Dumbledore and the bed chamber of secrets: Sir Michael Gambon's ménage à trois with his wife and (much) younger lover

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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The leafy lanes of rural Kent have echoed in recent days with the low roar of a particularly eye-catching sports car.

Behind the wheel of this sleek, 187mph mean machine has not been the usual football player or pop star you might associate with such an over-the-top display of machismo.

Instead, Sir Michael Gambon, his face like a lugubrious marshmallow, has been seated at the controls as he puts his latest £80,000 toy through its paces.

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Jack-the-lad: Sir Michael with girlfriend Philippa Hart

"You hear him coming long before you see him," a neighbour told the Mail.

"The car's utterly brash and not really appropriate for someone of his age, but he seems smitten with it. The only problem is that it is low-slung and it takes him quite a while to get out of it. He's 6ft 2in and a bit arthritic."

Which is not, one suspects, the image the theatrical knight was counting on when he took delivery of the head-turning black Audi R8.

But in his inimitable style, the 67-year-old acclaimed actor has christened the latest German-built addition to his fleet of sports cars "Teutonic Viagra".

It has also made for somewhat hair-raising trips between his £4million country manor near Gravesend and the Hertfordshire set where he is filming his latest outing as Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter movie (so erratic is his driving that BBC's Top Gear named a corner of its race track in Gambon's honour after he nearly rolled a car on the show.)

Nor is it the only new arrival in the well-stocked garage of the extravagant Sir Michael. It has been joined, it is said, by his and hers Mercedes sports cars he bought for himself and his wife of 45 years, Lady Anne.

According to reports this week, the gift of the car to his wife is a "thanks for having me back present" as the star reinstalls himself in the marital home two years after walking out for another woman.

Loyal: Wife Lady Anne

Yet, bizarrely, friends of the softly-spoken and bookish Lady Gambon have been insisting that "as far as she's concerned, they've never been apart".

But such confusion is, perhaps, understandable given the Bafta-winning Gambon's obsessively secretive approach to his private life - plus what can only be described as his highly complicated living arrangements.

It is so complicated, that while it was thought Gambon had left his wife for the lover - 25 years his junior - who last summer bore him a child (he has attempted to keep the relationship so secret that he refuses even to say what sex the baby is), the reality is substantially more tangled.

In fact, while he has been playing happy families with set designer Philippa Hart in London since she gave birth in May, he has at the same time quietly continued his role as landed gent with his wife at his country pile.

And, strangely, it is a situation apparently tolerated by both women in this highly unusual Ménage à trois.

Witness, for example, Gambon's bold-as-brass attendance at a summer garden party in the Kent village of Meopham, where he has lived with Anne for more than 20 years.

The charity event at the home of a retired GP drew the attendance of the local great and the good to help raise money for a Romanian hospice.

But the hot topic of conversation was not the prize raffle. Instead, the talk - whispered behind the hands of the invited guests - was of Sir Michael's appearance with his wife just days after newspaper reports that the star had become a father for a second time with Miss Hart (he also has a son Fergus, 44, with Lady Anne).

"He and Anne were definitely there as a couple," said fellow guest Geraldine Hasler, who was seated next to Gambon.

"I think Anne finds it strange that people say Michael left her for this other women. As far as anyone who knows them is concerned, they are still very much married.

"Anne is a lovely woman, very humble and not at all ostentatious. She is very supportive of Michael. They go to quite a few events together in the village. He comes over as a Jack-the-lad, but underneath it all he I think he is quite shy. He doesn't like to be bothered and keeps his personal life private."

So private, in fact, that when one interviewer asked him about his wife, he replied: "What wife?"

"Which wife?" might have been a more accurate response, given that when he is in London it is the 42-year-old Miss Hart who assumes the role as his companion.

The couple are regular fixtures at a series of private parties thrown by Sir Michael's theatrical cronies as well as dinners with their friends Jeremy Clarkson, the food writer A.A. Gill and Gill's girlfriend Nicola Formby.

The Dublin-born, London-raised actor and Miss Hart have been an item around town for eight years after working together on the set of the 2000 film Longitude, in which Gambon starred as 18th-century watchmaker John Harrison.

Within a year of their meeting, Gambon was openly introducing the brunette as his girlfriend to Charles Dance, Dame Maggie Smith and other cast members on his next movie, Gosford Park, in which he played a philandering aristocrat.

At the same time friends revealed he was describing Miss Hart as "the love of my life" and was also talking of their desire to start a family together.

Unsurprisingly, when his relationship with the younger woman became public, Anne, whom he married when he was 22, was said to be "devastated".

But even after his relationship with Miss Hart became public, Gambon, who found national fame in 1986 when he played a crime writer with a disfiguring skin condition in the acclaimed BBC series The Singing Detective, refused to move in with Philippa and insisted he remain at his West London bachelor pad when he stays in town.

Instead, he indulged his boyish hobbies of fast cars (he also owns a Ferrari), flying his light aircraft at the weekends and tinkering with his collection of 800 antique firearms.

He also remains in the habit, according to those in neighbouring apartments, of arriving home alone from appearing in a series of West End starring roles, closing his front door and letting out a "terrifying primal scream, like an ape giving vent".

Which might have as much to do, one suspects, with the strain of juggling his complex affairs of the heart as the emotional intensity of performing night after night on the stage.

A year ago he cancelled a series of Samuel Beckett plays in which he had been due to star in Sydney blaming "personal reasons", as friends revealed Miss Hart was pregnant.

At the same time it was reported that his marriage was over in all but name with the staunchly Catholic Lady Anne refusing him a divorce on the grounds of her religion.

But, in fact, while Gambon quietly helped Miss Hart relocate from her one-bedroom flat in Westbourne Grove, West London, to a £750,000 terrace house in nearby Chiswick, he refused to move in with his lover and their newborn baby, preferring to return to his wife or his London bolthole.

Nor does the chain-smoking and dissolute Gambon, who was knighted in 1998, appear naturally suited to the rigours of late fatherhood.

A month after the birth, he cut an exhausted and dishevelled figure as he slumped on a bench in a London park during a stroll with Philippa, their newborn and his lover's pet dog.

He is said to have complained to colleagues that he was exhausted as he attempted to fit in his busy domestic schedule with his demanding work.

In contrast to his rather fraught existence, Lady Anne, a retired mathematician, presents a somewhat serene image amid the bucolic splendour of their rambling Georgian pile. She spends her days creating her own ceramics on a potter's wheel in a specially adapted annexe.

Friends say she also indulges her hobby of bookbinding as well as attending regular get-togethers with the local coffee morning set.

One resident told the Mail: "I know her pretty well socially and we are members of a few local groups. She is friendly and chatty, though she has never once mentioned anything to do with Michael's mistress or the baby. But she happily talks away about him and which new part he is playing.

"She's exceedingly loyal to him, but she must know that in a small community like this tongues will wag about what her husband gets up to in London. In spite of it all she remains very dignified.

"I can't imagine she can be pleased with the situation, but she seems to put up with it and I'd say she definitely still loves him. Maybe she realises the only way to keep him is to let him lead this rather odd double life."

Crucially, according to her friends, it was his wife and not his girlfriend Sir Michael chose to accompany him when he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Kent at a ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral six months ago.

But Gambon is said to have a difficult relationship with his son, who is two years older than Miss Hart. Fergus is an expert on ceramics and works for auctioneer's Bonhams. He also appears on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow.

It is Fergus, who lives in nearby Tunbridge Wells, who escorts his mother to local functions when Sir Michael is away filming. He is also to be seen mowing his parents' lawn.

The friend of Lady Anne told the Mail: "She has had to get used to Michael coming and going for years because of his acting work. I think she employs a sort of double-think about his other life. It's as if this other woman and her baby don't exist.

"But I would say that neither of them encourage anyone taking an interest in their marriage. Michael can be standoffish and curmudgeonly, but a lot of it is bluster.

"A few months ago, when some neighbours told him a disabled friend was a big fan of his, they found Michael knocking on their door the next day holding a signed autograph for this chap.

"When he is at home, which he often is, he and Anne are like any other husband and wife I know. They seem like a perfectly normal couple."

Given the distinctly out-of-theordinary nature of his complicated private life, this might be the roguish and talented Gambon's finest performance to date.

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