By the 1970s, film companies had not come knocking on Ian’s door as they had with other actors of his generation. This is an integral part of the McKellen mystery. Why had this not happened? What was in the way? When he had a good part in a film no one knew who he was: ‘Not that I wanted to be a film star, but it should be useful in the theatre.’ He found that ‘a vicious circle exists in the theatre’; to get ‘an excellent part in an excellent play’, he had first to be established in a wider medium than the theatre as a box-office draw to satisfy the backers.
Moreover, he felt it was a little annoying when people in theatre and film who should know him, did not. ‘I am always going after films and not getting them, which is upsetting at the time … Films are absolutely the worst of all. The actor is never told anything. It is so insulting, so rude and so despicable. I would be glad to not only cut them off but cut their heads off.’
Another cause for fear and alarm had been highlighted when, back in 1980, years before coming out, he had met Sam Spiegel at Spiegel’s house when Harold Pinter had suggested him as the possible heterosexual lead in a film of Pinter’s Betrayal. ‘We chatted,’ he told John Lahr in 2007. ‘I was shortly going off to do Amadeus. Spiegel said, “You’re going to America?”
‘“Yes.”
‘“Will you be taking your wife?”
‘I don’t know why I said, “Well, I’m not married. I’m gay.”
‘“Oh!” he said. “Look at the time. Lovely to meet you.” I was out of the house like that.’ McKellen snapped his fingers. ‘I had never come out to somebody before.’
In 1980 Christopher Miles, the brother of the actress Sarah Miles, cast McKellen in his first film after a long gap in the role of D. H. Lawrence. Miles had been the director of the early aborted Gregory Peck film, so here at last was a substantial leading role in a film.
McKellen seems, at least from my perspective, an extraordinary choice for Lawrence. Surely it was not going to convince anyone that McKellen could be made to look like Lawrence, but McKellen’s blue eyes, similar to those of Lawrence, as well as the oval-shaped face, clinched it for Miles. ‘Authenticity’, that dreadfully misleading word, was the name of the game, so filming in exact locations like a Lawrence travelogue, would make the biography A Priest of Love by Harry T. Moore come alive. Ian concedes that the original book was ‘stodgy’, but the auburn-dyed hair and extra false moustache and hair around the chin, plus Lawrence’s ‘surplus energy and a lot of things gnawing away at his innards’, created its own brand of wishy-washiness.
Ian claimed he was searching to find the inner man. At a pre-filming cast do given by the American millionaire who put up the whole £1 million budget, he asked Alan Plater, who wrote the screenplay, how Lawrence would be behaving at such a party. Plater told him to sit in a corner and watch. Still, Ian could not find the inner Lawrence: ‘Have you noticed how Freud, Shaw, van Gogh and Lawrence are the same person! When I put on a beard I could be any of them,’ he told the Sunday Times. When Kenneth Branagh came to play Lawrence in a later television film, again written by Plater, he struck out for an image different from the vituperative woman hater and tortured intellectual, who was ‘wonderfully sunny, a great mimic and marvellous company’.
You can tell from the way Ian recounts making the film on his website that this was a performance that was not going to strike fire into the hearts of screen audiences: ‘By Lake Garda, an old lady who had served breakfast to the honeymooning Lawrences 65 years previously took one look at me in costume and rewarded me with a huge smile of recognition: Lorenzo!’ He also describes his first encounter with one of the co-stars: ‘I flew out alone to Oaxaca in Mexico … and was shown up to a hotel suite overlooking the valley surrounded by a distant mountain range. The dusk was pierced by lights twinkling in the town where D. H. Lawrence had stayed and written. Through the fronds of the palms on a level with my veranda, the swimming-pool reflected the fading blue of the sky. A lone bather in a bright green one-piece was breast-stroking in my direction. She waved: “Hello, Ian!” It was Ava Gardner and I felt I was in Hollywood.’ Gardner, who played Mabel Dodge Luhan, a rich American patron of the arts, had light brown hair which ‘fell wispily against her pale, celebrated cheekbones’.
What could McKellen have been thinking of during the filming beyond ‘I have to become a famous movie star’? Janet Suzman, cast as the writer’s wife, Frieda, was hardly an inspired choice: a gifted classical actress in the Peggy Ashcroft tradition, the fluidity and sensuality of a Laurentian heroine was not her forte.
The consequences of Priest of Love were dismal in advancing his film career. The jobbing actor, always having to be at work, was taking on any old film role. He was asked by Melvyn Bragg to feature in a diary of his year for a South Bank Show film in 1985, in which he declared glumly, ‘The joy’s gone out of the job, even the acting.’ In the stream of interviews he gave, he engaged as the charismatic, great actor in complete modesty, underlining that he could not help it if people wanted to talk to him, photograph him and know all about him. He was also, as the other side of this, a workaholic, quite happy sometimes to play the heroic martyr to the demands made on him, underlining his lonely position.
I can’t see beyond this treadmill of work. I am usually in the office [where he planned his work] by 9.30, and if I’ve got a performance I don’t finish until eleven. Then, while I was rehearsing the double bill [of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Sheridan’s The Critic in 1985], there was also some learning to be done. It’s daft. No way to carry on. If you’re not used to it, making decisions that affect other people’s lives (meaning theatre personnel as well as staff) is much, much more worrying than making decisions about your own life. It’s exhausting – and then you have to forget all that and go on stage.
Screen fame stubbornly eluded McKellen, and in the wider world if you were not a film star you did not rate. ‘Ian McKellen is Ian Mc-who? to all but the country’s slim group of theatregoers,’ wrote a journalist in Woman. Duncan Weldon, the leading producer and theatre manager, told me his name was not even a big draw for audiences when he presented him as the star in 1980s West End theatres.
While Ian protested to Tim Pulleyne in the Guardian that he was more excited when an unsolicited film script hit the floor in Camberwell than a play proposition, film or TV roles in the UK and US such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zina, The Keep and Plenty made between 1982 and 1986 brought him none of the kudos enjoyed by, say, Christopher Plummer, Sean Connery or Peter O’Toole. And by then Jacobi had become an international star and household name with I, Claudius, in which Ian turned down the role of Caligula, possibly, one might speculate, so as not to play a smaller role than Jacobi’s. It was played instead by John Hurt. Others in his peer group happily combined screen and stage success. But now Stephen Frears, another Cambridge figure, who had since leaving built a successful career as a director, stepped into the breach.
Frears had worked primarily with writers such as Alan Bennett, and in 1982 teamed up with novelist David Cook to make Walter, about a boy with physical and learning disabilities, for Channel Four’s new and ambitious Film on Four slot. McKellen was performing Amadeus in New York when Cook sent McKellen the script of Walter, which was based on his Hawthornden Prize-winning novel, inspired by his time spent working as a hospital nurse. Perhaps this extremely subjective and emotional role would prove the Janus other side of the Plantagenet royal princes’ coin. The part caught Ian’s imagination, with the added attraction that here, too, was a striking serious social theme about a victim of the present-day underclass, the mentally ill.
Frears could not have been a better operative to cut Ian’s acting down to size, to reduce his powerful work ethos and his impatient need to analyse to a simpler essence of just ‘being’. The important factor was that Ian was just at the right moment ready for it. While Frears is a very self-deprecating and self-critical personality, he was challenged by ex-Cambridge McKellen (they thought and spoke about the same kind of serious mission in art), to put to one side his use of anonymous, unknown people and take on board ‘this immensely flamboyant actor … I found that tremendous and very exciting.’
This was a work on a great social theme, influenced by Ken Loach. The film, more explicit as might be expected from Loach’s influence, was not going to be for people who had read the book. Ian could use his native accent for what little dialogue there was (Walter lived mainly through his imagination which he found difficulty in sharing). His thoughts ‘swam like goldfish inside his innocent head’.
Ian visited a psychiatric hospital, saw similar patients at first hand, and did a complete makeover for the physicality of a disabled Walter. He was prepared to immerse himself in the humblest possible way. He spent a week with an ex-psychiatric nurse at a large hospital, where he met after-hours with other nurses to act out episodes from their working day. Stephen Frears dropped in each day. He told McKellen, ‘De-focus your eyes and it will seem that your thoughts are more confused and complete [as the character Walter] than your own.’
With bucked-teeth dentures and flat cap, Ian then went out to test the role with the ex-nurse in Marks & Spencer, and behave in public as he thought Walter would behave, making a beeline for the rack of ladies’ underwear and giggling to himself, then charming fellow shoppers at the check-out with an innocent, toothy grin. This was a far cry from putting freshly picked raspberries on your breakfast cereal in proximity to Gregory Peck in Gstaad.
When screened as the inaugural Film on Four, Walter kicked up quite a furore because there was a degree of no-holds-barred violence as well as a very gentle, humane, even sweet side. Denounced by some as a new low in television obscenity, Walter, Ian claimed, was the most amazing job he had done up to then, wholly changing his perception of human beings in the two weeks of its filming.
Frears says later he learnt a trick from Ian during this, which he passed on to Helen Mirren when making The Queen. (David Frost asked McKellen in 2006 what he thought of Frears’ film. ‘You can see she was jealous of Diana,’ he said, but surely what he meant was ‘envious’.) When Tony Blair says to her in one scene, ‘You were very young when you became Queen,’ and she replies, ‘Yes, just a girl’, Frears directed her to do what Ian had done in Walter: ‘As you say that line, let your eyes drift across the camera.’ Frears added, ‘She did it, and I thought, you’ll win an Oscar – and she did!’ Ironically, though, the Oscar would go on eluding Ian.
A sequel, Walter and June, was made and shown two years later, in which Walter has sex with mentally ill June, played by Sarah Miles. Serious critics appreciated the performance and applauded, but once again no major film role materialised as a result. Ian’s film ambitions of playing leading roles remained unachieved, until in 1988 another chance came along, this time to play John Profumo, the UK War Secretary, in Scandal, with John Hurt as the society pimp Stephen Ward, the film which exposed the liaison showgirl Christine Keeler had with Profumo and which significantly damaged the Harold Macmillan government.
David Suchet was mooted as a possible for Profumo, while Donald Pleasance turned the role down. McKellen’s self-justification for doing it was that it was a very important social and political theme for his country, and given that this was in the immediate wake of his coming out, he wanted to show he could still convince the public as a straight lover. In the usual style of his approach, McKellen wrote to Profumo to try and engage him in conversation, but twenty-five years on from the shameful event, Profumo only wanted to be left in peace. Ian did have a chance to talk to Christine Keeler when she visited the set, but did not seize it.
The film, not altogether a great success with critics, had its moments, particularly Hurt’s haunted osteopath Ward and Joanne Whalley’s enticing Christine Keeler. But it was a disaster for McKellen. His risible hairstyle made him, even he confessed to Time Out, ‘the laughing-stock of five continents’. Yet he seemed puzzled why it was a failure, for he stated in his declarations about his career moves, this time in August 1989 (when perhaps hubris was at its very height): ‘It’s a slight mystery as to why bigger film roles haven’t come my way, but now I’ve been left behind.’