Dang, Dumbledore is dead
Gambon
When he’s not Dumbledore he is (was) 82-year-old Michael Gambon. Natural causes, was it? Maybe that’s the cover story to obscure Snape’s role in the matter. After all, if you’ve seen the Harry Potter movies, you know that Snape has done it before. But Snape is twice dead. Once in the series and purportedly once in “real life” as Alan Rickman in 2016.
There’s a long list of denizens we can look at: Bellatrix Lestrange, Draco Malfoy, Lord Voldemort, Dolores Jane Umbridge, Lucius Malfoy, &c., &c. Like Snape, any of these characters could have escaped the “fiction” of the series and manifested in “real life.” That’s probably why Richard Harris (the first actor to play Dumbledore) died after the first two movies in the series in 2002 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma–according to the cover story.
I’m biased in favor of Harris’ portrayal because I saw him once on the stage as well as in many movies and was used to his style (and his off-camera hijinks). He played a more ethereal Dumbledore than Gambon. Both were Irish and both were good in the role.
According to Variety, “While it is easier for a character actor, often working in supporting roles, to rack up a large number of credits than it is for lead actors, Gambon was enormously prolific, with over 150 TV or film credits in an era when half that number would be impressive and unusual — and this for a man whose body of stage work was also prodigious.”
Most readers and viewers don’t know that there’s a fine line between the fiction of novels and feature films and life as we think we know it. People tend to think they’re “safe” when the movie ends and when they reach the last page of the novel. Ha! I think not.
