Sir Michael Gambon, one of today’s most revered and prolific British actors, has announced that he’s ending his career in the theater because memory loss has robbed him of his ability to memorize his lines. While he said that he’ll continue to pursue roles on film and television, his short-term memory issues have become too much of a problem to continue performing live onstage. In an interview with Sunday Times Magazine, he said:
“It’s a horrible thing to admit, but I can’t do it. It breaks my heart. It’s when the script’s in front of me and it takes forever to learn. It’s frightening.”
He described how he’s been using an earpiece to have his lines read to him during his performances both onstage and onscreen, including during his time playing Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies, but during a live performance, it disrupted his concentration. He realized how much of a problem this was going to be six months ago:
“There was a girl in the wings, and I had a plug in my ear so she could read me the lines,” he said. “And after about an hour, I thought, ‘This can’t work.’ You can’t be in theater, free on stage shouting and screaming and running around, with someone reading you your lines.”
For a man who has worked onstage professionally since 1962, this must have been a devastating realization, to say nothing of how the voice in his ear would probably take away from the spontaneity and natural flow of his live performance. Gambon described being so stricken by his inability to remember his lines that he’s had severe panic attacks over it on more than one occasion. He does state, however, that his memory loss is not due to Alzheimer’s disease and is more likely due to aging.
Fortunately for him, and for us, working on a set where he can be fed his lines and get multiple chances to perfect his performance is still an option for him, so Sir Gambon won’t be making his final curtain call just yet. The next time we’ll see him will be in the three-part adaptation of J.K Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, which is premiering on the BBC on February 15 and coming to our side of the pond on HBO in April.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
