First Knight

Sir Ian McKellen has distinguished himself, not only as one of the finest actors of his generation, but also as a committed gay activist and co-founder of Stonewall

Words: Sheridan Morley

When Sir lan McKellen first opened on Broadway more than a year ago in the Sean Mathias production of Strindberg's Dance of Death, his performance was hailed by the critic of The New York Times as 'frightening and majestic... he projects an aggressive arrogance that doesn't so much conquer decay as ignore it. Every willed gesture, no matter how sloppy, becomes a death defying act... a mixture of heroic stage presence, actorly intelligence and rarefied theatrical technique.'

And this all about an actor who had not appeared on Broadway in the 20 years since Amadeus, an actor who had recently hit headlines in this country by 'coming out' about a gay relationship with Mathias, and (apparently still more scandalously) by announcing that he was fed up with the behaviour of London audiences and their lack of understanding and would henceforth confine his stage appearances to the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds where, in Jude Kelly's inaugural season, he played The Seagull, The Tempest, and Noel Coward's Present Laughter.

But what prevented any of those from moving into London had nothing to do with McKellen's avowed preference for Leeds audiences. His film career, long held in abeyance by his sheer theatricality, has suddenly taken off with another treble: Gods and Monsters, about the last days and mysterious suicide of the gay Frankenstein director James Whale; Apt Pupil, about an odd couple friendship between a young man and an old Nazi leader; and now, of course, Lord of the Rings, not so much a role as a wizard pension scheme, and the one that has finally established him as a worldwide movie star:

Life begins at 50

'It's very much easier to have a long career in the theatre, where it's almost expected of you. I've been acting there for the best part of 30 years, and respect starts to flow. But in cinema, the ranking changes month by month, and you really are only as good as your last picture. The earlier films I'd made [of his friend Martin Sherman's Bent and a '30s set Richard III were, for some reason, considered to be specialist "art" films, but I seem to have broken out of that at last with Lord of the Rings. Life for me really began at 50, and now I have a whole new lease on it. Secretly I always wanted to be Robert Redford, not just another English actor like Anthony Hopkins or Gary Oldman or Tim Roth, playing villains and other oddballs. And at last I'm convinced of having made the right choices, at work and at home. I'd still like to get on the list of bankable screen actors so that any part I want to play might just come my way'

At a time when two of our leading classical actresses, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, have found almost resident screen homes (Dame Judi in the new James Bonds, Dame Maggie in Harry Potter), there should be nothing stopping McKellen.

Yet curiously the demand for great classical actors on screen seems to be waning: a stage generation ago, Olivier, Richardson and Redgrave all managed to become film stars while maintaining careers at the Old Vic, but McKellen belongs to a different stage heritage, that of John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, John Neville and Derek Jacobi, for whom the cinema is a place to make quick money rather than a professional livelihood. Somehow one still expects to meet Sir lan on St Martin's Lane rather than Laurel Canyon Drive, and in the witty definition of his fellow knight Anthony Hopkins he is the quintessential example of an actor happiest when 'shouting at night' rather than filming by day. In any case, the experience of the Richard /// filming 'the money ran out regularly once a week' has not endeared him to the stage screen life of a Kenneth Branagh.

So McKellen is like no other leading actor of his time: his recent Prospero for the West Yorkshire Playhouse struck at least one critic as 'moody, embittered, tired, crabby and a little self righteous' and although that in no way could be considered an autobiography, it is true that McKellen seems unhappy in his own professional skin, a loner who stands outside the stage and screen establishments of his time:

'I went to work for Jude Kelly at Leeds because I was concerned that there should be a very lively theatre outside London. No matter what company I have joined, from the National to the Actors', I have always tried to lead a touring division. People then assume that if you are tired of London you must be on the verge of packing it all in, whereas in fact there is nothing harder than moving a whole production around the country once a week. The difference is that you can then play to people unfamiliar or less familiar with the text. There is nothing more exciting, more rewarding than an audience which doesn't know how a play will end.'

McKellen's regional theatre interests go back to the excitement he first found in repertory companies at Coventry, Ipswich, Liverpool and Nottingham. After a year in New Zealand, where anti gay laws were abandoned 20 years ago, Sir lan has returned to us more than ever determined to continue the fight for tolerance over here: 'Coming out was a huge mountain I thought I'd never climb; in the end, all my sister said was that she wished I'd done it years earlier. Gay men are not all mad, bad or sad, whatever the local press would have you believe.'

And Lord of the Rings? 'Gandalf is an immortal, he's been around for 7,000 years or more. That can be a bit daunting but I like to think of him as a Christ-figure, a messenger from the immortals as Tolkien said. It's not often you get a character like that, and I now appear in character on Burger King glasses that's if you eat enough burgers! It all seems a long way from Stratford, and a gay Gandalf seems to have set up all kinds of outrage on the chat rooms, but I tell people to expect a movie, not just a lot of moving pictures from the original book.'

For an actor who has in his time played Hitler, Czar Nicholas, DH Lawrence, John Profumo, Macbeth, Iago and Shakespeare's Kings Richard II and III, Gandalf should be an easy stretch. But then again, nothing has ever come exactly easily to McKellen:

'Acting is all to do with self confidence, which I badly lacked for all the years that I kept my homosexuality secret; now that I am "out", I find there's a kind of freedom in my acting, a willingness to go for the dangerous, the unexpected, which was never there before.'

Born in Lancashire in 1939, McKellen is the son of Bolton's one time Borough Surveyor and a Congregationalist minister's daughter: 'Acting, like being gay, is all about secrecy. It's about disguise, which is why so many gay men are good at acting.' In his case, the acting began at Wigan Grammar School and got him into Cambridge in the generation of Derek Jacobi and Trevor Nunn. Like them, he graduated to Stratford in the mid 1970s and the National a decade later. In 1988 he solemnly announced, 'I despise the lan McKellen of the last 30 years' and, as if to prove it, spent his next few months playing the Angel of Death to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero.

But as with Gielgud they also share what Alec Guinness once called the vocal genius of 'a silver trumpet muffled in silk' to see McKellen at his best you have to see him live. Mathias once called him 'childlike and vulnerable' but that is not something you'll find in his Edgar, the infirm army captain living in spiteful and isolated wedlock in a dank island outpost in Dance of Death certainly a forerunner of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Legendary theatre critic Harold Hobson even thought that when McKellen spoke he, Hobson, could hear 'the voice of Christ' so maybe it is just as well he never had to witness lan in the hellish environment of Dance of Death.