Michael Gambon (Maigret, The Singing Detective) plays Archie Rice , the role made famous on stage (1957) and on film (1960) by his illustrious first mentor, Laurence Olivier. Gambon was 23 and still working as a toolmaker when he was auditioned by the great man for a role in the National Theatre's opening production of Hamlet, and cast as spear-carrier. A year later, on Gambon's opening night as Othello in Birmingham, Olivier sent him a good luck telegram: "The other actors thought I'd sent it myself," Gambon recalls. As the central character in John Osborne 's drama, he plays a drunken, lecherous, egotistical vaudevillian whose act is on the downward slope.