Ian McKellen

Sir Ian McKellen (born May 25, 1939) is a highly acclaimed British actor on both stage and screen, regarded by many as the greatest living. He is also well known as a campaigner for homosexual equality.

McKellen was born in Burnley[?], Lancashire, during World War II, and has indicated that this had some impact on him. In an interview with gay newsmagazine The Advocate[?] (December 25, 2001), when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack, he said: "Well, darling, you forget -- I slept under a steel plate (during the Battle of Britain) until I was 4 years old."

He is known both for his professionalism and his ready wit, as evidenced by the quip above.

His father was a lay preacher, and both of his grandfathers were preachers as well. His home environment was strongly Christian, but of a nonorthodox bent. "My upbringing was of low non-conformist Christians who felt that you led the Christian life in part by behaving in a Christian manner to everybody you met."

When he was 12, his mother died. His father died when he was 24.

When he came out of the closet to his stepmother, who was a Quaker: "not only was she not fazed, but as a member of a society which declared its indifference to people's sexuality years back, I think she was just glad for my sake that I wasn't lying any more."

McKellen's acting career started while he was still a young boy. He won a scholarship to Cambridge University when he was 18, where he developed an intense crush on Derek Jacobi. He has characterized it as "a passion that was undeclared and unrequited." McKellen made his stage début in Coventry in 1961 and his West End début in 1964. He was already a major name in the theatre before establishing himself as a television and film actor.

He and his first lover, Brian Taylor, began their relationship in 1964. It was a relationship that was to last for 8 years, ending in 1972. They lived in London, where McKellen continued to pursue his career as an actor.

The role that made McKellen famous was his controversial portrayal of King Edward II of England in the Prospect Theatre Company[?]'s touring production, a role which he repeated for the BBC. In 1972, he founded the Actors' Company[?] with his friend, Edward Petherbridge[?], and this was the effective beginning of his reputation as an spokesperson for actors and the British theatre in general. Between 1974 and 1978, he enhanced his reputation with leading roles in Royal Shakespeare Company productions such as Romeo and Juliet (in which he played opposite Francesca Annis[?]) and Macbeth (opposite Judi Dench).

In 1978 he met his second lover, Sean Mathias, at the Edinburgh Festival. According to Mathias, the love affair was tempestuous, with conflicts over McKellen's successful career versus Mathias' somewhat less so. Mathias said that "in those days, the world was far more homophobic, and me being the young, pretty boy -- people wouldn't take me seriously as an actor, being Ian's boyfriend." Mathias was 22 when they met; McKellen 39. However, Mathias also says McKellen "did nothing but help me [in my career]."

McKellen's talents won him successively more important and visible parts, until eventually in 1980 he won the role of Salieri in the Broadway production of Amadeus[?] in 1980. He was awarded the Tony Award for his performance, the most prestigious award given to actors in live theater in the United States. His appearance as Walter, a mentally-retarded adult, in a 1982 television play, won him a new following, but he was still a relative unknown to film-going audiences right up until his Oscar-nominated performance as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

McKellen starred on Broadway in Bent[?], a play about homosexuals in Nazi death camps, starting in 1979. Despite his role in this groundbreaking play, which brought to public view for the first time in a widespread way the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, McKellen was not yet out publicly. At first, he was unsure whether he dared to take the role. "As impressed as I was by it, I thought 'My God! Do I dare be in this?' And Sean read it and said, 'Well you have to do it'," he said.

Bent proved to be of great significance to McKellen. Since starring in the original Broadway production of Bent, he has been involved in two other productions of the play. He directed the revival at the National Theatre in London, 1990, and also directed the movie version which was released in 1997.

While McKellen was always out to his co-actors, his public persona was another matter. It wasn't until 1988 that he came out in a really public way. In that year, a controversial law was under consideration in the United Kingdom called Section 28 which proposed to ban any discussion of homosexuality in U.K. schools. McKellen became active in fighting the proposed law, and declared himself gay during a debate that aired on the BBC. "My own participating in that campaign was a focus for people [to] take comfort that if Ian McKellen was on board for this, perhaps it would be all right for other people to be as well, gay and straight," he said. Section 28 was, however, enacted and is still on the books, and McKellen continues to fight for its repeal. He has criticized British Prime Minister Tony Blair for failing to concern himself with the issue.

By that time, McKellen's ten-year relationship with Mathias had also ended, and he has stated that being free of the additional concern of what effect his coming out would have on his partner's career made the choice easier, as did the advice and support of his friends, among them noted gay author Armistead Maupin.

He was named a Knight of the British Empire (KBE) in 1990 for his outstanding work and contributions to the theater, becoming Sir Ian McKellen.

In 1994 McKellen took a big risk by putting together a one man show, A Knight Out. The show was very successful and he still performs it today. He considers it a perpetual "work in progress."

Also in 1994, he made a bit of a splash at the closing ceremony of the Gay Games, where he stood before a crowd of gay atheletes and their supporters and fans to say "I'm Sir Ian McKellen, but you can call me Sereena." If he wasn't fully out of the closet before, he certainly was then.

Recently, McKellen has played Magneto in X-Men, and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, a role for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for best supporting actor. He reprised the role in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, in which the slightly dishevilled Gandalf the Grey is reborn as the more focussed and committed Gandalf the White. He had previously been nominated for his lesser-known role in Gods and Monsters where he played James Whale, director of Showboat and Frankenstein (1931).

McKellen has continued up to the present to be very active in gay rights efforts. He is a co-founder of the Stonewall Lobby Group[?], a gay rights lobby in England. The group is named for the Stonewall riots.

His credits include:

Theater

• Bent[?], Broadway
• Amadeus[?], Broadway
• Dance of Death[?], Broadway

Film

• Bent[?] (director)
• Apt Pupil
• Gods and Monsters
• Richard III
• Plenty
• Scandal (as John Profumo)
• X-Men (as Magneto/Erik Lensherr)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
• X2: X-Men United[?] (as Magneto/Erik Lensherr)

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Quotes used in this article are from an interview with Sir Ian done by The Advocate[?], December 11, 2001.

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External links:

• http://www.mckellen.com/ Web site
• http://www.mckellen.com/cinema/lotr/index.htm McKellen's personal pages on the Lord of the Rings movie, features a diary and answers to questions by fans.