Nancy Gryspeerdt: 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.
[Financial Times]
