Friends of The ABC

No.178: September 29, 2023

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Photo by Grant Armstrong

Dear Friends,

Just last week I was marveling at the constant stream of terrific actors the United Kingdom continues to produce. Just after writing that I saw none other than Jonny Lee Miller, as English as an Englishman can be, playing a U.S. Army Colonel in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. And he’s by no means an exception: for example, many Americans are totally clueless that Hugh Laurie—Hugh Laurie!—is a Brit, so good was his turn in the hit television series House, MD. And how about Damian Lewis? Even before his star rose in shows like Billions he played Dick Winters (practically the literal Captain America) in Band of Brothers. The Brits are really good as this acting thing. It must have something to do with the legacy of William Shakespeare.

We just lost one of the very best. Newspapers and headlines are announcing that Michael Gambon (“who played Dumbledore”) has passed away at age 82. Let me get this off my chest: saying that Gambon “played Dumbledore” is like writing that Michael Jordan is known as a former Double-A baseball player or a spokesman for Nike. That is, Albus Dumbledore is arguably the least significant role he ever played, and it is so very sad to be forever known for your least significant accomplishment. Journalists ought to be embarrassed to write such things. And to be clear: I’m not knocking Dumbledore, the character. It’s just that Gambon’s portrayal of him was—oh man, don’t get me started on this. I’ll just leave it here: I cannot wait for somebody to someday make films of the actual Harry Potter books. Because nobody has. (And if someone was smart, they’d do a faithful-to-the-books, ten-episode-per-book streaming blockbuster; it would easily be the most lucrative streaming series in history.)

IMDB tells us that Michael Gambon’s film credits reached 172 different roles. He was a staple of BBC costume dramas, to be sure. But he was also very versatile. I cannot tell you how amused I was to see him as the paranoid prepper in The Book of Eli, firing his AR-15 and throwing hand grenades! His role as the villain opposite Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall in (the vastly underrated!) Open Range was one for the ages.

But it is for the costume dramas that I will forever love him and miss him. He is terrific as Emma Woodhouse’s hypochondriac and anxiety-filled father in 2009’s Emma. But, at the end of the day, for me Michael Gambon will always be Squire Hamley.

Do yourself a big favor and set aside four hours to watch BBC’s adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives & Daughters and pay particular attention to Gambon’s Squire. I daresay there is not a better, more moving, and more compelling piece of acting anywhere, at any time, in any genre. There appear to be literally zero video clips of his performance on the Internet, so I’ll just plug in the original trailer for the show—just check out that cast!

RIP

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In his classic novel Les Misérables Victor Hugo invented a barely-fictional group of angry young revolutionaries called the “Friends of the ABC.” The name is a pun based on the French word abaissés, meaning “the abased, humiliated, degraded.” Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. A group of young, fiery, romantic young men take it upon themselves to stand up for the downtrodden masses and promise to “cut the fat ones down to size.” This is their time. The new world of justice and peace is just around the corner. The “dark of ages past” will give way to a new dawn.