ICON: Sir Ian McKellen

Occupation: The new Olivier, Rings master, X-Man manager

First you spend 30 years at the top of the bill in theatre, and then you star in five consecutive Hollywood blockbusters; it’s a pretty unique career path. But, from Shakespeare’s kings to Lord of the Rings, Britain’s Greatest Living Actor has never really been one for the conventional.

Story by John Naughton

I once saw Sir Ian McKellen on stage playing Richard III and the thing I remember above all others was not his voice, though its richness and timbre boomed the message to the gods while retaining the intense intimacy that is the preserve of the finest stage actor of his generation. Nor was it his intelligence, as he kept a mixture of serious theatre-goers and semi-drunk sixth-formers rapt with the villainous schemes of the humped one. No, it was his glove.

In mid-speech, without breaking stride and with an effortless, mesmeric dexterity, he manoeuvred a glove onto his right hand without the aid of his redundant left. It left you feeling that if he hadn't made it as an actor, he'd have been one hell of a customs officer.

Try it some time, and if you want to make it really difficult do it when you re also declaiming a speech, concentrating on hitting your mark and responsible for the financial success of a production you're

touring round the country, matinee and evening performances six days a week. It's a cute little flourish, the sleight of hand of a complete showman, its only equal being when I saw the West Indian cricket legend Viv Richards take a catch one-handed in front of some racist Headingley yobs and deftly remove the ball to leave a two-fingered salute.

So when the stage production transferred to the screen, I watched out for the glove moment and sure enough it's there, but if you blink, you miss it, as he slips it on while ascending the stairs from the mortuary having just put his moves on the recently widowed (by him, naturally) Lady Anne, played by Kristin Scott Thomas. It's a throwaway moment made possible by a lifetime's experience. Which is, in a way, rather like the recent film career that has brought him international fame in his seventh decade, after over 40 years at the theatrical coalface.

As Magneto in the X-Men movies and as Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, he's been characteristically convincing, but they've hardly been a stretch for a man used to performing his one-man show to packed houses on Broadway and in the West End, or delivering era-defining Shakespearean performances around the world. It’s a little like seeing Ronaldo play for the Rose & Crowns Sunday league team - he's great, but he doesn't t exactly need to break into a sweat.

McKellen can trace his new-found, big-screen success to two specific incidents. The first occurred in 1988 when, live on Radio 4 and faced with a line of objectionable questioning about Clause 28 by the then Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne, McKellen admitted that he was gay.

Realising, as they say, that denial is not a river in Egypt has brought him nothing but good. The burden of a lifetime of silence lifted from his shoulders, he subsequently discovered a new self confidence which has brought benefits to both his personal and professional lives, although in the past year he has broken up with his long-time partner, the director Sean Mathias.

The second turning point was 1995's triumphant film version of Richard III which served as a calling card to Hollywood - "I behaved like a grown-up actor. I didn't just wait for the job to arrive."

Roles, small and large, followed, with X-Men director Bryan Singer casting him as a fugitive Nazi in the guilty pleasure that is his adaptation of the Stephen King novella, Apt Pupil. His first Oscar nomination came the following year when he played original Frankenstein director James Whale in the excellent Gods And Monsters. He takes pains to point out that his film career hasn’t been an overnight success and stretches back to the Sixties - "It's just that you haven’t seen any of them." He's been in plenty of duds (and admits he was too "shouty" for the big screen for many years). He seems especially proud of his role in Arnold Schwarzenegger's first big-screen flop, Last Action Hero. But after the 1999 Oscars (which he didn't attend) he moved into Hollywood's first division. Yet being a player has not made him immune to the industry's innate insanity.

"I've had people cry," he laughs. "Literally cry with happiness when I say I've agreed to be in their film. Then I never hear from them again."

With the role of Gandalf (for which he received his second Oscar nomination) he has starred in two of the ten most successful movies of all time and the concluding chapter, The Return Of The King, out this month, is as good as guaranteed to make that three. Indeed, having been slated to play a part in a future Harry Potter movie, his tally may well not stop there. Quite an achievement for a Burnley boy who never even went to drama school.

"To suddenly be able to play good parts in big films has maybe come late," he reasons. "But perhaps ifs come when I was ready for it. I don't think I could have been quite the romantic young film actor that some of my contemporaries were."

Indeed, while Bates, Courtenay, Finney et al were busy being angry young men, McKellen's focus was the theatre. This had been the case since his childhood in Wigan (where he moved as an infant) and where as a seven year old, his Nonconformist parents gave him a Victorian model theatre as his Christmas present. Success on the real stage followed at Bolton School and continued at Cambridge where he won an Exhibition to read English and performed over 20 roles. When theatre critic Harold Hobson declared in 1969 that his Richard II had "the ineffable presence of God', it was clear that he had been marked out for greatness, which he duly fulfilled over the next three decades with an extended mantelpiece of awards.

International fame came relatively late after McKellen was anointed as the "new Olivier" at a precociously early point in his career. In a tradition stretching back to David Garrick, the English stage demands each era be dominated by one man, the yardstick always his ability to interpret Shakespeare. In the Seventies, working often under the direction of fellow Cambridge undergraduate Trevor Nunn, McKellen became that man, establishing himself in the pantheon of 20th-century greats alongside Gielgud, Richardson and, of course, Olivier. He was integral to a golden age at the Royal Shakespeare Company when, between 1976 and 1978, he starred in scores of celebrated performances at the Stratford theatre where, as a boy, he had seen Olivier.

A combination of passion, intelligence and hard work saw him move between the radical experiment of The Actor's Company and Establishment venues like the National and the RSC. The dichotomy has remained in his character to this day, seen in his outspoken views on gay rights, often articulated

through the group Stonewall that he helped found, which contrasts with such conformist impulses as accepting his knighthood. Nevertheless, by the mid-Seventies, when the world needed someone to offer a kingdom for his horse, enquire if it was a dagger he saw before him or to cry God for Harry, England and in all likelihood, St George, it sent for Ian McKellen.

Sitting in a sterile room in the Savoy hotel, McKellen has something of a defensive air about him. Bereft of his usual cigarette - "I haven't had nicotine for 14, 15 months but who's counting?" - he's dressed soberly except for a gaudy purple necklace, a romantic memento of a recent visit to the New Orleans Mardi Gras.

He has for some years operated as a kind of one-man antidote to the Gideons, which is to say he makes a point when he stays in hotels of ripping out the pages from the Bible (Leviticus 18:22) that refer to homosexuality as an abomination. Has he given the room we're sitting in the treatment?

"You know it hadn't occurred to me," he replies, surprised, "but I'm not in the bedroom. I may leave this one alone. If you’re just lying in a strange bed and in the drawer is this Bible that says you are an abomination, well I don't want that disturbing my night's sleep. I did a show called A Knight Out [McKellen became Sir Ian in 1990] in which I would tear out the offending page from a prop Bible. It's surprising how that can hurt people.

A Scottish bishop said I was the son of the devil." Despite the moments of levity, McKellen strikes a mildly confrontational attitude throughout his conversation, as if not to give me too easy a ride. I make the mistake, at one point, of using the term "anoraks" to describe the more intense fans of The Lord Of The Rings.

"Anoraks?" he snorts. "Is Christopher Reeve, who says he reads Lord Of The Rings every summer, an anorak? Is Sir Edmund Hillary, who's read Lord Of The Rings seven times, an anorak? Is Peter Jackson, who’s a huge fan of the book? What are you saying? Are you saying you feel sorry for someone who’s obsessed with Lord Of The Rings?"

Having spent so much of the past 15 years campaigning for gay rights, McKellen appears to have a natural sympathy for any group he senses is the victim of prejudice. Even if it's self-inflicted.

"Anoraks," he continues, "is not a good word for the people who I've met who love Lord Of The Rings or indeed the whole fantasy genre. At Comicon [a US comic book convention] I met thousands of them and I said, 'I cant see a single anorak'. No one picked up on it because they didn't know what an anorak was... which fairly proves my point."

Yet McKellen famously admitted when the first film came out that he had not read the book, though he now claims to have done so. And if pushed a little further, his solidarity with the more intense sword-and-sorcery types does show fracture lines. "The only sense in which it got a little irksome," he admits, "was when people were telling us how to make the films and you had to say, `Look, we're the professionals and

if you don't like what you see, go and make your own Lord Of The Rings."'

Moreover, he does admit that where the two mighty rivers of cyberspace and Tolkien converge is a raging torrent of nonsense.

"I've seen some of the sillier sites," he acknowledges, "the odder sites, the slash material, same-gender sex stories about characters, and indeed actors, in Lord Of The Rings, written by young women, on the whole."

For the uninitiated these sites, such as Slashart by the Theban Band, are worth a visit. Slashart is filled with countless, lovingly wrought images of Aragom and Legolas or the like having a rather chaste cuddle. They might make you laugh and might make you think that the Life Shop has a lot of unsold stock. You wouldn't need to be Perry Mason to put its creators in the vicinity of the anorak.

"It's odd," he smiles, "but no odder than a box of Corn Flakes which I've got on my fridge at the moment with my picture on the side, or rather Magneto's picture. Just odd. I don't take it too personally."

He does have a point: his image is now ubiquitous. After our meeting I discover a pack of Top Trumps which tells me that as Gandalf The White he's 2018 years old, 5'9", his Resilience is 10, his Magic 20 and

(I must admit this came as something of a surprise) his Resistance To Ring is 3, the highest in the deck.

Whatever the truth of that, McKellen is happy to dismiss a cyber rumour that he petitioned for Legolas (in the form of Orlando Bloom) to be Gandalf's love interest. Its source was an offhand comment he made, but as he acknowledges, "Irony is a difficult thing. It doesn't t translate awfully well from tape to page."

That notwithstanding, did he never question at any moment during filming what he was doing halfway up a mountain with a pointy hat, a big beard and a cloak?

"Of course, you re thinking of that all the time," he smiles, "how best not to look foolish. The wind can catch your beard or blow your hat off. Worse than that, in the scene you’re referring to, that wasn't real snow. That was polystyrene balls which entered every orifice. I've probably still got a few. Very, very, very unpleasant."

Despite such suffering for his art, McKellen has always seemed happier as an actor than all-round impresario and seems to have abandoned any aspirations to be a major director. Does the directorship of the National Theatre, still the blue ribbon job in British theatre, not appeal?

"No. Never," he declares emphatically. "I'm always hoping the National will be run in the way that

I want it to be run, but I don't want to run it. Enormous stamina and imagination, willpower, patience and guts are required for that job. Good luck to anybody who does it."

Far more likely is that he will continue to alternate theatrical performances, like his recent version of Strindberg's Dance Of Death, with marquee performances in big studio films. Will he, for example, be reprising the role of Magneto in the next instalment of X-Men?

"We all ask that," he says. "I asked Bryan Singer who he thought were the crucial figures in any putative X-Men 3. He said, `Wolverine and Xavier.' I said, 'That's a very short list. No, I don't think we can trust Bryan Singer to direct X-Men 3 if that's going to be his attitude."

Relax comic book guys. He's being ironic.

For the time being he's happy to make the most of having some genuine free time (as opposed to between jobs free time that is the lot of the less successful actor) in which to explore the changes which have overtaken London while he's been on the other side of the world. He has yet to acquaint himself fully with the wonders of the Tate Modern. As he sets off from our interview on his journey, he does it as he tackled Hollywood. Single-handedly.