Michael Gambon

A major and definitive biography of the beloved actor, full of 150 exclusive interviews with stars including Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Alan Ayckbourn, Brian Cox, Billy Nighy and Jeremy Clarkson Michael Gambon’s rise made little sense. The son of working-class Irish immigrants, he left school with no qualifications and became an apprentice toolmaker in a factory while his future contemporaries studied at drama college or Cambridge. Yet he would emerge as the towering actor of his generation: a performer of unrivalled power and instinctive imagination who could reduce audiences to tears or make them rock with helpless laughter. Jasper Rees, the Sunday Times bestselling author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood, interviewed Gambon more than any other journalist alive. Drawing on exclusive access to the Gambon archive, the memories of Michael Gambon’s family and the testimony of more than 150 actors, writers, directors, producers and friends – including Helen Mirren, Daniel Radcliffe, Judi Dench, Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton, Alan Ayckbourn, Eileen Atkins, Bill Nighy, David Hare, Lia Williams, Christopher Hampton, Simon Russell Beale, Sonia Friedman, Richard Eyre, Imelda Staunton, Matthew Macfadyen and Jeremy Clarkson – Rees tells the extraordinary story of one of the greatest actors of the last fifty years. The vast breadth of Michael Gambon’s career took him from spear-carrying in Laurence Olivier’s fledgling National Theatre to epoch-defining performances in The Life of Galileo, A View from the Bridge and Skylight; from many momentous collaborations with Harold Pinter and Alan Ayckbourn to public adulation in The Singing Detective and the Harry Potter films. In following the story through to the last years when he grappled with severe memory loss, his authorised biography takes readers closer than ever before to understanding the real Michael Gambon: a complicated and intensely private man, touched with genius, who was as surprising and elusive when not acting – with his mischievously tall tales, his passion for restoring antique firearms and flying planes – as he was mesmerising on both stage and screen. Funny, moving and revelatory, Jasper Rees’s masterful and definitive biography peels back the layers of Gambon’s myth to reveal the humanity of an acting colossus. 'This book reveals the wonderful man behind some of the greatest roles on stage and screen’ Daniel Radcliffe © Jasper Rees 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026