‘Gandalf is a door-opener’
Ian McKellen, 2017
McKellen owes an extraordinary debt to Ronald – or J. R. R. – Tolkien. With Shakespeare’s bust on display in his riverside home, he rhapsodises often over the bard’s greatness, and what everyone owes him, and he is truthful and eloquent about Shakespeare the man. He lavishes praise on other writers from Chekhov to Martin Sherman, yet when he entertains any number of guests with unbounded generosity in restaurants, at the end of the lunch or dinner party he rises to his feet, looks around benignly grinning at everyone, and addresses the company with the words, ‘Gandalf pays!’
At the very age when Margery’s illness had been casting and deepening that lasting shadow over her son’s life in Bolton, an Oxford professor of medieval literature was putting the final touches to his epic depiction of the timeless wizard. This was destined, more than anything else, to take the Bolton School boy into unimagined realms of fame and gold, far beyond any conceivable ambition he or his family might have had.
The parallels between Ian’s life and that of Gandalf’s creator are extraordinary. Humphrey Carpenter, a writer who lived in Oxford, met J. R. R. Tolkien in 1967, calling on him at Sandfield Road in Headington, his ordinary suburban home, which W. H. Auden once called ‘hideous’. In his biography of Tolkien, Carpenter’s first-hand description of the creator of Ian’s most famous role has a striking similarity to McKellen. He found Tolkien had what we can identify as the same strange voice, deep but not without resonance, entirely English but with some quality he could not quite put his finger on, as if he had come from another age or civilisation … ‘[While] he does not speak clearly … He speaks in complex sentences.’ This description eerily fits Gandalf and Ian McKellen, as well as Tolkien. Perhaps by his seventy-sixth year, when Carpenter visited Tolkien, he had grown into this unearthly figure. Carpenter was clearly out of his depth when he talked to him, for he believed some strange spirit had ‘taken on the guise of an elderly professor’. He had completed The Lord of the Rings nearly twenty years before.
There is much more than the voice. Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892, and a month later, in Bloemfontein Cathedral, South Africa, christened John Ronald Reuel. He once said he sometimes did not feel this to be his real name. At the age of three, Tolkien suffered a bout of rheumatic fever in Pretoria. Ian McKellen had also been three when he caught diphtheria, which some claim resulted in the highly idiosyncratic tone of voice that so colours his performances.
Arthur, Tolkien’s father, a bank manager, suffered a severe haemorrhage and died when he was four years old, during a time when he and his mother were visiting Birmingham (where both parental families had homes). Mabel, his mother, who had no great love of South Africa, brought Ronald and his brother Hilary up in Birmingham, and it was here his now widowed mother, in the course of her devout Catholic practice, befriended Father Francis Morgan, an Oratory teacher, who became protector and mentor to her two sons. In 1904 when Ronald was twelve, Mabel was diagnosed with diabetes and died the same year. Tolkien felt his ‘own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.’ In 1949 when Ian was ten, his mother Margery had been taken into hospital with breast cancer. She died in 1951. Ian was twelve, exactly the same age as Tolkien when his mother died.
Ronald was a cheerful, almost irrepressible person with a zest for life. He loved good talk and physical activity like the Hobbits he created. He had a deep sense of humour and a great capacity for making friends. But from now on there developed a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother’s death, when he was in the mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle could be won for ever.
Father Morgan became Tolkien’s sole guardian, a kind and generous benefactor. Ian’s father Denis, who as a pianist had some inclination of an artist, was the borough engineer of Bolton, and to his son had been a remote, unapproachable figure. Ian had no place to channel his grief or even share it, although he had been very close to his mother. Denis and his son had little rapport, and Ian, mourning in an unexpressed and even secret way, had grown somewhat lonely and into himself.
While Ronald channelled that emotion of loss into religion, which provided an outlet, Ian’s emotion had become less specific, more widespread and directed more towards glamour and entertainment than liturgy and language, the spoken versus the written word. Carpenter claims his mother’s death made Tolkien into two people and that his faith took the place in his affections that Mabel had previously occupied. This may be particularly pertinent to McKellen and may even be put forward as an accurate description of his personality. Two people to start with in life. In McKellen’s case the theatre substituted for religion.
A romantic disposition towards women and especially towards Edith Bratt, his first girlfriend, daughter of a single mother, whom Ronald met when he was sixteen and she nineteen, remained with Tolkien all his life. Their love survived early years of separation, while Edith, ‘remarkably pretty, small and slim’, remained his ideal, his inspiration for the female characters in The Lord of the Rings. Father Morgan forbade Ronald to write to her, or to see her until she was twenty-one. He gave in finally and married them in 1916. From the start, it was not an easy marriage, and although blessed with four children, Tolkien found domestic concerns rather irritating and trivial.
Yet ‘I feel on my own, a bit of an orphan,’ McKellen confessed on the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are? This was equally true of Tolkien, although dragons and mythological beings were for him what fictional characters were for Ian.
If the similarity of background between McKellen and Tolkien in some ways prepared him for Gandalf, the role still almost never happened for him. Dozens of actors were considered, while Christopher Plummer and Sean Connery, better known film stars, were offered the part before him. Richard Harris was another early possibility but declined, although Ian said he read for the part. Plummer said, of going on the lengthy filming schedule proposed in New Zealand, ‘I thought there were other countries I’d like to visit before I croak.’ He later regretted turning it down. That’s why, he said in jest, ‘I hate that son of a bitch Ian McKellen!’
Connery revealed only recently his refusal to do it came down to the fact he ‘never understood the script’. He added, ‘I read the book. I read the script. I saw the movies. Ian McKellen, I believe, is marvellous in it.’ Connery was to be paid six million dollars and, or so it was reported, 25 per cent of the gross, which finally came near to six billion. In 2005, again Connery told the New Zealand Herald: ‘Yeah, well, I never understood it … I saw the movie. I still didn’t understand it. I would be interested in doing something that I didn’t fully understand, but not for eighteen months.’
Even before the casting of Gandalf, there was a bizarre circumstance affecting whether or not McKellen could do it. I have quoted as an epigraph Ian’s remark that no actor was ever first choice, but in fact he actually was the director John Woo’s first choice for the role of Swanbeck in Mission: Impossible 2 (the 2000 film). He turned it down because he was not shown the script first. If he had persisted and accepted to play Swanbeck, which Anthony Hopkins then played, he would never have been Gandalf.
Ian claims he never read The Lord of the Rings before he signed up for it. For Gandalf he was offered four million pounds. But it was more likely that in his sensible practical way, he considered the role in script form more relevant to his taking part. Asked about why he was offered the role, he says that he was pretty certain Peter Jackson had offered it to Sean Connery and even Anthony Hopkins before offering it to him. He added that, personally, his first choice would have been Paul Scofield, who was in his late seventies. How each actor was chosen is the first of many epic stories surrounding the making of The Lord of the Rings. Ian Holm became Bilbo, in part because Jackson had heard him portray Frodo in the BBC radio adaptation; Christopher Lee was cast as Saruman as a result of reading for Gandalf; Elijah Wood, to prove his claim to play Frodo, produced a video of himself dressed as a hobbit in Hollywood Hills woodland locale. The model-turned-actress Liv Tyler was Arwen, for which her tall, long-limbed grace, flawless skin and dazzling blue eyes were a perfect match. She calls this the result of the decision of Jackson and the writer that ‘there wasn’t nearly enough female energy’ in Tolkien’s books, indeed ‘the only female energy came from the big Black Spider that kills everybody…’ So Arwen became the love interest, the blockbuster sine qua non. Ian, never one to drop the idea, suggested impishly there might be some love interest for Gandalf (with, say, the dwarf Gimli).
This rejection of roles was duplicated with other characters. Daniel Day-Lewis was offered Aragorn but turned it down. Timothy Spall at one stage was due to be Gimli the dwarf; David Bowie wanted to play the elf Lord Elrond, but this never happened. Then Stuart Townsend was relieved of his part after two weeks of shooting as Aragorn – he was considered too young by Jackson – and replaced by Viggo Mortensen. But ‘they say’ McKellen was ‘lured’ – the word Brian Appleyard used – into The Lord of the Rings by the arrival at his home in Limehouse of Jackson with Fran, his wife, who had flown to London to meet and choose the cast.
‘He’s not crazed,’ Ian told Appleyard, ‘he’s just eccentric. He only has two shirts, he doesn’t wear shoes, he only wears shorts, he doesn’t shave, he doesn’t cut his hair. And he’s married to this beautiful Goth who did the screenplay. They’re New Zealanders – how else can you explain them?’
The preparatory work should never be underestimated: creating the films took eight years, with only one year to create the final version of each film.
Ian found Jackson adamant that he was not going to interfere with Tolkien and would eschew all fairy tale and pantomime. The image of Gandalf, inspired by the drawings of John Howe, was crystal clear in Jackson’s mind.
There is a tradition in Hollywood of distinguished British actors playing wise old mentors with supernatural powers. Olivier had been Zeus in Clash of the Titans, while earlier James Mason was the benign, omnipotent fixer in Heaven Can Wait. Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars was perhaps the closest parallel to McKellen taking on Gandalf, and of course Richard Harris would be Dumbledore in two Harry Potter films.
Jackson had no qualms when he settled on McKellen (and had the immediate endorsement of Ian’s Magneto in X-Men to inspire confidence), perceiving straight away that Ian was able to get under the skin of a character and cease to exist as Ian McKellen. Right from the start, with his prime intention of bringing the characters in the book to life, Jackson and Fran considered it of paramount importance that no one character should come to dominate completely over the others. So perhaps it was just as well Gandalf was not a stage role for Ian, or the balance might have been upset.
How should we describe Gandalf ? ‘[He] is not, of course, a human being (Man or Hobbit),’ Tolkien points out. ‘There are naturally no precise modern terms to say what he was. I [would] venture to say he was an incarnate “angel” – strictly an angelos, that is, with the other Istari, wizards, “those who know,” an emissary from the Lords of the West, sent to Middle-earth, as the great crisis of Sauron loomed on the horizon.’
This was the intention the Jacksons had in their adaptation. They did not allow Gandalf to embody completely the author’s internally consistent, authoritative and controlling power. Instead they set out to allow Tolkien’s integrity and coherence, and sometimes his ambivalence, to come into focus slowly, as guided by the storytelling demands, and the needs of the other characters.
This had been something of a problem for Tolkien, too, for both in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings he sends Gandalf away from the main action and events, and in this way enhances the tension and immediacy of the drama, as well as the expectation and suspense of when he would return and intercede, either with success or failure. His attraction (and this underlines the parallel with, and closeness to, Ian himself) is his commanding distinctness. At the same time he is elusive in his core nature. Above all he is an enigma, insofar as we never quite get to the heart of his mystery, which is what Tolkien intended. There was a lot that made him a tempting role for Ian.
Before McKellen arrived in New Zealand, Gandalf had already been filmed trekking across country, the task undertaken by Michael Elsworth, the first of Ian’s two doubles. Ian’s absence, still filming X-Men in Toronto, was causing headaches, prompting the production team to rejig the shooting and push him further along into the shoot. They were throwing around the figure of one million dollars a day if there was any further delay.
In keeping with Gandalf’s long periods of absence during The Lord of the Rings, it was perhaps not surprising that Ian was not there for the first three months of shooting. He arrived on 25 January 2000 for his first day on location, an hour’s flight north of the Three Foot Six studios in Wellington. He has an eye for attractive landscape, and relished his arrival and the surroundings, finding Hobbiton looked settled-in and cosy, ‘surrounded by green low peaks and gentle valleys … The lone poplars on the horizon look as if placed by the art department but … You can never be sure. The smoke rising from the domesticated holes where the hobbits live is provided by an oil-burning machine.’
At once on Ian’s part there was complete and enjoyable submission, of an unconditional, and even celebratory nature, as he acknowledged how happy he was. Without as yet, it seems, or so he says, ever opening the book, he had heard Tolkien reading it and could say, ‘Tolkien rules the enterprise!’ It meant make-up and costume artists immersing themselves in the novel for Ian’s appearance, trimming long and cumbersome beards for the heroic Gandalf the Grey and revealing hidden cheek folds.
He found the outward form of the wizard’s beard and pointed hat was not all that difficult when he was surrounded by a team of people trying beards, wigs and noses of various lengths. After a day-and-a-half of this he dozed off while they were working. When he woke, he suddenly saw Gandalf staring back at him. ‘When I opened my eyes again there were some eyes twinkling back at me, and they didn’t seem to be mine – they seemed to be Gandalf’s!’
Once the appearance was fixed he could inhabit and infuse Tolkien’s characterisation with personal traits, tics, shades of emotion, irascibility, forgetfulness, tiredness to make him a rounded human being (if Tolkien’s wizard can ever be called that).
In the Bag End scenes when Gandalf meets Bilbo and Frodo at home, he bumped his head on the rafters, complaining Tolkien did not take Gandalf’s height into consideration. There was a lot of ‘scale doubling’ going on, matching sizes of the actors with the scenery, with Bilbo and Frodo, the stunt double and stand-in played by Kiran Shah, to be in hobbit proportion to Gandalf. There was, likewise, a big Bag End duplicating everything in the small set, so here for the scale Gandalf had a seven-foot-four-inch substitute, whose name was Paul Webster.
Ian was joined by veteran Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins. Both were experienced over the years with every kind of theatrical mishap and malfunction, yet both had remained down-to-earth. McKellen responded eagerly and warmly, like a child, to familiar surroundings. The kitchen table where Frodo pours the tea reminded him of the family kitchen of his childhood. Yet there was a difference, because Bag End felt to him ‘like a hole in the ground. Why are subterranean books popular with children?’
Jackson wanted to have the two Ians interacting on screen together so he put Gandalf closer to the camera, with the result Bilbo could be shrunk and the two of them could see each other’s eyes. Jackson says, ‘Bilbo’s [eyes] twinkle and pierce through you – he is so observant and yet he looks at you as the character.’ Each time the camera rolls Bilbo is present. ‘Ian [Holm] never repeats himself, he is different in each take and yet always in character. It is a daring approach to film acting, dicing with spontaneity.’
Jackson had a different approach, too, for each actor and, as a close colleague reflects, rolled with the punches and was flexible. Early on, Holm had told him, ‘I ought to warn you that I like to try different things on each take, so if you let me do three or four takes, I’ll give you a variety of different readings; and then if I haven’t given you something that you like, just let me know what it is you’re looking for and I’ll try to give it to you.’
Jackson sensed McKellen was in awe of Holm’s ability, ‘as well as being slightly fazed by playing opposite a character who, on the face of it, seemed to be quite erratic’. Sure enough, one day McKellen pulled Jackson to one side and asked, ‘Do you like what Ian does?’
‘It’s great,’ he answered.
‘I could never do it … I have to decide what the scene is about and then try to achieve that to the very best of my ability.’ Jackson endorsed and relished both Ians working in a very different way. He treasured the early scenes with Ian and Elijah Wood in which Frodo rushes in through the door, calling ‘Bilbo!’, then realises he has gone. With its shadows and flickering candles this was a ‘wonderfully moody scene’ with which to begin: Gandalf gazing into the fire, smoking his pipe and muttering Gollum’s word ‘Precious’; the Ring lying on the floor in the hallway. The scene, too, where Frodo sees the letters glowing on the Ring and asks what it means to Gandalf who recites the Ring-rhyme, was, says Jackson, ‘wonderful Gothic, creepy stuff from Ian, who was now really nailing Gandalf and bringing great strength to the character’.
Ian completely surrendered to and found ease in Jackson’s authority. He was aware of the curtailment of Gandalf’s power, but he abdicated from his questioning and searching that had so characterised many of his stage roles, and the involvement, even entanglement, with directors. For example, in The Two Towers, the second film, before Gandalf’s disappearance, seemingly lost to the Hobbits for good, which marks the end of Gandalf the Grey, the screen version establishes a subtle diminution of his powers and stature in favour of building up other characters. In the key scene of opening the door in the journey through Moria, where solving the riddle, which he does in the book with a hint from Merry, it is Frodo who solves it by divining, in a way the wizard has not, that the inscription constitutes the riddle. But as Ian claimed he had not read the book he might well have not been aware of these changes.
Ian found Gandalf’s increased vulnerability a joy and gift, for it deepened and enhanced the weight of Frodo’s personal journey with Gandalf’s loss or disappearance made into the personal route of Frodo’s own decision, heightening his anguish towards the end. Ian loved the fairground, itinerant nature of Gandalf the Grey, so much so that, as Jackson pointed out, ‘you can easily imagine he sleeps under a hedgerow and then rides on the next day. He has this wonderful, earthy quality to him.’ But the moment of confrontation with the Balrog caused Ian difficulties and some stress as he struggled to find a way to respond as Gandalf. At first he got angry and frustrated: when someone asked, ‘Can you tell us what the Balrog looks like?’ ‘Yes, it’s a furry rubber ball!’ he answered. He meant the tennis ball on a stick which they had set up to give him an eye-line. The Balrog existed only as conceptual art, so Ian had only a weak idea of what this monster looked like. Jackson felt it was tough on him: ‘he got a bit crotchety about having to do this powerhouse performance to absolutely nothing.’ Definitively, Ian had met his many-sided match in his director.
‘There were never tantrums. That’s not the Kiwi way. You discuss your point and you come to an agreement; you are doing it together,’ avowed Ian with approval. Jackson was like Ian himself, able to be involved in so many different things with inexhaustible energy. He was patient, he was modest and without pretension. He always made the day ahead enjoyable. His talents and gifts were there from the beginning, fully formed, says McKellen, while the bonus was his sense of humour.
There was a central paradox, even irony, in Ian filming in The Lord of the Rings. The spiritual power and conviction that Ian embodies in playing Gandalf came, while never explicit, from Tolkien’s beliefs.
‘Some have puzzled over the relation between Tolkien’s stories and his Christianity and have found it difficult to understand how a devout Roman Catholic could write with such conviction about a world where God is not worshipped,’ proposed Humphrey Carpenter in his biography of Tolkien. ‘But there is no mystery … Tolkien’s universe is ruled over by God … Everything in the end is subject to God … He wanted the mythological and legendary stories to express his own moral view of the universe; and as a Christian he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God that he worshipped.’ But as he had to place his stories ‘realistically’ in the known world, ‘To make this explicit[ly] Christian, would deprive them of their imaginative colour … So while God is present in Tolkien’s universe, he remains unseen.’ He observes the same was true of Shakespeare. Like many creators in art, music and literature, Tolkien believed he was doing much more than inventing a story. In making myths he was being a sub-creator under God, whom he considered the prime creator, and while he may pervert his own thoughts into lies, they come from God, and it is from God that he gets his ultimate ideals.
‘Not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate from God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth,’ wrote Carpenter, who like McKellen was a lifelong atheist.
Tolkien’s religion, not always a source of consolation to him, was ‘one of the strongest and deepest elements in his personality’, according to Carpenter. None of this is explicit and seen, and in the part, for example, when Gandalf the Grey returns, and becomes much more strong as Gandalf the White, he is now the archetypal Hollywood hero resourcefully fighting off orcs, then is rescued (with Bilbo) by the birds. Yet there is still something more than just heroism, and his power always comes from something greater than himself, similar in some ways to ‘The Force’ (which Guinness so perfectly embodies in Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars). It is at heart a religious commitment.
McKellen rented a house close to Peter Jackson’s family home in Wellington. He spent the rest of 2000 in unadulterated pleasure and enjoyment. Doing what he most loved without a break was completely revitalising, utterly productive of happiness. He took the film very seriously, approving of the way it deals with the adult theme of loss of innocence, love of country (yes, even for an unpatriotic pacifist) and companionship. He appreciated that Tolkien was not just writing a fantasy story, but truly a myth, and that this story about the mixed-race group that went off to defeat all the evil in the world might just be the story everyone wanted.
Christopher Lee played Saruman, the antagonist to Gandalf. Lee, seventy-eight years old during the filming, was another phenomenon of this miraculous enterprise. When Lee spoke as Saruman, all Ian could see and hear was Saruman, and he confessed that when Lee rounded off a speech with a snarl, to be within four feet of it was unsettling. He felt relieved he was not wearing his fangs. Off set Ian liked making Lee, fifteen years his senior, and a veteran of over two hundred films, laugh with theatrical chestnuts, such as when Noël Coward reads a poster: ‘Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them. I don’t see why not. Everyone else has.’ On their first day of filming in the Isengard gardens Saruman and Gandalf exchanged words that were later dropped. Gandalf has spied a couple of orcs scuttling among the trees. Astonished, Gandalf has the line: ‘Orcs, servants of the Enemy in Isengard.’
Saruman replies, ‘Not his servants – mine.’ It indicated that, at this point, ‘Saruman the White’ – in other words, not his evil double – was not what he seems.
‘Orcs – and so far from Auckland,’ cheeky Ian revised his line.
When in flooded Isengaard they came to shoot Saruman dead, ‘We laid Christopher on top of this great barbed wheel’ Jackson said, ‘and attached the end of a spike, covered in blood, as though it was sticking out of his chest. I then tracked the camera over the top of him to simulate the turning of the wheel. Christopher was in a good mood: I don’t think, at that stage, he’d dwelt much on the ramifications of being shown in such an obvious dead pose.’
Lee, intrepid villain to the end, knew Tolkien’s text better than everyone else. Not only had he read it when it first came out, but he had reread all three books yearly ever since. He was the only cast member to have met Tolkien, in a pub in Oxford (the Victoria Arms) where he was once having a beer with friends when Tolkien walked in. One of Lee’s friends knew him ‘and he very kindly came over to us’. Lee admitted in the end he did find the film very hard work. He lived to the age of ninety-three and died in 2005.
There are, and will always be, critics who say The Lord of the Rings films should never have been made. Arguments have been raised, or raged, on both sides, in all the media. A contrary view was that of Salman Rushdie who pronounced Jackson’s picture an improvement on its source material, if only because Jackson’s film language was ‘subtler, more sophisticated and certainly more contemporary than the stilted, deliberate archaisms of J. R. R. Tolkien’s descriptive prose and, even more problematically, of his dialogue.’ In his Summa Jacksonica David Bratman fiercely disagreed, contrasting Sméagol’s agony in the book The Two Towers ‘moving and better written than the filming; how much more sense it makes when his two personalities reflect that he is in two minds about this than in the film. “Leave now and never come back … leave now and never come back … leave now and never come back,” says Film-Sméagol. What subtle, sophisticated dialogue, eh, Mr Rushdie?’
A much-raised comparison was between the Arwen of Tolkien, the serene and beautiful image of feminine passivity, created perhaps in reaction to his own difficult marriage to Edith, and Liv Tyler’s Arwen.
Jackson stepped in positively here, as he saw an Arwen storyline did not exist in the books beyond the concept of an immortal Elf loving a mortal Man. ‘We wanted to create a story for Arwen – and we just thought, well, you know, why don’t we crank up the tension by having Arwen sort of ordered to take the ship as well. There’s no way you can create a greater conflict between Aragorn and Arwen than to have them permanently separated.’
Since the books were written, an unromantic reality had taken over in the depiction of female role models and heroines. The pattern of obedient passivity was left behind. Tolkien’s Arwen, modelled more on the Greek Psyche archetype, became a modern woman, or rather superwoman, as one feminist described it: one of ‘Jackson’s pumped-up, butt-kicking fearless heroines, masters of machinery, battle technique, physical hardship and emotional adversity – also able to nurture a child and experience romantic attachment.’ Yet Liv Tyler’s portrayal of Arwen never loses its romantic appeal as one sees in the scenes she plays with Ian: her appeal to him is potent.
Tolkien, who sold the film rights for £10,000 in 1969, did not object to a film or theatrical adaptation. Even though he was always being charged as unworldly, he saw the failure of poor films lay in their exaggeration and in the intrusion of ‘unwarranted material owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies … One of [the film-maker’s] chief faults is his tendency to anticipate scenes or devices used later, thereby flattening the tale out … He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights.’ Jackson didn’t flatten out that characteristic and peculiar tone, even though when he came later to make The Hobbit the ‘preference’ was decidedly for fights!
Defying five demons when Gandalf the Grey became Gandalf the White was, for Ian, like shouting on the battlefield as Coriolanus or Richard III and therefore familiar and straightforward, although not so complicated and challenging. Between Gandalf the Grey in the first half and Gandalf the White in the second, Ian was never in doubt which Gandalf he preferred. The more complicated Gandalf the Grey had ‘enormous strength, resilience, intelligence and determination, passion and generosity. He was also very human, very frail, in the sense that he liked to drink, he liked to smoke, he liked to laugh, he liked to play. He was also human in the sense that he was worried he wasn’t doing the job properly – that he’d somehow let Middle-earth down by not anticipating Sauron’s revival. He had to really organise himself. That was a fascinating character to play.’
Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings from 1937 to 1950, and there’s quite a lot of commentary that draws parallels between the world-war situation, and Hitler’s evil, with the Dark Forces, the hordes of orcs and especially the evil figures of Saruman and Sauron. Much, too, is made of the interchangeability of forces in Gandalf himself, who sometimes appears as Sauron, while Sauron also changes his appearance to that of Gandalf. In other words, Gandalf, too, is a man of disguises, like an actor.
There is an extraordinary confrontation in The Two Towers, when Gandalf and Théoden, having defeated the overwhelming forces of orcs and their allies, seek out Saruman in his tower. ‘Have we ridden to victory,’ asks Éomer, ‘only to stand at last amazed by an old liar with honey on his forked tongue? So would the trapped wolf speak to the hounds.’
The whole import or drift of this vivid scene is that Gandalf, supported by the wavering Riders, stands up to the wily Saruman, who argues with all the charm and plausibility of a great hero and saviour (just as Hitler did, in order to achieve domination of Europe) – ‘You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men’s hearts’ – but is prepared in the end in The Two Towers to stand up to him with force.
Matthew Parris has said McKellen is, to exaggerate his comment slightly, a commanding officer in the closet. But surely it’s Gandalf, in these years since he has played that part, who is at heart closest to who he is. You can see some of the ‘extraordinary goodness which is clear to anybody who meets him, but which isn’t always apparent on stage’, Brian Cox has said. McKellen identified wholly with Gandalf and said, ‘I am quite happy to be thought of as Gandalf.’