The Daily Telegraph - Features
What Michael Gambon’s will tells us about his complicated love life
The actor rewarded his wife but not the mistress with whom he shared two sons.
Does Michael Gambon belong in Slytherin? It has been revealed that the Harry Potter star, who died last September aged 82, bequeathed £1.5million to his wife, Lady Anne Gambon – and left nothing at all to his girlfriend of more than 20 years, Philippa Hart, even though the couple had two sons together.
That shocking revelation comes courtesy of Gambon’s will, which was published on Tuesday, and which reflects the extraordinary personal life of the late actor – known to millions as kindly Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in the Potter movies.
Lady Gambon is an executor of the will, which is dated December 28 2016, as is her and Gambon’s son, Fergus, who appears on Antiques Roadshow as a ceramics expert.
But they hardly need Fiona Bruce to tell them that this inheritance of £1,465,882 is a substantial sum. According to a provision in the will, it would otherwise have passed to Fergus, 60, if she had died before Gambon. There is no mention of Hart.
When asked by the Daily Mail if she knew about the will’s contents, Hart, who was speaking from her £1.5million home in west London (and who had reportedly split from Gambon before his death), said: “It’s none of my business. I really don’t want to talk about this.”
Gambon’s lucky recipients, Fergus and Lady Gambon, were similarly reticent.
The actor’s two sons with Hart – Tom, 17, and William, 15 – aren’t entirely forgotten: according to the will, each inherits £10,000 and one of his Variety Club of Great Britain awards. Tom gets a gong from 1987, William from 2000.
Gambon definitely deserves another award: the trophy for the messiest love life.
He was born to an engineer father and seamstress mother in Dublin in 1940, and the family moved to London when Gambon was six. He left school at 15 and had plans to follow in his father’s footsteps, until he fell in love with acting instead.
He fell for mathematician Anne Miller, and the pair were married in 1962 – the same year Gambon made his professional theatre debut in a production of Othello.
With his growing success via TV projects like The Singing Detective and Maigret came added press scrutiny, but Gambon was always protective of his spouse. When one interviewer asked him about his wife, he responded: “What wife?”
It was typical of Gambon’s mischievous approach to the press. He often played a game with interviewers, trying to sneak outrageous claims into articles – such as that he’d been a great ballet dancer, but suffered a career-ending injury when he fell into the orchestra pit.
In 2000, he met the redheaded Hart – who was 25 years his junior – while filming the Channel 4 series Longitude. Gambon starred as clockmaker John Harrison, while Hart was working as a set dresser. Her career was about to take off too: she went on to work as a set designer on movies including The Hours and Nanny McPhee, and the TV series A Very British Scandal.
Gambon was smitten. By 2001, he was bringing Hart to the set of Gosford Park. He introduced her to castmates Charles Dance and Maggie Smith as his “girlfriend” and called her “the love of my life”.
Lady Gambon was devastated when she found out about the affair, and he moved out of their £5million Grade II listed home in Meopham, near Gravesend, Kent. However, as a devout Catholic, she reportedly refused to contemplate a divorce.
But it seems it was never as simple as Gambon replacing his wife with a younger model. Instead, a sort of ménage à trois developed, apparently by mutual consent. Friends of Lady Gambon said she insisted “they’ve never been apart”.
Gambon moved Hart from her one-bedroom flat in Westbourne Grove, west London, to a more substantial four-bedroom Victorian terraced house in nearby Chiswick.
He then began regular commutes between his wife in the country and his girlfriend in London, zipping between the two in his beloved sports cars.
Gambon also reportedly gifted his wife a matching Mercedes car as a thank-you for taking him back.
Lady Gambon focused on her hobbies: creating ceramics on a potter’s wheel, bookbinding, and socialising with rural neighbours.
Hart gave birth to sons Tom in 2007 and Will in 2009, all while Gambon split his time between his dual families. He even kept up yet another home in London – this one just for him, to give him “breathing space” while he was working.
He’d play devoted husband and dad with his new clan, and go to celebrity gatherings with Hart, then head back to Kent and rock up
to the village garden party with Lady Gambon on his arm. A guest at the latter, Geraldine Hasler, said: “I think Anne finds it strange that people say Michael left her for this other woman. As far as anyone who knows them is concerned, they are still very much married. Anne is a lovely woman. She is very supportive of Michael. He comes over as a Jack-the-lad, but underneath it all, he’s quite shy.”
Actress Hetty Baynes met Gambon’s younger sons when they worked on The Casual Vacancy in 2015, the BBC’s adaptation of JK Rowling’s novel. Baynes said Gambon was “never happier than when his boys were on set”.
She did note that they probably “run him ragged”, since “having a child in later life can be an exhausting thing”. Gambon was in his mid-70s by this point.
But Baynes revealed that Hart, who she described as “amazing”, “does an awful lot of the work”.
Gambon and Hart continued to appear in public together. But we don’t know what was happening with this unconventional set-up at the time of his death. Lady Gambon and Fergus said in a statement that they were by his bedside when he died after a bout of pneumonia. Hart wasn’t in the picture.
If Gambon had gone back to his wife full-time, that might explain why she became the major recipient of his fortune. And Hart isn’t exactly struggling: she has her own career, and she retains her large London townhouse.
There may also have been a private arrangement made earlier between Gambon and Hart that isn’t reflected in the will: a gift of money, property or other assets.
Even so, it makes for strange optics, especially as Gambon must have known his will would become a public talking point. By not supplying any sort of explanation for this choice, he’s left us with a rather grim view of his treatment of his partner and children.
Perhaps he should have listened to a spot of Dumbledore wisdom. “Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
‘He comes over as a Jack-the-lad, but underneath it all, he’s quite shy’