Obituaries Thread 🐐

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Derek Malcolm, longtime Guardian film critic, dies aged 91

[Raylan]

Michael Gambon, Shakespearean actor who played Dumbledore, dies aged 82

Family announce death of star, known for Harry Potter, Layer Cake and Singing Detective, after bout of pneumonia

The actor had a sixty-year career on stage and screen

EAMONN MCCABE/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES

Thursday September 28 2023, 9.15pm BST, The Times

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Sir Michael Gambon, the Irish-English Shakespearean actor, has died at the age of 82, his family has announced.

The four-time Bafta-winning actor had a career spanning six decades in the profession, first on stage as one of the original members of the Royal National Theatre and then on television and the big screen.

His best-known role was as Albus Dumbledore in the film adaptations of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, from the third film onwards. He also starred in the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech where he played George V.

A statement on behalf of his wife, Lady Gambon, and son, Fergus, issued by his publicist Clair Dobbs, said: “We are devastated to announce the loss of Sir Michael Gambon.

“Beloved husband and father, Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife Anne and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia. Michael was 82.

“We ask that you respect our privacy at this painful time and thank you for your messages of support and love.”

Jeremy Clarkson, the TV presenter and journalist, paid tribute to Gambon who regularly appeared on his former programme Top Gear.

“I’m so sad to hear that Michael Gambon has died,” Clarkson wrote. “He was hugely amusing, and such a tremendous guest — we even named a corner after him.”

Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, praised the Dublin-born actor, writing on Twitter/X: “Rest In Peace. A great actor. Whether performing in Beckett, Dennis Potter or Harry Potter, he gave his all to every performance.”

Obituary

Michael Gambon was never an official member of the acting “awkward squad”, but interviewers invariably left an audience with him none the wiser about what made him tick.

The craggy-faced thespian told one that he had started his career in the Royal Ballet. When another asked him about his wife, Anne, he responded “What wife?”. Another thought they had finally cracked it on being invited into his dressing room, only for Gambon to point to a signed photograph of Robert De Niro on the wall — he had never met the actor and had written the dedication himself.

With Bob Hoskins and their Baftas in 1987. Gambon won best television actor for his role in The Singing Detective

PA

Gambon believed that an actor’s work should speak for itself. It did in this case as he established himself as one of the Britain’s most popular character actors. His career on the stage eventually flourished after he was spotted by Sir Laurence Olivier and invited to join the National Theatre company in the early Sixties. Simon Callow once said of him: “Gambon’s iron lungs and overwhelming charisma are able to command a sort of operatic full-throatedness which triumphs over hard walls and long distances.” Sir Peter Hall called him “unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful”. In 1980 Ralph Richardson coined the phrase “The Great Gambon” after seeing the actor play the title role in Brecht’s The Life of Galileo in a bravura three-and-a- half-hour performance at the National Theatre that made his name in theatrical circles.

Gambon in A View from the Bridge at the National Theatre in 1988

ALASTAIR MUIR/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX FEATURES

And though he once improbably auditioned to replace George Lazenby for the role of James Bond in 1970, Gambon would go on to achieve renown in television and cinema in the classic “character actor” guise, his lived-in features and stentorian voice used for a wide palette of roles that ended with him playing the kindly, wise old wizard Dumbledore in six Harry Potter films.

By middle age Gambon’s cheeks had grown so jowly that he himself described his face as being “like a balloon full of water”. His rubbery features could either be turned down lugubriously or they could light up in childish delight. To that he could add a chaotic swirl of grey hair and a mixture of menace and melancholy in his dark eyes that were framed by bags so big under them that they could hold baby kangaroos. He used the fact that he was a rather ungainly man, with big bones and enormous feet, to clownish advantage as he mapped the physical landscapes of his characters. As a result he was superb in comedy and a fine interpreter of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

Calling himself an instinctive rather than technical actor, Gambon claimed that acting lessons were “a load of bollocks”. Yet he was able to convey great pathos in portraying characters under physical or mental pressure: Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya or Philip Marlow in Dennis Potter’s television masterwork, The Singing Detective. In the latter he plays the crime novelist called Philip E Marlowe, who while stricken in hospital with a chronic skin disease falls into a fantasy world that is a surreal mixture of wartime England and hard-bitten noir thriller. Swathed in bandages, Gambon gave a mesmeric performance, often just with his eyes, in a portrayal that brought him to the attention of the wider public. He began receiving fan mail, but remained an offbeat and elusive character. One fellow actor said of him: “Sometimes I feel he is almost embarrassed by how good he is.”

Gambon in The Singing Detective

ALAMY

Michael Gambon was born into a working-class family in Dublin in 1940. His mother, Mary (née Hoare), was a seamstress; his father, Edward, was an engineering operative. The family moved to London when Michael was six so that his father could find work in rebuilding projects after the war. Michael grew up on a street in Camden Town on which several of the neighbouring addresses were still piles of rubble.

He attended the Catholic St Aloysius boys’ school in Mornington Crescent, where he made his performance debut serving on the altar. While half disappearing in a pall of incense as he swung the thurible three times, Gambon experienced the first thrill of “standing in front of people and being looked at”. He otherwise hated the schools he attended in London and Kent and left at 15 with no qualifications. After sweeping floors in a factory he became an engineering apprentice with Vickers-Armstrongs in Crayford, Kent. Working at a lathe, his hands became so impregnated with oil that it would take years to come out.

Working for the engine-maker left him with a lifelong interest in things mechanical and he would amass a collection of some 800 antique guns. He also became a qualified pilot, once taking a fellow actor for a spin and pretending to have a heart attack.

Gambon was knighted in 1998

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE

He decided to become an actor after walking down Shaftesbury Avenue one day, looking inside the open door of the Prince’s Theatre and seeing a world of which he knew instantly he wanted to be a part. After a limited “am-dram” experience, he sent a largely invented CV to Micheál Mac Liammóir, a Dublin-based impresario who took him on as a spear-carrier in the touring company he was running.

In 1963 Gambon auditioned for Olivier’s National Theatre, but just as he was about to start a speech from Richard III he gashed his hand on a nail protruding from a stage pillar. He got the job anyway, but with his fellow National Theatre intake including Robert Stephens, Derek Jacobi and Frank Finlay, competition was fierce. After three years Olivier suggested that he should try the regions, which he did, tackling big roles such as Othello, Macbeth and Coriolanus, with varying success.

Gambon played Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective
BBC

He made his West End debut in 1974 as the easygoing vet in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, on the recommendation of the impresario Michael Codron, who saw his potential. The Ayckbourn link was to be crucial: Gambon went on to achieve some of his finest work with the group of actors led by Ayckbourn at the National.

Hall directed him in the three-hander Betrayal about an agent and a publisher, and the woman they share. At first Hall was suspicious of Gambon. “All actor, taking refuge behind an incomprehension which certainly isn’t true.” As rehearsals continued, the director changed his mind. With Daniel Massey and Penelope Wilton forming the other sides of the triangle, this was one of the National’s most underrated achievements of the 1970s.

Gambon’s performance persuaded Hall to assign him the title role in Galileo against the advice of his fellow NT directors, who considered Gambon insufficiently starry. Surviving the notorious lash of John Dexter’s tongue during the rehearsals, Gambon picked up the London Critics best actor award.

He simply accepted the good reviews with the bad and never approached the craft with the reverence of some of his contemporaries. Once while playing Polonius in Hamlet, he declaimed the line “O, I am slain” on three consecutive nights in the guise of different theatrical grandees. In another production when a member of the audience coughed, he would cough back to them before delivering his line. “He thinks theatre is important but not that important,” one fellow actor said. “When the show’s over, he’ll go home to get on with other things. He brings a sense of sanity to the whole business.”

Gambon would garner less favourable reviews as Benedick in Peter Gill’s production of Much Ado About Nothing at the National, but demonstrated his mastery of the Bard by appearing simultaneously at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon as King Lear and as Antony opposite Helen Mirren’s Cleopatra — sometimes playing both roles on the same day. His anatomisation of madness was particularly powerful as Lear, with a red-nosed Antony Sher as the Fool sitting on his master’s knee like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Sher wrote a book about the experience, Year of the King, which has a number of passages recounting Gambon talking in fruity north Londonese. Yet behind the gruff kindness and inveterate larking about on set, Sher detected “Great currents of feeling”. On once being stopped by police for speeding on the M1, Gambon pleaded with them that he needed to get to Stratford for that night’s performance of King Lear. After giving them a lengthy soliloquy on the hard shoulder, the officers let him go.

Michael Caine and Gambon starred together in the 2003 comedy The Actors
GETTY IMAGES

Ayckbourn then invited him to lead the company he was running at the National, having earmarked Gambon for the meaty role of Carbone, a New York docker, in A View from the Bridge. Gambon immersed himself in the part by watching films set on New York’s docks, including On the Waterfront. He knew about the exhaustion brought on by physical labour and added to this an understanding of the blinkered views of Italian immigrant families. His Catholic upbringing in a poor part of London may have helped. Gambon himself said that playing Carbone was the only time he found himself slipping into the role when he was not on stage, taking on the walk and talking to people in the argot of the Bronx. In a sparkling review of the production, The New York Times called Gambon “arguably the finest actor in the English theatre”. It won him a clutch of best actor awards.

Up to the beginning of the Nineties the best known of his sporadic films, at least to the arthouse audience, was Peter Greenaway’s darkly baroque cult classic The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), in which he was the monstrous, foul-mouthed gangster whose response to being cuckolded by his wife (Helen Mirren) is predictably gruesome.

Gambon as Galileo at the National Theatre in 1980
ALAMY

Having concentrated on the theatre, and not made a great deal of money, he decided to cash in on his growing profile and accept the financial lure of Hollywood. It was a disaster. His chosen vehicle, Toys, was a flop and another film, Clean State, struggled to get a release. With some relief he returned to Britain and began to establish himself on television, taking on the role of Maigret in 1992. Although he was well cast as the dogged detective, the series faded without leaving much trace, and a BBC2 revival of John Osborne’s The Entertainer in 1993 did not fare much better. The part of Archie Rice should have fitted precisely with both the clownish and tragic sides of Gambon, but the performance turned out bland, never touching the depths of sleaze reached by Olivier, the first Archie. In a typically coruscating attack on the production Osborne remarked that “even the magnificent Gambon floundered”.

In 1995 Gambon was once more back at the National, taking the title role in Volpone and playing the self-made restaurateur in Skylight, David Hare’s metaphor for the Thatcher years. “For a man of such bulk,” recalled the critic Michael Billington, Gambon showed “extraordinary lightness and grace”. Skylight transferred to New York, giving Gambon a somewhat belated Broadway debut.

Gambon’s film career finally picked up in the early Noughties, and he replaced the late Richard Harris as Albus Dumbledore from the second Harry Potter movie onwards
ALAMY

By the turn of the century Gambon was immersed in the disciplined precision of Pinter and Beckett. He played the manipulative tramp in a London revival of Pinter’s The Caretaker and was Hirst in No Man’s Land in the West End. He read a monologue by Hirst, selected by the playwright, at Pinter’s funeral in 2008.

Back in the 1980s Richard Eyre, then running the National, had first approached Gambon to play Sir John Falstaff, a part which seemed to be made for him. It finally happened in 2005 under Eyre’s successor, Nicholas Hytner, in Henry IV, but for some the result was disappointing. In The Times Benedict Nightingale said Gambon lacked “charm, fun and, surprisingly, charisma” and criticised his “often bleary and blurry” diction.

Rehearsing for Antony and Cleopatra with Helen Mirren in 1982
TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD

Gambon’s film career, meanwhile, had finally picked up. He reckoned that earning good money in the cinema was a fair reward for staying faithful to the stage. He was one of the aristocratic leads in Robert Altman’s splendid ensemble in Gosford Park (2001), and the British prime minister in Ali G Indahouse (2002). He was excellent as the insouciant Charles Fox in Amazing Grace (2006), which told the story of William Wilberforce’s struggle to abolish slavery in Britain, and as George V in The King’s Speech (2010). By then he had succeeded the late Richard Harris as Albus Dumbledore, the hugely bearded headmaster of Hogwarts, in the Harry Potter films. In one year he managed a Harry Potter and five other films.

He also became much busier on television. In 1999 he won the best actor Bafta for his Squire Hamley in Wives and Daughters and enlivened other costume dramas as Mr Holbrook in Cranford and Mr Woodhouse in Emma. There were further Baftas for the 17th-century inventor John Harrison in the Channel 4 series Longitude (2000) and for Stephen Poliakoff’s masterly study of a family trapped in its past, Perfect Strangers (2001).

Gambon won the best actor Bafta award for his role in Wives and Daughters

BBC

He went on to serve Poliakoff as Edward VII in the acclaimed drama The Lost Prince. Lyndon Johnson hardly seemed obvious casting for Gambon, who was worried about getting the Texan accent, but his portrayal of the US president in the miniseries, Path to War, earned him Golden Globe and Emmy nominations.

Gambon had married Anne Miller in 1962 and they had a son, Fergus, who became an expert in ceramics and appeared on The Antiques Roadshow. In 2002 it was revealed that he was in a relationship with Philippa Hart, a set designer 25 years his junior. Soon afterwards he moved out of the family home and became a father again in his sixties, when she gave birth to his sons Michael and William.

The accompanying publicity was acutely uncomfortable to an actor for whom the idea of stardom was abhorrent. Indeed, it was said that Gambon was so shy accepting an award, which he did many times, it could leave him tongue-tied.

Gambon was a role model for many younger actors
TED BATH FOR THE TIMES

Younger actors looked up to him. Danny Lee Wynter, who appeared with him in Joe’s Palace (2007), recalled walking with Gambon in Soho and encountering the young actor’s father, with whom he had a difficult relationship. “My father suddenly morphed into a child. He called him ‘Sir’. ‘Your son did good,’ Gambon told him. ‘So did you!’ I said to Gambon, but he just grunted and barked ‘Shut up, what do you know!’. The two men laughed. In that moment I felt proud. Gambon knew of my relationship with my old man when months before we were stuck in a canoe together in the moat of Bodium Castle for an entire day and covered everything from childhood, religion, sexuality, idols and life regrets. He knew the strained nature of our union because we spoke of it in candid detail. Now here they were in this impromptu meeting. We said our goodbyes and I continued walking with Gambon on towards Chinatown. ‘Funny things, fathers, aren’t we, Danny’, he said.”

Gambon retained a love of fast cars until late in life and relished an appearance on BBC’s Top Gear in 2002 as one of the celebrities who is timed doing a circuit of a track. Gambon cornered the Suzuki Liana on the final bend on two wheels. It was renamed named “Gambon Corner”.

With Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2009
ALAMY

He went on to endear himself to a younger generation by appearing in six Harry Potter films between 2005 and 2011. He took a simple approach to the role of Dumbledore: “I just stick on a beard and play me, so it’s no great feat. Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. I’m not really a character actor at all.” Thereafter he said, “Children stop me for Dumbledore, posh people for Beckett.”

Gambon retired from the stage in 2015 because he was finding it increasingly difficult to learn his lines, but he continued to lend his charisma to cameo roles on screen, including in Paddington 2 and Judy.

He reflected with some satisfaction that after such a notable career on stage and screen, not many people still had any idea who he really was. He was particularly delighted that when he went to receive his CBE in 1990 — he would be knighted eight years later — he heard the Queen whisper to an aide: “What’s it for?”

Sir Michael Gambon, actor, was born on October 19, 1940. He died of pneumonia on September 28, 2023, aged 82

[Raylan]

OBITUARY

Chuck Feeney obituary

Self-effacing duty free pioneer who made billions and then, in an extraordinary act of philanthropy, quietly gave it all away to charity

Feeney in 2009. Warren Buffett described him as his hero, adding he “should be everybody’s hero”

“I used to be Charlie’s girlfriend when we were teens,” said the little old lady.
“Boy, did I make a mistake.” Later known as Chuck, Charlie Feeney was an unprepossessing New Jersey boy who became a multibillionaire from duty-free shops and gave it all away to charity, anonymously for the most part, and ended his days living in a rented flat in San Francisco.

A fellow billionaire, the investor Warren Buffett, called him “my hero, and he should be everybody’s hero”.

While Feeney based his philanthropy on the highest and best use of the money, his generosity sprang from deep misgivings, bordering on guilt, about how much he had amassed and whether he deserved it.

After years of pondering what to do, and attracted to the example of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, he based his philanthropic strategy on the principles expressed by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay, The Gospel of Wealth. The best option, Carnegie said, was to provide “the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise”, such as universities and libraries.

In 1984 Feeney secretly consigned his entire shareholding in the firm he co-founded, Duty Free Shoppers, to a Bermuda charitable foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies. Unlike his high-spending partner, Robert Miller, he embraced the simple life, carrying his papers in a plastic bag, wearing a £10 watch, selling his car and travelling instead on buses and the economy sections of planes. Feeney, with hooded blue eyes and a boxer’s chunky physique, not only outstripped Carnegie’s generosity even after allowing for inflation, he diverged from him in one significant sense: he would not allow his name to go on any building or institution he financed. And until late in life, he would not accept any honours.

For many years, when he gave money he insisted that the recipients must not reveal the source. “Beyond Mr Feeney’s reticence about blowing his own horn”, said Christopher Oechsli, Atlantic’s chief executive, “it was a way to leverage more donations: some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.”

Consequently, many beneficiaries had no idea who had changed their lives so dramatically, and some thought it was being laundered by the mafia.

“It is their call what the rich do with their money,” Feeney said in his gentle New Jersey accent. “I would not want to impose my thoughts on any rich person: he can keep it all or spend it all. If he doesn’t find anything wrong with buying big yachts, fine — more power to him. But think about giving it away while you are alive, because you’ll get a lot more satisfaction than if you wait until you’re dead. Besides, it’s a lot more fun.”

He wound up Atlantic in 2020 after giving away $8 billion (about £6 billion), keeping a relatively modest $2 million to retire on. One of Feeney’s last gifts was $350 million to his alma mater, Cornell University, to build a technology campus on Roosevelt Island, in New York, taking his total support for Cornell to nearly $1 billion. His first gift, for $10,000 more than 50 years earlier, had been to the university’s hotel school where he had studied. His donations extended around the world, including Australia and Vietnam, but especially Ireland.

Initially sympathetic to the IRA cause, Feeney was horrified by the 1987 Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing, which killed 11 people while he happened to be in London. “Maybe I was naive at that stage,” he said, “but I took the view that this is not the way Irish people react, by blowing up kids at commemoration events.”

Feeney was honoured by Irish universities, from both the north and south

He subsequently gave money to both sides — Sinn Fein and the Ulster Defence Association — on condition they worked with President Clinton to broker peace. Feeney also gave $1 billion to Irish education.

By 2006 Atlantic was a big business, even though its purpose was to give money rather than make it. An organisation sprouted up with 300 staff in ten countries, and a professional management operating to agreed guidelines. However, even though Atlantic’s assets had long ceased to belong to him, occasionally Feeney was frustrated to see outsiders distributing what he thought of as his cash in ways that he did not always approve of.

By 2010 he wanted the board ousted so he could take back control, arguing for “a moral and fiduciary obligation that the interests, values and passions of the living sole donor be given central consideration in spending the fruits of his labour”.

The battle dragged on for another 18 months. Feeney got his way, but the tension between the professional and personal approach was fully resolved only when Atlantic was dissolved.

Charles Francis Feeney was born in 1931 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a working-class town six miles south of Newark. His parents, Leo and Madaline Feeney, had come there from Philadelphia a few years earlier.

Leo, a member of the Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus, was an underwriter with Royal Globe Insurance in New York, and Madaline was a nurse. They had three children: Arlene was the eldest and Ursula the youngest.

At ten years old, Feeney was selling Christmas cards door-to-door and being paid to help the postman put letters and cards in mailboxes. He and a friend earned more by clearing snow from driveways.

Feeney went to the local St Genevieve’s Grammar School, becoming at 13 the first pupil to win a scholarship to the Jesuit Regis High School in Manhattan, which, despite the subsidy, his parents could barely afford. So he got himself expelled and went to St Mary’s of the Assumption High School in Elizabeth instead. There he acted in the school production of The Divine Flora, an obscure comedy, and played for the American football team. He was voted wittiest in his class in 1947.

On weekends Feeney caddied at a nearby golf course. “It was nine holes for a dollar with a tip of 25 cents, or eighteen holes for $1.75 and a tip of 25 cents,” he recalled. “I always looked for two nine-hole players.”

In 1948 Feeney joined the US air force, knowing that he would be conscripted anyway within a few years, and his workmates started calling him Chuck. He was sent to the Fifth Air Force Radio Squadron’s Mobile Detachment at Ashiya Air Base, on Japan’s southern tip. When the Korean war broke out in 1950, Ashiya was a supply staging post.

An article in Reader’s Digest inspired Feeney to apply to the Cornell School of Hotel Management, selling sandwiches to fellow students to pay the bills. He graduated in 1956, and learnt French and Russian at the University of California, Los Angeles.

When he discovered that university courses were free of charge in France, he took a master’s in political science at the University of Grenoble (now Grenoble Alps University), at the same time becoming a proficient tennis player and skier.

On the coast at Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice, was a US navy base. The entrepreneurial Feeney started running a summer school there for the sailors’ children.

Through her father, a French Algerian psychiatrist, he met Danielle Morali-Daninos, a student at the Sorbonne in Paris. They married in 1959 and had four daughters and a son: Juliette, Caroleen, Leslie, Diane and Patrick. Feeney made them all work as waiters or chambermaids in their school summer holidays, and pay their way through college.

Diane, the youngest daughter, ran the French American Charitable Trust (Fact), with her brother and sisters as directors. It started with $40 million in 1990, on Feeney’s divorce from Danielle, made grants promoting a more egalitarian society and closed in 2011. Caroleen is an actress, and the other children live privately. Feeney made what he described as “unextravagant provisions” for his children in his will.

Feeney married Helga Flaiz, his former secretary, in 1995.

In a Villefranche bar he met an Englishman, Robert Edmonds, who was trying to sell duty-free alcohol to American sailors and needed a partner who knew his way around the navy bases.

When Edmonds went to the Caribbean, Feeney reconnected with Robert Miller, who had been in the year ahead of him at Cornell. They teamed up to form a partnership that lasted nearly 40 years. He and Miller founded the Duty Free Shoppers Group (DFS) in 1960, opened a Paris office, sold duty-free cars and created a Europe-wide network until Feeney saw that there was less competition in Asia.

As most US navy ships would stop in Hong Kong on their way home, he and Miller set up there. Their big break, in 1965, was obtaining the exclusive concession for duty-free sales in Hawaii. The Japanese were beginning to venture abroad in numbers for the first time after the Second World War, and had money to spend because their domestic market was still so limited. Hawaii was a favourite destination.

Feeney in April 1999

DFS became the world’s largest travel retailer, paying hundreds of millions of dollars for the most lucrative airport concessions. In 1996, Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies and a partner sold their stakes in DFS to the French luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH), despite opposition from Miller. The two founders did not speak again for years.

In 2012 all of the universities of Ireland, north and south, jointly conferred an honorary doctorate of law on Feeney. He also received Ireland’s Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad. But Feeney remained at home rather than risk being the centre of attention.

When he received Cornell’s Icon of Industry Award in 2010 the president emeritus, Hunter Rawlings, presented him with a $13 watch. “The award of this Casio is really appreciated,” Feeney mused, “because you can always sell these things on eBay.”

Chuck Feeney, businessman and philanthropist, was born on April 23, 1931. He died on October 9, 2023, aged 92

[Raylan]

Michael Gambon leaves £1.5m to wife and nothing to girlfriend

Not a fan of the durable relationship idea evidently

[habanerocat]

Couldn’t read it but I assume that’ll be contested.

[Raylan]

https://archive.ph/4joN1

[habanerocat]

What’s a trophy?

[Raylan]

Not sure whether it means a valuable heirloom or an actual trophy of some sort

[Arthur]

Michael Jambon

[Fagan_ODowd]

@Arthur

Michael Jambon

He was an awful ham

[Julio_Geordio]

Things I learned today Michael Gambon was Irish

[balbec]

Vince Power made the Torygraph @Fagan_ODowd

Vince Power, promoter who opened the Mean Fiddler and went on to become the king of pop festivals – obituary

He moved to Britain from Ireland in his teens and embarked on his business career selling secondhand furniture

Telegraph Obituaries11 March 2024 • 3:17pm

Related Topics

• Obituary,
• Pop music,
• Rock music,
• Reading Festival,
• Glastonbury Festival,
• Republic of Ireland

12

Vince Power at the Finsbury Park Fleadh in 2004 CREDIT: Roger Taylor

Vince Power, who has died aged 76, was the founder of the Mean Fiddler chain of music venues; he also took on the flagging Reading Festival, transforming it into a mainstay of the summer music calendar and heralding a move into other events including Leeds, Latitude and Hop Farm festivals.

The aptly named Power, who had cropped hair, a stubbly beard and a twinkle in his eye, had been running a chain of second-hand furniture stores in north London in the early 1980s when he visited Nashville, Tennessee. Having enjoyed the music and hospitality, he was inspired to open his own honky-tonk bar. “I just thought, wouldn’t it be great to have my own place, with a house band and a cold beer?” said the music mogul who was once described as “a 6ft lump of Irish meat and gristle”.

He bought a former gambling den that had once been frequented by the Krays and Richardsons in the rundown Irish enclave of Harlesden, north-west London. On December 9 1982 the Mean Fiddler opened its doors, the name being a tribute to the many musicians in his family. Many of the acts were Irish, such as the Pogues. Eric Clapton was known to chat with strangers at the bar, while Sting, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello enjoyed the music in virtual anonymity.

The Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, a former gambling den frequented by the Krays CREDIT: D Elwes/Daily Mail/Shutterstock

Customers flocked there at weekends, but less so during the week, when on one occasion only nine punters came through the door, and Power was forced to broaden his range of music. “Once I’d got rid of my own personal tastes, it began to work very well,” he told The Independent.

Clubbers and critics were soon making the trek up the Bakerloo line, and over the years the Mean Fiddler played host to such high-profile musicians as Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, who played his final British gig there in 1987.

Some events were less successful. Power once found the American country singer Dwight Yoakam having a fit of nerves by the stage door and had to coax him on stage. On another occasion the singer-songwriter John Martyn was due to play at 10pm but did not emerge until midnight, when he was promptly sick over the front row; Power “had to give a lot of people their fivers back”.

Always socially conscious, he laid on fundraising gigs to support the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, Irish people who were convicted – wrongly, it subsequently transpired – of terrorist offences. This led to suggestions that he was a supporter of the IRA, though he insisted that he was against any kind of violence.

Vince Power at the Reading Festival in 1997 CREDIT: Eddie Mulholland

In 1990 Power agreed to help Harold Pendleton revive his flagging jazz festival at Reading. Within three years it was back on track, but Pendleton then ended their arrangement. A furious Power bought the rights to use the field and his Reading Festival soon became a highlight of the summer music scene. The Leeds Festival joined his portfolio in 1999.

On occasions he flirted with the stock market, though the City did not know what to make of him. In any case, he had little trouble raising cash when it really mattered. In 2000 a member of staff at his Madstock festival in Finsbury Park, north London, was mugged while carrying a five-figure sum of cash, leaving him unable to pay the headline act, Madness. He rushed around the festival site, calling in cash and favours from stall holders, and hours later handed Madness a bin liner containing £25,000. The show went on.

John Vincent Power was born in Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford, Ireland, on April 29 1947, the fourth of 11 children of Jack Power, a forester, and his wife Brigid. Four siblings died at birth, including his unnamed twin sister, who was denied a Catholic funeral because she had not been baptised. He described how his childhood made “Angela’s Ashes look like good bedtime reading”, adding that there was no hot water and the toilet was “any field you like”.

The Pogues on stage at the Mean Fiddler in 1984 CREDIT: Steve Rapport/Getty Images

Educated at Kilmacthomas village school and Dungarvan Vocational College, he won a scholarship to study artificial insemination at Galway Agricultural College, but unable to face three years of study, he instead went to live with his aunt, Kitty Barry, in Hemel Hempstead. She found him work at Woolworths but he loathed both the job – and his manager, who insisted on calling him Paddy. He also hated life in England, returning home six times in his first six months.

Gradually things improved. He moved to Kilburn with an Irish friend and started selling beds at Whiteleys shopping centre in Bayswater. He then worked on the biscuit line at McVitie’s and the baked-beans line at Heinz before joining Wall’s, from where he was sacked after falling asleep and leaving hundreds of ice-cream bars to land in boxes unwrapped.

His next job was demolishing roofs for £2 a time on building sites, which got him into household effects. “There was so much furniture left in these old Victorian houses people were abandoning for their high-rise blocks. I’d restore it and sell it through ads in the newsagent,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Power at one of his venues, the Jazz Cafe in Camden CREDIT: Justin Sutcliffe

At 19 he rented his first shop and before long had a chain of furniture shops across north London. His most lucrative find was an oil painting that he bought for £10 from a house in west London and sold a couple of weeks later at Sotheby’s for £7,000.

By the turn of the century Power’s Mean Fiddler group owned some of the best-known music venues in the capital, including the Astoria, Subterania, Point 101, the Jazz Cafe and G-A-Y, though the original Mean Fiddler in Harlesden closed in 2002. He took on Home, the eight-storey superclub in Leicester Square, and expanded into fine dining, including Michelin-starred Conrad Gallagher’s eponymous restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, though they soon fell out.

He also started the Phoenix Festival near Stratford-upon-Avon, which featured David Bowie, Björk and the reformed Sex Pistols, but it struggled in the face of competition from the Glastonbury Festival and was cancelled in 1998. Four years later Power took operational control of Glastonbury under a three-year deal signed with Michael Eavis, the organiser.

By 2005 Power had sold a controlling stake in the Mean Fiddler Group to the American media group Clear Channel. The following year the company, which became known as Festival Republic, started to reduce its clubs to concentrate on festivals, including the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Through his Vince Power Music Group he moved into upmarket West End clubs, including the Pigalle in Piccadilly.

While his focus was always on Britain, he also staged festivals in the US and Spain. The headline acts at his 1993 Fleadh Mór festival at Tramore racecourse in Waterford included Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Joan Baez and Van Morrison, though “I lost over £1 million on that gig,” he said ruefully. Undeterred, he was part of a consortium that later bought the racecourse.

Power, who was appointed honorary CBE in 2006, was far removed from the stereotypical rock promoter. He was a staunch vegetarian, devoted to yoga, and never tried drugs. He did, however, have eight children by three partners, but insisted that they would not benefit from his millions, telling The Independent: “I’d rather give all my money to charity than my kids.”

Vince Power, born April 29 1947, died March 9 2024