Michael Gambon lied his way into the profession and never really stopped. The first and most important lie — a fabricated CV that got him through the Gate Theatre's door in 1962 — established a template he refined for six decades: invent freely, deflect constantly, and make the deception entertaining enough that no one bothers to check. Jasper Rees, a stage journalist who interviewed Gambon multiple times and came away baffled each time, has written the closest thing to a definitive account of a man whose defining quality was his resistance to definition. The biography's structural problem is also its most revealing insight. Rees draws on more than 100 new interviews, the archive of Gambon's wife Anne (whose existence was unknown to most of his colleagues for decades), and the Mel Gussow interview collection — and still cannot assemble a coherent character. Not because the research is thin, but because the subject engineered it that way. Gambon ran a parallel life for years: married 61 years to Anne, raising a son with her, while conducting a long relationship with National Theatre administrator Lyn Haill and being photographed publicly with set designer Philippa Hart, with whom he had two sons. The man in the marital home in Kent and the man in the press were not obviously the same person. What Rees does well is the career arc, and that arc is genuinely dramatic. Gambon spent his first years at the National barely useful — his thuggish good looks (over 6ft, barrel-built, 'a face of fleshy menace') made him atmospheric background rather than a leading presence. He left in 1967 in search of better parts, found them in Ayckbourn, returned in 1978 to triumph in Pinter's Betrayal and Brecht's Galileo. Then came The Singing Detective in 1986, which made him a household name and remains the performance against which everything else is measured: a man playing multiple selves, none of them escaping the original wound. The fit was almost too perfect. The biography is less comfortable when cataloguing Gambon's offstage mischief — the fart machines, the water bombs, the ad libs designed to derail co-stars. Rees gives these extended coverage, and the cumulative effect, as he notes, tips from amusing to disquieting. Penelope Wilton says the water pistols 'got very tedious.' Eileen Atkins recalls him boasting that he didn't bother with matinees, just said the words. After the triumphant opening of Miller's A View from the Bridge, he reportedly began 'gently destroying it' — the performances deteriorated, the New York transfer evaporated. This is not the harmless clowning it presents as. The decline is handled with real care. Gambon began struggling with lines in his late 50s. Prompt boards, then earpieces through which a prompter fed him his own dialogue. On screen, multiple takes could cover the difficulty; on stage, increasingly they could not. Rees reveals that Gambon was diagnosed with dementia — a fact Gambon always denied, perhaps because he had watched his mother destroyed by the same disease. The man who spent his career manufacturing mystifications found himself mystified by his own memory. It is the biography's most human passage, and the only one where the layers genuinely fall away. Rees employs a structural device — interludes between main chapters focusing on specific aspects of Gambon's character — that mostly works. One devoted to his hands (said to be beautifully elegant, displayed in his Harry Potter wand work), another to his love of fast cars (he nearly overturned a family saloon on Top Gear). These feel genuinely supplementary rather than filler. The book's real limitation is the one Rees himself acknowledges: no biography can fully convey what made the man great on stage and screen. You can accumulate testimonies about alchemy. That does not mean you have captured it.
