It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at popular culture, especially something as overwhelming as the eight-film Harry Potter series, which parked itself in cinemas worldwide for a full decade back when the millennium still had that new-car smell. Whether a supporter or disparager of the films (truth be told I side with the former, beginning with the Alfonso Cuarón-helmed Prisoner of Azkaban), one has to admit the series introduced a generation of young movie goers to a murderers’ row of British acting legends, many of whom they otherwise probably never would’ve laid eyes on. I’m talking Maggie Smith, Imelda Staunton, John Hurt, Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, Richard Griffiths, Richard Harris, David Thewlis, Timothy Spall, Robbie Coltrane, Ian Hart, Brendon Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Gary Oldman, Jason Issacs, Helena Bonham Carter, Jim Broadbent and so on.

Association is a powerful thing, especially in the purview of cinema. So you can see how this early exposure could affect impressionable souls, the hope being that some of the younglings who enjoyed Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn in Half-Blood Prince or David Thewlis as Remus Lupin in Prisoner of Azkaban or Brendon Gleeson as Mad-Eye Moody in Order of the Phoenix…

…one day will seek them out in more challenging films such as Topsy-Turvy (1999), Naked (1993) and/or Calvary (2014).

Case in point: Back in 2010, the CFS’s 8-year-old son happened upon his parents watching Downton Abbey. While producing fake vomiting sounds, he happened to notice the imperious Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith). Suddenly intrigued, he removed his finger from inside his throat to ask if she was Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter. Told that she, indeed, was none other than, he not only watched the rest of the episode with us but all subsequent seasons.

Sticking with this theme of positive outcomes to early exposure/association with Harry Potter actors, it should come as no surprise to my 15-20 loyal readers that yours truly, being a film prodigy and general highbrow, came to Michael Gambon, one of my all-time favorite actors and the man who played Dumbledore, in reverse.

I say reverse because it wasn’t some mass-market extravaganza that brought him to my attention but rather a relatively obscure (in the States at least) BBC production of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.

The year was 1987 and, having read somewhere (Time magazine?) about the splash the miniseries had made upon release in Britain back in November 1986, I caught the series when it finally was shown (uncut!) on my local PBS station.

And what a series it was, telling the story of Philip E. Marlow (Gambon), a novelist suffering from both writer’s block and a debilitating skin condition (psoriatic arthropathy) that leaves him bedridden and suffering in a hospital ward. Drifting in and out of consciousness due to pain, Marlow fantasizes about his unfinished detective novel, his wartime childhood and the suicide of his mother, the latter two threads interwoven into the plot of the former. Oh, and did I mention the characters often break into lip-synced song and dance?

This was heady, brilliant stuff, much too complicated to do justice in a single-paragraph synopsis. But just as impressive as Potter’s writing and plotting was Gambon’s brilliant performance, effortlessly switching from a pathetic (albeit hilarious) curmudgeon suffering the indignities of a painful and debilitating autoimmune disease (his scenes with a nurse applying a salve to his privates are too much)…

…to a suave, steely detective in the tradition of Bogart…

I was utterly mesmerized by this guy—his look, his voice, his delivery. But who was he? Certainly not your typical leading man, at least as we expect in the US. (Adjectives not associated with Michael Gambon: traditionally handsome, dashing, imposing, invincible, etc.)

Of course, if Wikipedia had existed back in 1987 (not to mention the internet), I would’ve known that Gambon was celebrated in England as an award-winning original ensemble member of Olivier’s Royal National Theatre. Anyway, despite my ignorance, I knew I needed to keep an eye out for this guy.

Next up? Peter Greenways controversial/fascinating/disgusting/unrated (as in NC-17) The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) in which Gambon played a brutally repugnant mobster who gets a comeuppance that needs to be seen to be believed. (My friend Mike and I saw this together at a north suburban Chicago movie theater and I’m not sure either of us are completely over the experience.)

A quiet period followed, at least at the cinema. (He remained very active in the theater and British television, e.g. Maigret). But then a flurry of film roles, mostly supporting but always memorable, including the oily Brown & Williamson CEO, Thomas Sandefur, in Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999); the grumpy and doomed Sir William McCordle in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001) and evil cattle baron Denton Baxter in Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003).

Around the same time he had some meatier roles on cable TV, starring as clockmaker John Harrison in AMC’s Longitude (2000) and Lyndon Johnson in HBO’s Path to War (2002).

And then, in 2004, he entered the world of Harry Potter, taking over the role of Dumbledore from Richard Harris, who passed after the second film. How strange it must have been for Gambon, an actor so far removed from the mainstream, to suddenly embody one of literature’s (and film’s) most beloved characters.

I’ll end with a clip from the British TV show, Top Gear, in which Gambon, in the weekly “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” segment, drives with such abandon the he has a corner of the track named after him.