Michael Gambon retires from acting due to “frightening” memory loss.
The actor who starred in six “Harry Potter“ films as Dumbledore, has had to wear an earpiece on stage to receive lines recently.
According to reports, Michael Gambon has announced his retirement from theater acting after admitting that he can’t remeber lines anymore.
In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine, Michael Gambon revealed that learning scripts would take him longer and that he would quickly forget them. “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 said.
Michael Gambon starred in six Harry Potter movies revealed that he has to use ear pieces for production assistants to feed him lines but, his forgetfulness had become so bad that six month ago he officially retired from acting.
“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.”
Gambon put his forgetfulness down to his age and worried that it was a sign of Alzheimer’s but his doctors have given him the all-clear. This isn’t the first occasion Gambon has struggled with his memory, in 2009 he was twice taken to hospital with panic attacks brought on by the stress of forgetting his lines during rehearsals at the National Theatre in London. [via]
Even though his forgetfulness has been extremely hard on his acting career, Dumbledore plans on returning to film and TV where the stress of remembering lines is not as bad.
Michael Gambon will appear in the BBC TV adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy.
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Image Credit: Harry Potter/Warner Bros.
