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Gay Byrne also speaks with a similar accent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVoMs-jE4Bo

Irish Senator David Norris has a very similar accent to the one used by Michael Gambon's Dumbledore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTNTc88I1SI

I'm American and Michael Gambon has always sounded very English to me although I have NOT seen any of the Harry Potter movies. To answer that earlier poster's question, Gambon has done an American at least once that I know of. He did a Southern/Georgian accent in The Insider.

I agree with GreenGobbie that Irish, West Country, and American accents have alot of similarities (although they still all sound distinctly different to my American ears).
Personally, I was actually a little confused when I first heard Gambon's accent as Dumbledore (I wasn't sure if he was using an English accent or an Irish one), but I have met a couple of Irish folks with accents identical to the one he uses in the movie, so now its "familiar."

It is clearly a gentle Dublin accent. I saw him in an interview and he said that he was going for a Trinity College Dublin accent.

I laughed at your comment on Australians sounding like cockneys beacuase my husband,whos from east london likes to describe Australians as "Cockneys who got there hands caught in the till!" To translate a till is a cash register, and yes we have lots of Aussie friends and bizarrely they still seem to like him. The Australian and British sense of humour is luckily very similar and both can take a good ribbing! P.S I LOVE lammingtons!

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k i fixed it. but being from Ireland i would expect him to still have some sort of accentand his is very..non existent. It has like a watered down version..which is funny cause in harry potter they're supposed to have an English accentjust sayin'

He's not from the UK

i agree!! i was surprised to see that he is actually from Ireland haha

He has never really sounded American to me, but he does sound much less "British" than the others actors in the HP films (reality of the matter is that many Americans, myself included, have no ability to distinguish accents beyond Scottish, Irish, English, and maybe Welsh. While there is a lot of variance from the UK point of view in English accents, these distinguished characteristics aren't easy for Americans to identify). I think he could probably pull off American general dialect pretty well, which is what newscasters generally use.
I haven't noticed, but does he pronounce his R's? That would definitely make him sound less Br2000itish than the others.

I thought he was American too!
That was the reason I checked his imdb, to see haha
But I love his voice, its very appealing

umh..in the harry botter books i meant..

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But in the books, he has an native american mother
so he is kind of american

I'm watching Goblet of Fire, and just realized, that when everyone else in the movie definitely have decisive accents (I'm American here) Mr Gambon has very clear pronunciation of his words. Has he tried to play an American or Canadian? Bet he could pull it off more effectively than some other English men who attempt a North American accent. (I say North American accent, because quite frankly, I find most United States citizens and Canadian citizens sound the same, apart from the occasional Southerner hick, New Yorker and New Jersey accents.) But, there you have it.

I lived on the East Coast of America, and he'd fit right in.

Sounds like a regular if slightly refined Irish accent to me. I have a London accent and most americans think i'm either british (no such accent) or australian, one guy was even convinced that I was south african for a while. Sad but true.