On my second day earwigging for Michael Gambon, I found myself lying under the bed in which the legend of stage and screen was portraying Winston Churchill. It was 2015, and we were on the set of Churchill’s Secret. Hidden this way, I was out of view for the camera, but not out of earshot, so I could shout out his lines for him to repeat. The idea was we’d cut my bellowing out of the scene afterwards.
Earwigging is the process of reading an actor’s lines into a microphone. These are then fed into a tiny earpiece in the actor’s ear. The tech is imperfect and sometimes it fails, as it had that day when I was forced to improvise by hiding under the bed. Certain movie stars are said to opt for an earpiece purely to save the time and effort of learning lines, but I find that hard to believe. Line-by-line feeding is tricky. It can cause random pauses and actors often look distracted as they listen. The frustration Michael felt about the whole process was profound.
Michael had lost the ability to learn lines several years before. He would often recount how he’d been rehearsing Alan Bennett’s play The Habit of Art at the National Theatre in 2010 and suddenly collapsed, in fear. Memory decline was what he was afraid of, a slippery slope he would indeed begin to slide down. He was replaced in The Habit of Art and only returned to theatre once more in a one-man play, Krapp’s Last Tape, that relied upon his recorded voice more than live monologue.
Developing a method for memorising and recalling lines is part of every actor’s practice. For all but the most demanding jobs, it’s a basic requirement before the real work begins, not a proof of acting talent. Occasional lapses happen, like an ill-timed cramp might for an athlete. But when an actor loses the ability to learn lines, it’s a career-ending injury. If you don’t have your lines, it is all you can think about.
Becoming an earwig hadn’t been my plan. Before stepping in to cover for Michael’s regular earwig in her absence, I was a director’s assistant and budding script editor. I got the gig because the director saw how much I loved watching actors work. It is a very well-paid role, partly, I think, because everyone involved feels reassured by the extortionate fees, as they might by paying a Harley Street doctor.
The plot of Churchill’s Secret centred on the ailing prime minister being brought back from the brink after a stroke by the tough love and care of a young nurse. It’s possible that at the time of my peculiar meet-cute with Michael, the part of the nurse rubbed off on me. It was Michael’s last leading role, and the fact that Churchill’s situation spoke to his own paid off. He was proud of his performance. I continued to work with him until he fully retired in 2018, my work becoming palliative. The jobs ranged from a high-budget period drama (Victoria and Abdul), to indie projects done on a shoestring, to an almost walk-on part in Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland biopic.
Though it was never properly defined, my job included telling Michael what the script was about and how he fitted into it. Then, we would run his lines over and over, in the back of cars and hotel lobbies, in an attempt to allay his massive anxieties. Despite this exhaustive prep, he was unable to retain much. And when we stepped on the set, we were starting virtually afresh. I would usually take my place in some cupboard within radio range and, watching him on a handheld monitor, I’d cue him, using exaggerated emphasis to suggest where we were in a sentence, while trying to keep my meaning somehow neutral.
Sometimes he’d find my intonation inoffensive; he would have less trouble interpreting the sentence and could make it his own. Sometimes he’d contort my emphasis, resulting in unusable takes for which we’d both feel guilty. He often said he wanted me to read lines “straight, like a machine”, willing me to be less of an encumbrance to his expression. But when we experimented with less signposting, he couldn’t gain sense from my sounds. Ever the precision engineer he had trained to be, he was insistent that if he had the use of his younger brain he could build the contraption he needed to compensate for its gradual decay.
Michael’s desire for autonomy was based on what he’d achieved, an incredible career characterised by versatility and power. Of his TV work, he was best known for The Singing Detective; of his films, for his role as Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts in Harry Potter (a film that “changed everything”, not necessarily for the better). But his humane presence enriched movies as various as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover; Gosford Park; Layer Cake; The Wings of the Dove; The Life Aquatic and Quartet. In the 1960s, his work on TV series The Borderers led to him being sized up as a candidate to play James Bond. But he thought of himself as a stage actor first. Over the decades, he’d interspersed Shakespeare with Brecht, Pinter, Ayckbourn and Caryl Churchill, at the Birmingham Rep, then the Royal Shakespeare Company, then everywhere else that mattered.
In the swansong of his career, where we found ourselves together, he could still deliver spine-tingling hugeness. There were occasional moments when truth would move through him, no emotion too big or too complex, and I’d shiver. But it happened seemingly at random. It came sometimes when he was scared, or bored, or interested, or supported, during the most surprising scenes and inauspicious projects. He’d say he had been a “total hit and miss merchant” long before the memory loss. His response to his frequent terror that his talent would leave him was to make no systematic attempt to harness it.
His innate vulnerability made him endearing far beyond his control, a lost person trying (very successfully) to get by. He liked childish food (we both did) and saying everything in a bad American accent. He didn’t display taste in anything much, except maybe clothes, and sometimes made uncouth noises in your face. My curiosity about him registered as a sticking plaster over a great wound and, as regards vulnerability, he met a match in me. Our third eyes vetted each other over the course of our early jobs together, and once he realised I was sympathetic, he would save me seats around the place. He liked the fact I was questing for my path more thoroughly than he had the conscious courage for. He liked to pronounce my name theatrically, like an announcer. He said it was a name that deserved to power all the way up to the top.
As for what qualified me for the job, there wasn’t much. I had no vocal or dialect training. I was slaloming my way through my mid-twenties, in the midst of psychotherapy for a life so confusing in its early years that I was unable to hold down a career. What I really wanted to do was act or direct or write, but self-sabotage had got in the way. My only other qualification was having had a complex grandpa, who died years before.
Michael and I became socially inseparable on jobs. He unfailingly wanted to “muck about”. We’d make videos of him hiding in clothes rails or emerging from showers, fruit strapped to him, me his straight man. He loved an in-joke. He’d have me guffawing with laughter on our private radio channel between takes, muttering rudeness about other actors, his own bodily functions or his made-up desires.
His humour was sometimes boyishly bawdy, but a sense of care for one another came to be the truer signifier of our relationship. The closeness sometimes turned sour. He loved to insinuate that I could be easily discarded. If I tried to explain a producer’s worried look or told him he was jeopardising his own health, he would belittle me in public. Once he overlooked me for a job.
My understanding was aided by time. The significance of several things only struck me properly later. That his wife Anne, worldly wise and more literate than he, had helped him write a false CV to get his first acting job. That he didn’t keep up friendships with people he’d worked with, not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know how. The way he remained deferential in a working-class manner to directors, even after all his success. The awfulness of having once pretended to a full rehearsal room that his mother had died. The lie “just slipped out”. He was new to acting and worried he would be fired for being late.
When he gave up working, there came time to reflect on what we’d been to each other. Friends? Vulnerable antagonists? Effective colleagues? We plotted to make a documentary together about him being put out to pasture through the lens of our relationship. We managed two stressful days of filming, him grasping for a final connection with an audience, before it was decided that anything that resulted would be too exposing. I found it difficult to accept the loss of the project. Secretly, I had hoped it would power me up to the top.
When I’d swallowed my disappointment, I began taking him on trips in my battered car. Him socially distanced in the back seat with a Covid mask on, napping and looking heavily old; me emotional, playing music I hoped he’d enjoy. In Dungeness, we attempted to get members of the public to recognise him. When they didn’t, he suffered. I remember him waking from one car nap. He yawned, smiling and raising his eyebrows at me in the rear-view mirror: “I’ve come up from my pudding.”
When he could no longer do trips, I regaled him alongside his wife and son with stories of our time on film sets. He was able to play with my baby daughter, born a year and a half before he died — to mirror, delight and come alive for her — after he’d grown distanced in adult conversation. He was still like a weathervane, or a giant in a children’s book, all fingers and kindness and brooding chaos. If I was hung up on the idea of mutuality, I might worry — more — that our friendship became “real” only in these last years, through his family, with him wondering why I’d inveigled my way into his home.
Michael died on September 27. In the weeks that followed, the internet was awash with sentimental captions accompanying pictures of his winking wizard-eyes. His joke about anal sex from the Top Gear sofa also did the rounds. There were tributes from fellow actors and directors. Amid the public responses, I was privately processing. I had come to know him as “that, and more”. I don’t know if I’ve ever liked any friend so much. I hope he knew it was warts and all.
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