Actors - Ian McKellen

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Ian McKellen

	Actors - Ian McKellen

Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CBE (born May 25, 1939) is a highly acclaimed Oscar nominated actor on both stage and screen. His roles have spanned genres from serious Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular action movies. He is also known as an activist for the rights of gays and lesbians.

Youth and early career

McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, and has indicated that this had some impact on him. In an interview with The Advocate magazine (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 until I was four years old." (Quotes in this article are from the Advocate interview unless otherwise noted.)

McKellen's father, Denis Murray McKellen, a civil engineer, was a lay preacher, and both of his grandfathers were preachers as well. His home environment was strongly Christian, but non-orthodox. "My upbringing was of low nonconformist 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, Margery Lois McKellen (née Sutcliffe) died; his father died when he was 24.

When he came out of the closet to his stepmother, Gladys McKellen, who was a Friend (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 boy. He won a scholarship to St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, 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 serious partner, Brian Taylor, began their relationship in 1964. It was a relationship that was to last for eight years, ending in 1972. They lived in London, where McKellen continued to pursue his career as an actor. For over a decade he has lived in a five-story Victorian conversion in Narrow Street, Limehouse, London.

First major stage roles

The role that made McKellen famous was his 1969 portrayal of King Edward II of England in the Prospect Theatre Company's touring production of Marlowe's Edward II. The production was controversial for its explicit torture scenes and implicit homosexuality. He later reprised the role for the BBC. In 1972, he founded the Actors' Company with his friend Edward Petherbridge, and this was the beginning of his reputation as a spokesman 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 success in acting versus Mathias' somewhat less-successful career. 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 his career.

Award-winning successes

McKellen starred on Broadway in Bent
, a play about gay men in Nazi death camps, starting in 1979. Despite his role in this ground-breaking play, which brought to public view for the first time in a widespread way the persecution of gay people 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. In 1990 he starred in the revival at the National Theatre in London directed by Mathias, and also made a supporting appearance in the movie version, also directed by Mathias, which was released in 1997.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Ian McKellen ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Ian McKellen; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Ian McKellen

Youth and early career

First major stage roles

Award-winning successes

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay