In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine, 74-year-old Gambon revealed that it takes him longer to learn scripts and that he forgets them quickly.
“It’s horrible to admit, but I can’t. It breaks my heart. When I have the script in front of me and it takes forever to learn it, it’s scary,” he said.
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The actor who played Dumbledore in six Harry Potter Films, admitted that he recently resorted to using earphones to have text read to him.
But his forgetfulness had become so pronounced that six months ago he realized it was time to close the curtain on a theater career spanning five decades.
“There was a girl in the wings and I had a plug in my ear so she could read the lines to me,” he said. “And after about an hour I thought, ‘This can’t work.’ You can’t be in the theater, standing freely on the stage, screaming and running around, and have someone read the lines to you.”
Gambon attributed his forgetfulness to his age and feared it was a sign of Alzheimer’s, but his doctors gave the all-clear.
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This is not the first time that Gambon has had problems with his memory. In 2009, he was hospitalized twice with panic attacks because he had forgotten his lines during rehearsals at the National Theatre in London.
Although he may never perform on stage again, Gambon will continue his film and television career, where the stress of remembering is much less and where he can be presented with his lines.
Gambon will next appear in the BBC adaptation of JK Rowling’s A sudden death also in Dad’s Army Remake for the big screen.
