Ian McKellen Biography

Ian fell in love with the theatre early. His first experience was being taken to see Peter Pan at Manchester Opera House, at age 3. At 7, he was given a fold-up Victorian theatre made of wood and Bakelite. He remembers manipulating cut-out figures from Olivier's Hamlet with wires, providing all the voices - for Olivier, Jean Simmons et al. His first Shakespeare play had been Twelfth Night, when Jean (McKellan, not Simmons) took him to a show by the amateurs of Wigan's Little Theatre. He also saw Jean herself play Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Wigan High School For Girls. Yet McKellen says his main early influence were the peddlers down at Wigan's Saturday Market, flogging lucky Indian charms, cure-all snake-oils from darkest Africa and flash gadgets from the capital. These were the first performers Ian witnessed at close range, these charming con-artists lit the artistic flame of Britain's finest actor.

At 11, Ian moved up to Wigan Grammar School for Boys, but stayed only a year. In 1951, Denis became Borough Engineer and Surveyor of Bolton, and there the family moved. This brought young Ian even closer to theatre life. He spent a lot of time at Bolton's Grand Theatre, watching the variety shows, the tap-dancers, the jugglers, the bad comics - all for free as his dad knew the theatre owner - and hanging around backstage. He loved the glamour of it all, even at this low level. Indeed, throughout his career, no matter how successful he became, Ian would always return to tiny venues and ensemble casts. The notion of intimate performances for "ordinary" people is clearly important to him.

Ian had always acted at school, whenever he could. But at Bolton School (Boys' Division) opportunities were more regular. There were school plays, performed in the main hall, where Ian learned the vital trick of being audible over "800 bottoms shifting on 800 rush-bottomed chairs". There was also the Hopefield Miniature Theatre, a converted Edwardian house where both teachers and pupils would rehearse French playlets, snippets of Greek tragedy, puppet shows, whatever - performing before 50 or so parents once a term. Here McKellen began to learn technique, and made his debut, as Malvolio in Twelfth Night. And he gained confidence. Once he was told by his Classics master that he had grease paint flowing in his veins.

There were others who fired his ambition. During the summers, a group of Bolton School students would be taken to camp at Stratford. They'd stay in tents, half an hour upstream from Stratford. They'd spend the days punting around on the Avon, then in the evenings they'd punt down to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where they'd watch festival performances by the likes of Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Gielgud and Paul Robeson. What an unbelievable way to spend your youth. McKellen does recall one near-fatal blow to his sensibilities, though. In 1957, after seeing Peggy Ashcroft as Imogen in Cymbeline, he briefly ditched his acting ambitions and considered becoming a journalist, or a chef. She seemed so very far beyond him.

As a good scholar, an increasingly fine actor and as Head Boy of Bolton School, Ian won a scholarship to St Catherine's College, Cambridge. Here, he threw himself into acting with the Marlowe Society, working with such future celebrities as Derek Jacobi, David Frost and Margaret Drabble. Appearing in 21 productions, he let his academic education slip, the scholarship being withdrawn after two years. No worries - he already knew this did not matter. Ian can actually recall the exact moment he knew he could and would be a successful actor. Outside the Arts Theatre in Cambridge one evening in 1959, co-student Richard Cottrell (later a famous writer and director) congratulated him on a good review. The Marlowe Society considered itself an ensemble and had a tradition of not revealing the names of its actors. McKellen had been specifically and deliberately picked out by the reviewer. He was on his way.

Having been President of the Marlowe Society from 1960-61, McKellen graduated from Cambridge with a BA (2.2) in English Literature in 1961. London beckoned, but Ian was keen to learn his craft before taking on the audiences of the West End. Now was a wonderful time to do it. After WW2, the government's attitude to the People had changed dramatically. And, as well as creating the National Health Service, they'd begun to pump money into building a series of civic theatres around the country. The first of these was the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry and this is where Ian began his apprenticeship, being paid £9 a week (his digs costing £3). It didn't start too well. On his debut, on the 4th of September, 1961, as Thomas More's son-in-law in A Man For All Seasons, he completely missed his second entrance. His dad and stepmother Gladys had driven down specially, too.

Nevertheless, Ian learned quickly, performing in a different play every two weeks for a year - including the varied likes of The Seagull, Ten Little Niggers and Toad Of Toad Hall. From Coventry, in 1962, he moved on to the Arts Theatre Company, in Ipswich, for another year. This saw him appear in Becket, The Amorous Prawn, and David Copperfield, as well as starring as Henry V and Osborne's Martin Luther. Not yet content with his training, in December 1963, he moved on to Nottingham Playhouse. This he remembers as extremely important as, beginning with a production of Coriolanus, the director Tyrone Guthrie taught him how to show the audience they were seeing something extraordinary. The Lord Of The Rings was not the first time McKellen dealt in magic.

Now came his time. The press had noted Ian's performances in Nottingham. Now, director Michael Codron was looking for a young (and cheap) actor to play the lead in James Saunders' A Scent Of Flowers. McKellen was recommended, and taken on with no audition. He moved down to London, taking a place in Kensington with his lover Brian Taylor, a history teacher from Bolton. His experience in rep paid off. McKellen was superb. Better still, in the audience one night was new sensation Maggie Smith. She recommended Ian to Laurence Olivier, then building his new National Theatre at the Old Vic and Ian was taken on, on the same day as Ronald Pickup and Michael York. His second London production would be Franco Zeffirelli's Much Ado About Nothing, in 1965, with Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Albert Finney, his old pal Jacobi and fellow newcomer York.

McKellen worked hard, often originating roles in new plays. One was particularly successful - The Promise, with Judi Dench, in 1966 - so much so that it was taken to Broadway, to the Henry Miller Theatre. Here, sadly, it was not so successful. Being a modern Russian play in the midst of the Cold War didn't help. Being picketed by US actors (led by Roy Scheider) claiming the Brits were stealing American work didn't help either. McKellen enjoyed the US though, especially Joel Gray's breathtaking performance in Cabaret. And the vanilla ice cream.

McKellen returned to repertory, touring the UK and often directing. Then came another major breakthrough. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1969, Ian performed both Richard II and Edward II and, basically, blew away audience and critics alike. Now he was the new Olivier. "No player of similar age," said the respected critic Harold Hobson "has such lustre, such interior excitement, such spiritual grace". McKellen returned to London in triumph. "I remember one heady evening in my dressing room at the Piccadilly," he later said "when I introduced Noel Coward to Rudolf Nureyev. I suppose I'd arrived".

Oddly, McKellen's film career was far slower. Back in 1966, he'd played a soldier in a war movie called The Bells Of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling, but despite starring Gregory Peck, the movie was never completed. Auditioning in Rome, Ian had been turned down for both Barbarella and a spaghetti western. Indeed, other than a few TV plays, all he'd done was A Touch Of Love, starring Sandy Dennis and written by his former fellow-student Margaret Drabble (it was, notably, McKellen's first gay role). Oh, and there was Alfred The Great, wherein David Hemmings was Alfred, Michael York was Guthrum, King Of The Danes, and McKellen was, er, Roger.

But filmic fame would come in the end. In the meantime, McKellen stuck with his first love - the theatre - and he pursued his theatrical ideals. As said, Ian loved to perform for everyone, not just London's rich. Furthermore, he did not (unlike Olivier) believe in any kind of theatrical aristocracy - particularly not with himself at its head. He preferred an ensemble cast, everyone swapping roles, playing out in the regions. So, along with friend and fellow actor Edward Petherbridge, he came up with the notion of the Actors' Company, a troupe that would choose its own plays, and its own cast lists, as a true democracy. They called around their friends and, when enough names were gathered, in 1972, the Actors' Company was born. This was also the year McKellen broke with his lover Taylor. He bought his first house, at 17 Camberwell Grove, where he'd live, alone, for the next eight years.

After several years, the challenge of bigger roles grew too desirable, and McKellen was persuaded to join the Royal Shakespeare Company by its artistic director, Trevor Nunn (another of Ian's peers at Cambridge). Now, Ian reached new peaks of greatness as Dr Faustus and Romeo (opposite Francesca Annis's Juliet). His Macbeth in 1976, with Dench as his Lady M, was considered to be the best since Olivier. But McKellen would never be content with personal glory. By 1978, he was organising a small RSC "commando unit", taking Three Sisters and Twelfth Night round 26 towns. Then came a similar tour of the USA. He loved to take theatre to the people and, at the time, said this was "the most enjoyable thing I have ever done".

But, of course, there was to be more glory. Come the Eighties and McKellen found himself once more on Broadway, playing the sinister Salieri in Amadeus. Actually, he was CREATING the role for which F. Murray Abraham would later win an Oscar. Ian would have to make do with a Tony. There was also a debut starring role onscreen, in Priest Of Love, wherein McKellen played novelist DH Lawrence when he was sick with TB, inbetween the banning of The Rainbow and the writing of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Priest Of Love gave McKellen a taste for films, and especially films with a strong, often controversial message. In Plenty, he stood by as Meryl Streep battled crazily for post-war sexual equality. In Stephen Frears' excellent Walter (later shown as two films), he was tremendously moving as a mentally retarded man suffering under the compassion-free regime of Margaret Thatcher. In Michael Mann's brilliant supernatural thriller The Keep, he played a Jewish doctor brought in to translate arcane documents by Nazis being persecuted by dark forces. In the movie, Ian had a disease that made him look 30 years older. For 12 days, he spent 5 hours in makeup, but was never called to the set. Eventually the producer, believing him to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, flew him home from Wales for a weekend's rest.

Naturally, the theatre remained his main draw. After Amadeus, Ian had returned to the National Theatre, now on London's South Bank. He won the Olivier Award for Actor Of The Year for Wild Honey. He also, again with Petherbridge, organised an ensemble atmosphere, where actors would swap roles and understudy for each other. Come 1986, Ian would go off on his own, touring the world in a one-man show called Acting Shakespeare (once again taking theatre to the people!). Then, in 1988, he returned to the NT, now producing. He put on Deborah Warner's King Lear (with Brian Cox as Lear), which was cross-cast with Richard III. The two plays would tour the world, with Ian in 1991 winning yet another Olivier for his Richard. Eventually, his Richard III, where the wicked plotter is seen creating a fascist state in future England, would reach the Silver Screen.

In the meantime, there was big controversy. On Radio 4 in 1988, McKellen admitted he was gay while discussing Section 28, whereby Thatcher hoped to make the "public promotion of homosexuality" a crime. He'd never really discussed it with his family, or anyone else. What difference did it make onstage? But now he became a genuine campaigner for Gay Rights, actually co-founding the Stonewall group (John Gielgud would be a major contributor, though sadly always in secret). He also originated the role of Max in Bent, about the suffering of gays in Dachau. A movie would be made of the play later, with Clive Owen playing Max. Ian would play Uncle Freddie, with Mick Jagger appearing in drag.

His first role after coming out, though, was in Scandal, with McKellen as John Profumo - he wanted to play someone who was famously “a raging heterosexual". He then played the famously anti-gay Adolf Hitler in Countdown To War, and also returned to the RSC, as Iago bringing down Willard White's Othello in Trevor Nunn's famed production, the last ever at Stratford's original The Other Place. A year later, he was Knighted by the Queen (he'd received a CBE back in 1979).

Come the early Nineties, he was ready for the Big Screen, and often used it to publically promote homosexuality (and sexual equality in general). He appeared in Tales Of The City, then in And The Band Played On, the tale of the discovery of and early fight against HIV. As activist Bill Kraus, Ian stood out in a cast including such stars as Richard Gere, Anjelica Huston, Steve Martin and Nathalie Baye, receiving an Emmy nomination for his pains. Then came The Ballad Of Little Jo, where Suzy Amis was forced by society to dress as a man.

The real breakthrough came in 1995, when Ian starred alongside Kate Beckinsale in a production of Cold Comfort Farm that did well in the States. Then came Richard III and Bent, and Rasputin where Ian played Tsar Nicholas to Alan Rickman's mad monk. He was Emmy-nominated for this last role, for which he actually won a Golden Globe (Richard III won a Globe nomination too). He made a wicked Nazi, hiding out in the States in Stephen King's Apt Pupil. And then came Gods and Monsters, where Ian starred beside Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave (with whom he'd first starred in an ATV Sunday Playhouse production called Sunday Out Of Season, back in 1965) as James Whale, director of Frankenstein. He was very bright, very witty, very gay, and Oscar-nominated. Sadly, he did not win - he had planned to use his acceptance speech to criticise the film industry for its attitude towards gays.

So, you're Oscar-nominated - your career should quite obviously be based in Hollywood. But Ian McKellen is Ian McKellen, so off he went to join an ensemble for a season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, doing The Seagull, The Tempest and Present Laughter. Only then came the big productions. First he was Magneto, Master of Magnetism, teasing and testing the mutant superheroes in the excellent X-Men (he'd earlier played Dr Reinhardt Lane in The Shadow). He would return as Magneto in X-Men 2, only this time, having escaped his plastic prison, he would join forces with his good-guy arch-enemy Professor Xavier to battle Brian Cox's malevolent Stryker, a military swine intent upon eradicating all mutants. Xavier, of course, would be played by Patrick Stewart who, back in 1977, had starred alongside McKellen in the RSC productions A Miserable And Lonely Death and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Interestingly, McKellen actually scored the part of Magneto through a stroke of fine fortune. Seeing director Bryan Singer to discuss the lead in his Apt Pupil, Singer had told him he was too young to play the dissipated old Nazi. As they chatted, Singer asked McKellen if he'd seen the new miniseries of Cold Comfort Farm, recently screened in America. The guy who played the preacher in that, said Singer, was something special. Of course, the preacher was McKellen and, once informed of this, Singer appreciated the great man's ability to transform himself, casting him in Apt Pupil and then as Magneto.

Then there was Gandalf and The Fellowship Of The Ring, and a worldwide fame not even the new Olivier would expect. Berating Bilbo, encouraging Frodo, battling grotesque creatures of all sizes and getting magically whupped by Christopher Lee's beastly Saruman, McKellen was brilliant. Once more he was Oscar-nominated, only to be pipped by Jim Broadbent's searing comic turn in Moulin Rouge. Naturally, he would return in The Two Towers, promoted up the hierarchy of wizards due to his trials in Part One and, now Gandalf The White, leading the rebellion against Sauron as the whole of Middle Earth went mental. Then would come the climax in The Return Of The King, a film so hotly anticipated that 100,000 came out onto the streets when it premiered in Wellington. The trilogy would also bring him a little sadness. Having met young New Zealander Greg Nickels on-set, he began a relationship so fruitful the couple actually exchanged rings, only to split just two months later.

Of course, he was still McKellan, and would continue with smaller, more intimate projects than Peter Jackson's epic. Emile would see him as a tortured father, contacting Deborah Kara Unger, the last surviving member of the family he betrayed and abandoned long before. Could he reconnect with his loved ones, or was he doomed to disappear into his own memories and regrets? Few actors had the depth to fully explore this awful struggle. Onstage he'd perform A Knight Out in Vancouver in 2002, then Dance Of Death in London the next year, rejoining the production in Sydney in early 2004. That year would also bring Eighteen, where he'd play the grandfather of a struggling homeless boy, his taped WW2 reminiscences inspiring the kid to find a life of his own. Come Christmas, he'd also deliver an outrageous Widow Twankey in Aladdin at Kevin Spacey's Old Vic, reprising the role at the end of 2005.

2005 would see McKellen in Asylum, based on Patrick McGrath's gothic romance. Here Hugh Bonneville would take over as superintendant of the titular institution, his wife Natasha Richardson beginning an affair with a charismatic inmate. McKellen would lend added weight as a bitter and sharp-tongued doctor passed over for the top job. After reuniting with Judi Dench when both provided voices for the big screen version of The Magic Roundabout (later inexplicably retitled Doogal for a US release), he'd move on to a brief run in Britain's top soap opera Coronation Street, playing Mel Hutchwright, a blocked writer and con artist who takes advantage of the street's book club to cadge drinks and accommodation. McKellen had actually been asked to appear on the show before, back around 1990, when he'd been invited to play Elsie Tanner's long-lost nephew, but he'd bottled it.

2005 would end with Neverwas, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival but, despite an all-star cast including Jessica Lange, Nick Nolte and Alan Cumming (Nightcrawler in X-Men 2), suffered a delayed release. Here Aaron Eckhart would play a psychiatrist working in a residential mental facility where his own father, author of the childrens' fantasy book of the title, had been maltreated years before. McKellen would appear as a wise old nutter, linked to both the father and his book, who helps Eckhart towards a series of improbable discoveries.

More triumphs would arrive in 2006. Receiving an Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, McKellen would spend the spring onstage at London's Donmar Warehouse in Mark Ravenhill's The Cut. Onscreen, he'd enjoy huge success as The Da Vinci Code's Sir Leigh Teabing, a rich and eccentric expert on Holy Grail mythology, who aids colleague Tom Hanks in his attempt to unravel a worldwide conspiracy involving secret Christian sects and albino killers. Having provided a voiceover intro to the British martial arts sci-fi extravaganza Displaced, he'd then appear as Magneto once more in X-Men: The Last Stand, this time, along with his malevolent Brotherhood, staging an extraordinary attack on the Golden Gate Bridge. After this, his voice would be heard yet again when he played Toad in the animated Flushed Away, a tale of a posh rat lost in the sewers of London, also featuring Andy Serkis, formerly Gollum.

Returning to the stage in 2007 to play King Lear, Ian McKellen will continue to use his fame and fortune to promote his first love, the theatre. He could easily star in a production in your local Town Hall - something you couldn't say about any other superstar. He will also continue to spread the word that one should feel OK, even glad to be gay. In fact, so active has he been in this area that it seems only right to end the biography of the greatest actor since Olivier with the words - GAY PEOPLE MUST HAVE THE SAME RIGHTS AS HETEROSEXUALS. He'd like that.

Dominic Wills