Three years later, the pair were sharing the stage at the National in Hamlet. Gambon was carrying a spear. 'O'Toole had just done Lawrence of Arabia,' he remembers. 'We were all in awe of him, us walk-ons. We'd walk on and stare at him. Stand there with our spears and work our way nearer to him, you know, shuffle across the stage just to get close.'
Four decades later, Gambon is back at the Albery and in his element - wing-collared and wild-haired in a smoky dressing-room deep under the theatre. He is rehearsing a new play, Cressida, with a young group of actors. I wonder if he's noticed them edging across stage towards him yet.
'Nah, nah nah. That's all gone,' he says, in his lugubrious Tommy Cooper voice, with a little deadpan dismay. 'Those were the days of deference, weren't they? You don't get it now. The world's changed.' He looks even more hangdog than usual, and then produces his wonderful one-note smoker's laugh: 'Huhhh.'
Though Gambon, veteran of a string of definitive stage performances - he lists his own best of times as Galileo, Antony and Cleopatra and A View From the Bridge - is, in many ways, an awe-inspiring figure himself now, offstage he is happy still to cast himself as the untutored spear carrier. Asked why he chose to do this play, he stage-whispers: 'I'll do anything they offer me.' It sometimes seems that is not far from the truth. In recent months, he has starred memorably in two TV series - Wives and Daughters and Longitude; he teamed up with Al Pacino, an old friend, in Michael Mann's Oscar-nominated The Insider, and he has just completed the filming of Beckett's Endgame with David Thewlis in Dublin (or 'Paddywood' as he calls it).
Cressida, a comedy written by Nicholas Wright, former script director at the National, gives him the role of gnarled mentor - 'It's set in 1610 in the Blackfriars Theatre. I'm this bloke who teaches boys who play girls how to act' - but he resists the idea that he has any particular insights to offer beyond the script: 'I just read the lines,' he says.
As well as insisting that his is a straightforward profession, Gambon has always denied that actors should be of interest beyond the parts they play. 'I was talking to Robert DeNiro,' he says, half-smiling, in response to a question about his life outside the theatre. 'He said, "I don't fucking want anyone knowing anything at all about me." That's about how I feel.' In place of self-revelation, he offers little parables about his craft. Ask him about his formative years and he'll say: 'What's engineering got to do with acting? Acting is very precise. Plays have a mechanical structure. If one of the cogs doesn't work, then the play shudders, just as a machine shudders.'
Question him about his relationship with his parents, who moved to Camden Town from Dublin when he was five, and he mutters good naturedly. 'Oh, OK. So, er, it's all simple stuff, acting. I don't overcomplicate it. There's no mystery there.'
Only part of this evasion is a defence mechanism, you guess; partly, it seems to speak of a disinterest in introspection. If Gambon has a complex nature, he seems to keep it well hidden, even from himself. Recalling what was perhaps his finest hour, in The Singing Detective, he says, self-deprecatingly: 'I had a terrible job trying to work out what it was all about. It's very deep stuff, you know. Jon Amiel, the director, would say, "Look, you're thick, I'll explain every day what's going on." So one day, he'd say, "Today, you're doing someone that doesn't really exist except in your imagination." To act well in that kind of thing, you need to unclutter your mind a bit.'
Gambon has many strategies for mind-uncluttering, which is a persistent professional and, probably, a psychological need for him. In his time away from the theatre, he makes precision clocks, restores antique firearms ('and flogs 'em'). 'If I'm in a West End play for six months, I do it during the day, or at least I do after the first few weeks, when I'm usually still shitting myself.' He also flies planes from Biggin Hill, and he'll generally hire a single-engine aircraft if he's in LA, a place he loves ('They call me Sir Gambon!'). 'I go up the coast, and there's an airport there with two runways. So you get clearance and you come in at 120 knots and next to you is this 737 from United coming in. You look across, you know, wave at the pilot up there, and he gives you the finger...'
Tellingly, his favourite kind of flying is 'where you don't look out of the window, in fog or whatever. I love instrument flight. You trust your technique for a couple of hours, totally alone, follow your charts, and when you're 100 yards above ground, the runway lights are there, as if by magic.'
Acting, you suspect, offers him another way of absorbing himself in technique: 'I wouldn't know what to do with myself if it wasn't for all this,' he says, gesturing around the chaotic dressing- room. 'Doing a play in the West End is like being in a sanctuary for six months. It cuts the world off. You're alone with this little team.'
He only tried directing once, a curtain-raiser at the National. 'I found it lonely,' he recalls. 'The director tells the actors when the tea-break is. No one talked to me. They all ganged up.' He's been lucky with directors over the years, though, and he thinks Nicholas Hytner, who's doing Cressida, compares favourably with any of them. 'You want directors to be your dad,' he says. 'Nick's become my dad, so it's all right. Some refuse to do it. When they won't be your dad, you get nervous.'
If his directors are his father figures, Gambon's fellow actors have always been brothers in arms. He says, unsentimentally, that he misses a little of the camaraderie of old days at the National, when after shows, invariably himself, Anthony Hopkins and others would have a quick drink. 'We'd go to the pub next door to the Vic, then we'd go to the Salisbury up the road. Then we'd go to the Buxton, an actor's club, behind the Haymarket. From the Buxton we'd go to Jerry's, another club. Get out of there about 2.30. If we weren't working till the next evening, we'd then go back to the Buxton, bump into Richard Harris or O'Toole, then up to Covent Garden to the porters' pubs for a last pint and a bacon butty, which would take you through till breakfast.'
That doesn't happen now, he says, puzzled. 'Actors have all got mortgages and live in St John's Wood.' He worries a little about the future of the theatre - 'There seem to be more marketing and PR people than actors' - and he regrets the passing of the great eccentrics he's worked with, Ralph Richardson in particular. Richardson, he reveals, did, however, leave him an abiding legacy.
'One night, not long before he died,' Gambon says, in his throaty, conspiratorial way, 'I went to his dressing-room. He said to me, "I'm very happy to see you; I want you to take this." And he produced a tiny, little silver box; inside it was this old, grey tablet covered in muck. A huge thing. Looked like a horse tablet. He said, "I want you to have it." And when I asked why, he said that it was prescribed for him in 1938 by a doctor but he'd never taken it, and since then he'd always worried about the pill, lost sleep wondering what it had been for. He went on and on like this,' says Gambon, grinning, 'so eventually I popped it in my mouth.'
'What happened?' I ask.
'I'm still waiting to find out.'
Cressida runs at the Albery Theatre, London WC2 (020 7369 1740)
