May 21, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Grand knight of British theatre and Hollywood latecomer, Sir Ian McKellen, is a sell-out at 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, May 21, Graphic News:  As Ian McKellen clocks up his biblical “threescore years and ten”, it could hardly be said of him that his strength is fading and his time will soon be up. Indeed, the reviews of his current triumph in London’s West End in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, describe his performance as the tramp, Estragon, as nothing short of “superb”. Teamed once again with old friend Patrick Stewart -- the pair first met at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 70s and went on to share the billing in the X-Men movies -- the production is directed by McKellen’s former partner of 10 years, Sean Mathias.
 
“It was important to us both that our friendship should survive the split,” McKellen writes in his online autobiography. “Sean is one of the three most helpful directors I’ve worked with -- alongside Trevor Nunn and Tyrone Guthrie.”
 
Regarded by many as the natural successor to Laurence Olivier, Lancashire-born McKellen was told by his high school Classics teacher that he had greasepaint flowing through his veins. From childhood trips to the theatre, to school productions and summer camps up river at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he watched with awe the previous generation’s “greats”, including Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton and Peggy Ashcroft, McKellen’s destiny never seemed in doubt. When the Bolton School Head Boy won a scholarship to study English at Cambridge he threw himself so completely into undergraduate theatricals that the prize was withdrawn, for poor academic performance.
 
His contemporaries at University included Derek Jacobi, to whom McKellen was deeply attracted. Years later, he discovered the admiration had been mutual, but theirs was an era when homosexuality had only just ceased to be criminal and the debate around Clause 28 -- an attempt by the Thatcher government to restrict its expression, especially in the Arts -- was still decades away. A BBC radio discussion in 1988, in which McKellen became so frustrated by what he saw as the prejudice of fellow guest Peregrine Worsthorne that he declared himself, live on air, to be gay, marked the beginning of his activism for equal gay rights.
 
Learning his craft in the repertory theatres of England, McKellen was part of Olivier’s National Theatre company at the beginning of the 1960s, but broke away from its stellar ranks in search of lead roles. He excelled at Shakespeare; his 1968 performance as Richard II for the Prospect Theatre Company, later televised by the BBC, elicited a congratulatory telegram from John Gielgud. When he joined the RSC in 1976, his Romeo, to Francesca Annis’s Juliet, and Macbeth, opposite Judi Dench, passed into legend.
 
On Broadway, McKellen won a clutch of awards, including a Tony for his portrayal of Mozart’s arch rival, Salieri, in “Amadeus” in 1980. Throughout the decade his one-man show, Acting Shakespeare, sold out on both sides of the Atlantic. In London, McKellen would stand in the foyer at the end of each evening, collecting cash in a bucket for the London Lighthouse, an Aids hospice.
 
Knighted in 1990, McKellen has since become known to new, younger audiences worldwide as Gandalf the Grey, Tolkein’s wizard from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, adapted by New Zealand director Peter Jackson, in three of the costliest and highest-grossing films ever made. Despite their winning 17 Oscars, McKellen, nominated in 2002 for Best Supporting Actor in The Fellowship of the Ring, lost out to fellow Briton Jim Broadbent, to McKellen’s lasting disappointment.
/ENDS