In 1995, he successfully portrayed Richard III onscreen as a snarling, 1930s fascist, but before that McKellen's biggest movie role to date had probably been as Death, in Last Action Hero. (Hollywood producers called on him, as they seemed to on all classical English actors back then, only when they needed a cadaverous villain of some sort.) After Richard III he was seen as a potential lead, and in 1998 won an Oscar nomination for his role as James Whale in Gods and Monsters, a superbly delicate and tortured performance. "It isn't quite like sharing a stage with somebody," he says of acclimatizing to the new medium. "You're acting not so much with the other actor, but with the camera. That's a very personal relationship that film stars have. The equivalent in the theater would be an actor who has a very personal relationship with the audience that excludes the other actors. Well," he says caustically, "you try not to do that."
When the offer came in to play Gandalf in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, lots of fine subhead:
Ian McKellen has enthralled audiences on the big screen, small screen and stage. Now, he
becomes King Lear in a play that has sold out all over the world
British actors had already turned it down, including, reportedly, Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery. How they must be cursing themselves now. The success of the films has made McKellen not only richer, but celebrated to a degree that gives him freedom to do more of what he wants. The role must have been a walkover - Gandalf speaks with a Shakespearean intonation but without the difficult sentence structure. I wonder if he has discussed how to play a wizard with his friend Michael Gambon, who does Dumbledore over in the Harry Potter franchise. "Funnily enough, we never have." He grins.
As a relief from the hard labor of Lear, three times a week the company performs Chekhov's shorter tragedy, The Seagull, in which McKellen plays the elderly and mercifully sedentary role of Sorin. When it played in New Zealand, Helen Clark, the prime minister, said drily to McKellen afterwards, "That's a cheery little number." He liked her for that. Has he met Gordon Brown yet? "I have. I met him at the civil partnership ceremony between Michael Cashman, who's a member of the European Parliament, and Paul Cottingham, his partner. It was quite an occasion. There was a letter of love and regard sent from Tony Blair, still prime minister, and Gordon Brown, the prime-minister-in-waiting, was present. I just thought, well ..." His voice drops; weary, proud. "Yessssss!"
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