from the ages of 18 to 21, all the while apprenticing as a toolmaker .
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