Casting a Spell

Despite being one of the greatest stage actors of the past 30 years and a leading gay-rights activist, Ian McKellen did not taste real fame until two years ago when he played the wizard Gandalf in 'Lord of the Rings'. He tells Mick Brown how his life has changed. Photographs by Julian Broad

What an interesting man Ian McKellen is. For years he has been, by general consensus, Britain's finest classical actor. In more recent times, since his coming out in 1988, he has been a high-profile advocate of gay rights who has none the less been embraced by the Establishment - he was the first actor of his generation to be knighted, in 1991. To which in the last few years, somewhat belatedly, and to his evident astonishment and delight, must be added ‘global movie star'.

The week after next sees the release of the third and final part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which McKellen once again weaves his spell as the magician Gandalf.

McKellen's roles as Gandalf and his polar opposite, the arch-villain Magneto in the X-Men films (`two of the seminal icons of the 20th century for anyone into comic strips or fantasy literature,' as McKellen himself puts it on his website) have introduced him to a constituency far beyond the theatre-goers who have, for years, hung on his every word.

Film stardom has come relatively late in his career. It was not until he was in his fifties that he began to make any kind of impression in cinema. (His first and only Oscar nomination came for his role as the gay Hollywood director James Whale in Gods and Monsters in 1999. On the day of the nomination McKellen, true to his theatrical inclinations, was to be found not in Hollywood, lobbying and glad-handing the selection committee as the politics of the movie business usually demand, but at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, preparing for his role as Prospero in a production of The Tempest.)

At the age of 64, he belongs to a generation of actors - perhaps the last - whose reputation has been built on their performances of the classical repertoire on stage, rather than in film – ‘the last of the great pyrotechnical actors,' says his close friend Sean Mathias, who has directed McKellen several times on stage and film, including his performances in Uncle Vanya and Bent at the National Theatre. ‘Ian is an extraordinary technical actor, an extraordinary personality on stage that audiences thrill to watch. If that describes a great actor, then he definitely is. Every part he plays he breathes this almost palpable fire into.'

Superficially surprising as the choice of McKellen might have been for the role, it is now almost impossible to imagine that anybody else could ever have been Gandalf. He is a surprisingly large man; big-boned, broad-shouldered and with enormous hands – ‘like a big old farmer,' as Mathias puts it fondly. Yet, even shorn of beard and flowing white hair, McKellen seems almost to float across the noisy west London restaurant where we have arranged to meet, all sweetness, light and twinkling beneficence.

Ask him why he thinks he was offered the role of Gandalf and he adopts an expression of faux bewilderment. He knows that the director, Peter Jackson, was looking for an Englishman and he is ‘pretty certain' that Jackson had already offered it to Sean Connery and Anthony Hopkins before offering it to him. `Although personally, I would have offered it to Paul Scofield...'

He pauses. `What connects those three is a certain gravitas and authority. And I think it may have appealed to Peter that I'd done a lot of the classics and Shakespeare, and that Tolkien's dialogue doesn't roll off the tongue. You have to be alert to it. But, I don't know...' he shrugs. ‘He must have seen me on film and thought I was all right.'

In fact, watching McKellen as Gandalf it occurs that this is the role for which a lifetime of playing Shakespearean kings has truly prepared him. Harold Hobson, the doyen of theatre critics, claimed to detect ‘the ineffable presence of God Himself in McKellen's 1969 performance of Richard II, so it seems peculiarly fitting that he should now find himself irrevocably cast as the personification of wisdom and goodness.

‘Well that's the wonderful thing about this film,' McKellen enthuses. `People haven't quite cottoned on to how surprising it is that the biggest popular cinematic hit of the moment is filled with good people. It's not about cannibals.

`This is about people discovering their strengths, trying to do good by the world and by each other, and who like each other and depend on each other and help, put their arms around each other – and isn't that nice? So it's very heartening that young people look up to Gandalf as one of their role models and friends through life. I'm on their side, because I'm a fan of Gandalf as well.'

It also, I suggest, carries a certain responsibility for McKellen himself. Noblesse oblige.

He nods in mock grativas.

`I'm up to it...' Then he pauses. `What do you mean, responsibility? I have to behave, you mean?'

You must be benign and generous, not tell people you're too busy to sign autographs, or clip impertinent children around the ear.

`No. If a person comes up to you and says, "Don't I know you?" and "Who are you, what have you been in?" and they're having the conversation with you they should be having with themselves, then you can do without that. But otherwise, it's so easy for me to be nice. How could I not be?'

Sean Mathias says that the recognition which Lord of the Rings has brought McKellen is the kind that he has always craved, albeit quietly. `He had that iconic status as a Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actor for many, many years, and he enjoyed that. But obviously that was on a much smaller scale. The fact that he has landed this iconic role in one of the most legendary pictures of all time has maybe surprised even him. But he loves the adulation of the public and all that goes with it.

McKellen puts it slightly differently.

It is true, he says, that he always longed to be a popular actor `who could bring people to something that I cared a lot about. That's why I've been very happy when we've put some good Shakespeare on television - Macbeth, the Othello with Trevor Nunn when I played Iago, Richard III. They are still there on DVD, and I suppose millions of people must have seen them.'

But it is also true that having worked for so long in the theatre - what he calls `that little part of showbusiness' - he is now a part of `the bigger showbusiness. And I really enjoy that.'

His website, which McKellen runs himself, receives more than 20 million hits a month. Among the discussions about the motivation of Richard II and the encyclopaedic list of his various film and stage appearances are opportunities to buy Gandalf and Magneto T-shirts, and a section on rumours, true and false. `Question: I heard that Ian and Christopher (Saruman) got into a fight in public in London and almost killed each other. Plz tell me this isn’t true. Answer: Wherever

The Fellowship of the Ring is screened, Gandalf and Saruman fight. Elsewhere Christopher Lee and I are the best of pacific friends.'

The night before we met he had appeared in a charity performance on the same bill as the comedian Ross Noble, Bruce Forsyth and David Frost. `Marvellous!' booms McKellen with palpable enthusiasm. `We're all in the same business, and now I'm discovering a little bit about a side of the business I wasn't allowed to be part of before. So that's what I'm enjoying. Not the being famous. That's not the fun. The fun is that I'm allowed to go anywhere now. I'm sort of accepted.'

At the same performance he had been astonished to hear Noble doing some comic business about his roles as Gandalf and Magneto. `I talked to him afterwards and he said, "I do 40 minutes of you in my act!" So I'm current! And that's very, very, very nice. And what's nice about it is that I'm current not simply for having acted but for having landed on a couple of parts that are iconic. So I think people's feelings for my acting now are strongly coloured by their feelings of affection for Gandalf and Magneto. I ride on their bandwagon.'

The success of Lord of the Rings has made McKellen richer than he's ever been. That is true, he says, `but it makes it sound as if I've been rich all along. I get paid, as most people do, less than they're worth. But then everyone's always paid less than their worth.'

Even in Hollywood?

`Well, there might be one or two people of whom that's not true, but very, very few. But isn't that how people make money, by employing people for less than they're worth? Of course it is!'

What most people fail to realise, he says, is that acting, at least in the theatre, is `notoriously badly paid'. It was only when he performed the part of Salieri in Amadeus on Broadway in 1980 that McKellen was finally able to afford to buy his own house - on the river in London's Docklands. `Walter Raleigh set sail for the New World from just around the corner,' he says, as if it were yesterday.

He is not an extravagant man, and claims to have few luxuries, `although I always travel first class'. The stylish worsted suit he is wearing was clearly expensive, but, `I was given this'. He has not had a family to support, nor children to put through school. `I've had it easy.'

His attitude to money, he says, has always been simple. As a young actor, working in his first job in rep in Coventry, he was befriended by two actors, Sheila Keith and Bernard Kilby, both of whom were working in rep to pay off tax bills. Each night, after hours, they would drink in a pub opposite the stage door. `I was on £8 a week and would gamely try and buy my round. And Bernard was always there to say - and this a man who owed the government money - "No, no, you don't pay for my drinks; I buy my drinks and I buy your drinks as well, because one day you'll have enough money to buy drinks for somebody else."'

And now you do?

`Yes, which is wonderful.'

McKellen's background was solidly middle-class. His father Denis was a borough engineer. His mother, to whom he was utterly devoted, died when he was 12. It was a loss of his 'emotional centre', he would later recall, which his father could never replace.

He showed an early fascination with theatre. As a child, he would play with a fold-up Victorian theatre made of wood and Bakelite, manipulating the characters and providing all the voices. Among the fondest memories of his youth are of being taken to the local palace of varieties, the Bolton Grand, by his father, watching the tap-dancers, jugglers and comics from the wings, and being transfixed by their ability to conjure the magical from the mundane.

`These people travelled the country, different towns every week - and I've done that.' He grimaces. `Awful! They'd be in dreadful digs, the dressing-rooms were disgusting. But their job was dealing in stardust, and they had it in their pockets somewhere about them, because when they went on stage it was like nothing else in the world. It was certainly a million miles from anywhere I'd seen in South Lancashire, and I wanted to go there. And those guys who were underpaid and living with dreadful landladies were in charge of all this. But equally I wanted to see how you get there. You step over a line from the dark into the light, and everything is different – apparently.'

Later, he would be similarly transfixed attending school camps at Stratford-upon-Avon, and punting down the river to the Shakespeare Theatre to watch Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft.

By the time he arrived at Cambridge, where he studied English, the die was cast. The director Trevor Nunn arrived a year later to find that McKellen was ‘already a legend' for his performances in student productions.

Off stage, Nunn remembers, McKellen seemed like just another duffel-coated student. `He wasn't golden haired or phenomenally glamorous. There was nothing about him physically that made you think, "Oh, I see why he's the star actor..." But when rehearsals began it was absolutely immediate, as if there was a full-fledged professional in the midst of this student group. He had an aura.'

The pair remained friends, but would not work together again until 1976, when McKellen joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, where Nunn was artistic director.

By then McKellen had already been hailed as `the new Olivier’ (a grail which at the time was being sought in the theatre world with the same avidity as the pop world was seeking the ‘new Beatles'). But he singles out Nunn's production of Macbeth, in which he appeared with Judi Dench, as probably the most satisfying moment of his theatrical career.

`Something very extraordinary happened,' remembers Nunn. ‘Ian had already got a reputation as a great actor, the one who was going to inherit the mantle, and I think he fully realised that all eyes would be upon him. And he was terrifying, yes, but somebody in whom everybody could invest their belief and sympathy in that impossible role of a man who by the end is a psychopathic killer. But you stayed with him; you absolutely knew how he'd got there.'

Reflecting on his career, McKellen now acknowledges that the theatre provided not only an outlet for his passions and a platform for his talents, but also a community where his sexuality would be accepted.

In his recently published diary about his years running the National Theatre, Richard Eyre writes of McKellen telling him on one occasion that he had actually gone into theatre ‘for the boys'. When I suggest that this was surely meant as a flip remark, McKellen gives a broad smile. `No, far from it. I hoped I would meet people like myself, and I did.'

There is something more than prurience in discussing McKellen's sexual preference, if only because, since his public declaration of homosexuality in 1988, it has become, in a sense, emblematic of him, as he has become emblematic of the gay-rights movement.

McKellen says that he knew he was homosexual by the time he was 12. The theatre provided a largely congenial and accepting environment, albeit, as he puts it, as a member of ‘a secret club. There was a bit of a language, signals, I suppose... Secret knocks on the door. Well, for goodness sake.’ He sighs deeply. ‘And for some people a bit older than me, it's a matter of regret that it's not still like that.'

While McKellen never perpetuated the deceit of talking in interviews about ‘not yet having found the right girl', neither did he see himself as being part of the gay scene. One of London's most, popular gay pubs, the White Swan, is at the end of his street. ‘I'd lived there 10 years before I even discovered it was there. I wasn't functioning as a gay person. My terms of reference and my life were what they would have been for Alan Howard - a straight man working in classical theatre.'

Over the years he had lived in two stable and long-term relationships, that were `very much like marriage. I had a perfectly satisfactory life. I was working very hard. I was accepted by all my friends, the people I worked with, no problem. I didn't come up against any overt homophobia.'

It is only looking back, he says, that he realises he was ‘living a lie'.

It was not until 1988, on a visit to San Francisco, that he finally discussed the possibility of coming out - with his friend, the writer Armistead Maupin. The opportunity presented itself shortly afterwards, during a discussion on Radio 4 with Peregrine Worsthorne about the Thatcher government's ‘Clause 28.’ “[Worsthorne] was being so objectionable, in that patrician way he has,’ McKellen says. ‘He was talking about “they”; “they” have secret clubs which they join and commune together behind closed doors. I said, "Oh, like the Garrick Club." He said, "Oh yes, well, I suppose they have a few of them in there." And I said, "That's why I won't join because I'm one of them myself."

`It was a wonderful debating point. Because the breath was out of his sails. He didn't know what to do. He'd never, I think, spoken to an openly gay man in a public forum.'

For McKellen it was a public declaration of what he describes as `the central thing about me'. 'Coming out was a big thing. It wasn't just, oh here we go. But it was the best thing I did. And why, why, why didn't I do it earlier? Well because I was too busy acting. And why was I too busy acting? Covering up the fact that I was gay. Because as an actor you're always pretending to be someone else; you're drawing attention to yourself in a story-telling way because you can't draw attention to yourself as a gay man. And I think that's why a lot of gay men become actors - because they can't draw attention to themselves as being gay. Well, they can, but there's a cost to that.'

He pauses.

‘It's ironic that the biggest disadvantage of being gay, of being different, is that it does require you, if you're going to be at ease with yourself and everybody else, to declare yourself. Most people don't have to do that. It's a testing point. And whatever age you bring it about, it will cost you some effort, risking all your self-confidence. But what you gain is the world, of course; you become a free person. It took me 49 years. And I sort of recommend it.'

Having made the decision to declare himself, McKellen might have quietly carried on with his life - I'm gay, so what? Instead, he chose to use his position as a public figure as a platform. The following year he co-founded Stonewall, a lobby group campaigning to improve the lot of gays and lesbians in society, and since then he has campaigned for gay rights with a zeal that prompted Matthew Parris to remark that rather than being an actor who adopted politics as an afterthought, McKellen might actually be a political reformer for whom the acting career was merely a forethought.

McKellen says that he is merely honouring the family tradition of speaking as you find and doing what you feel to be right. His family, he says, was `full of missionaries'. Both of his grandfathers were non-conformist preachers. His father, like his father before him, was a past, and McKellen says he would have refused to do National Service as a conscientious objector if it had not been abolished shortly before he was due to be called up.

‘We were Christian and we were brought up to believe that we were here to make a difference to the world. Life wasn't just to do with how much you earned. But you would be doing some good; you would be sticking up for what you believe in and you would be helping other people.

`And I always thought about acting that I was in it partly for those reasons. To bring to people these wonderful stories, wonderfully told, was a public service.

‘So it's not such a big leap from that to saying, Oh my God, I'm gay and the world doesn't like it. I’m going to tell people about this.

‘Politics is making connections. If I in my privileged position, good at my job, recognised, have some connection with someone half my age who's just tried to kill themselves because they're gay, then perhaps I can help them and perhaps the world can change. And I know it has helped people because I get the letters from them.

`And the fact that the actor playing Gandalf is openly gay and the world is not falling over in shock, that's a marvellous thing for gay people.'

Sean Mathias, with whom McKellen lived for nine years, until shortly before he came out, believes that McKellen the actor and McKellen the activist are of a piece.

`Actors are completely impossible because it's hard to discern that fine line between who is the actor and who is the person, and often they don't quite know themselves. With Ian, it then becomes hard to discern who the very private person is. But I think that's another quality that makes him such a great actor - a lifelong dedication and vocation to his craft. You could ask, is he always acting? And I think he has always seen his life in quite a public way; in the parts he plays, in the publicity he does, the projects he attaches his name to. It's all a platform for something he believes in. And in that respect I think he sees himself as a politician, in the sense that his life is now lived through the prism of the public gaze. He feels he has a duty in society. At times people have called him pompous and up himself, but actually it's something Ian takes totally seriously and believes in.'

McKellen now lives alone, after a relationship begun in New Zealand while he was filming Lord of the Rings came to an end. Richard Eyre has described him as being ‘like a lot of gregarious people, very, very solitary’. McKellen says he has an abundance of friends, ‘so that’s all right’, although from time to time, he admits, he does wonder about the prospect of a lonely old age Did I realise, he asks, that there are no old people's homes for gay people? `Most old people have bright young girls coming in saying `hello!' and sitting on your knee maybe. Well, you want a boy sitting on your knee, don't you?'

He is now at an age when everything reminds him that he is old. As an actor he is obliged to study himself more closely in the mirror than most people - and quickly put the possibility of a facelift out of his mind, `although I think it would be nice to get rid of some of this - what do you call it ...?' He tugs at the folds of flesh under his chin. `But I wouldn't try and make myself look young; I don't think you can do that.'

Coming up the stairs at the Haymarket recently, he bumped into Sheila Hancock coming down the other way. ‘She said to me, "What's the matter, darling; have you hurt yourself?" And it wasn't that I'd hurt myself, I was just finding it a strain to walk up the stairs...'

Sean Mathias says that pronouncements of infirmity are premature. McKellen, he says, ‘has got a hell of a constitution. And he's a terribly naughty man. He can go on stage, go out for dinner afterwards, go on to a nightclub, drink and dance half the night and still come in and do a matinee. He's exhausting.'

‘Derek Jacobi came up to me in a restaurant the other day,' McKellen says, ‘and whispered "I'm 65 today!" with a boyish excitement which I don't really relate to, because I'm an old age pensioner too... But like me, I'm sure he's thinking, "How much longer have I got left?" - to work, that is.'

He thinks he might have 10 more years in which he will have enough energy to turn up eight times a week to do a theatrical performance. But what he wants to do now is learn how to really act in film.

`It's a mysterious thing, film-acting, and how you get to be good at it I really don't know. I've done some good stuff, but it's usually in disguise I've got a lot to learn in film.'

For the next month, however, he is free of commitments, free to go where he likes, when he likes. The evening I met him he was off to Newbury to introduce a friend who is touring theatres giving exhibitions of flower-arranging At the weekend, he was going off to Stratford with his friend Richard Wilson to see three plays and then leaving for New Zealand to see more friends made during the filming of Lord of the Rings. In January he returns to the stage, at the Sydney Festival, in Sean Mathias's production of Strindberg's A Dance of Death.

His face, in the guise of Gandalf, already appears on New Zealand stamps, and is now to be found on a newly minted commemorative coin. `I don't know what denomination. But I'm assured it's legal tender.'

So you're like the Queen, I say.

McKellen smiles. `Very, very like the Queen Although she doesn't carry money of course, and I do.' He is looking forward to `spending' himself `I can just see it. "Will a couple of Gandi's do it?" He explodes into laughter. `Wonderful!'