‘Imagination,’ said Napoleon, ‘rules the world.’ The Lord of the Rings was ruled by a man whose exuberant imagination had such breadth. The impact of the trilogy in turn came to rule for some years the entertainment and media industry, spreading its influence far and wide through frequent repeats and its haunting musical score. And, importantly, it was not the creation of a committee, a consensus group, a caucus or splinter mob, or that of a petition or mass demonstration, but of one man and his wife.
To record the technical adjustments to the make-believe launches anyone trying to write an account into realms and reams of the improbable. McKellen recalled the extraordinary facts, such as the Three Point Six studios in an old paint factory with no heating, no air-conditioning, no sound-proofing, right next to Wellington airport. ‘Every take was preceded by a conversation between the assistant director and air traffic control, letting us know we had three minutes to get the shot. Every word of the film has been dubbed, though you’d never know.’ He kept asking, ‘Do these Kiwis really know what they’re doing?’ How easy it was to ‘underestimate someone who doesn’t wear shoes and who’s only got two shirts and they’re both the same colour, and never cuts his hair. Peter Jackson doesn’t look like a major director who can organise vast troops. He looks like a … hobbit…’ Ian’s brief and terse comment was, ‘I never once saw Peter tired.’
The pace was relentless, but the equanimity and control never flagged, although one day, on the Rivendell set, waiting for the lights to be set up, Jackson lay down on Frodo’s bed, and fell for a couple of hours into a deep sleep. Here was a different kind of heroic saga: the film-maker’s. Each night he was supposed to be watching the dailies, but with three units shooting it was not an easy task. They would finish at 6.30 and, an hour later, he’d be in the cinema at Weta Workshop, running up to three hours of footage. So every night, before he could go home to bed, he would be watching something that ‘ran for the equivalent length of Ben-Hur or Gone With the Wind – or one of The Lord of the Rings films!’ After the day’s stress on set the nights were also full of stress. He had a recurring dream. ‘I’m lying there, incredibly tired and sleepy, and I drowsily wake up – in my dream – and find that the film crew have come in to my bedroom and are standing around the bed, demanding instructions about what to shoot and how to shoot it. That’s when I always realise with horror that I don’t know what to say to them – that I don’t actually know what scene we are filming!’
In the final month of 2000, Ian was so drained he fell into depression because he felt he had to fall back on conventional shooting. A colleague, Philippa Boyens, observes he could ‘get quite dark’, complaining how tiredness was making his imagination literally seize up. He kept his problems to himself, and always had Fran by his side: ‘If I had a partner who wasn’t involved or didn’t understand then I really would derail and very quickly … It’s only because Fran and I know the pressures we’re both under that we’re able to keep on top of them.’
Fran, for her part, says, ‘It’s about understanding and about problem solving.’ A colleague of hers says, ‘Fran lobbied to bring in extra help as the sheer volume kept mounting up.’ Key workers on the film attested to ‘the seamless line between the two, and their single commingled unified vision’.
It grew horribly frantic as Christmas 2000 loomed. They had made it to the final day of principal photography. On the morning of the last day Jackson shot the Council of War scene. They staged in the hall at Minas Tirith the debate between Gandalf and Aragorn (in the book it takes place in a tent). In the afternoon Jackson shot Aragorn in the hall putting on his armour and strapping on his sword before going out to confront Sauron. (In the end the scene was never used. They could all have gone home a bit earlier.) They ‘were shooting some really serious dramatic scenes, but it was a fun day,’ said Jackson. ‘Everybody was in a good mood. Someone had brought in a feather boa and, all day long, we had guest clapper-boarder operators – the only proviso being that they had to wear the feather boa while doing it … We wrapped up about five o’clock, but word came through that Fran was still shooting (with the unit two) so we drove across to her, snuck onto the set and the champagne finally came out about six o’clock!’
There was a big party in Shed 21, one of the original wharf buildings on Wellington harbour, with limousines, two thousand invited guests, the mayor and other illuminati. To the by now exhausted, Jackson, this was just a symbolic event. More years were yet to come, editing additional footage, and reshooting scenes, with the whole unending razzmatazz of promotion. The 274 days had come to an end. Ian described the film as being shot just like a home movie but even so, the statistics were staggering. As Mark Barratt reports, two thousand film crew, in five studios with twenty-one cameras, shot 4.5 million feet of film and ran three hundred and thirty vehicles on thirty kilometres of newly made roads. The props numbered forty-eight thousand. Helm’s Deep, ‘scene of one of the climactic battles, just one of three hundred and fifty sets, ‘was as large as a city block’. Many sets, such as the ancient wood and stone Prancing Pony Inn and the gates of Minas Tirith with its sculptures, were fashioned from polystyrene and sprayed. They planted Hobbiton with flowers and crops a year ahead to establish themselves. But the oak tree under which Bilbo Baggins has his birthday party was ‘artificial. Standing in concrete and supported with wire guy ropes, the enormous structure was covered with a quarter of a million hand-painted leaves and acorns.’
The film production had become one of New Zealand’s major employers, but McKellen was right, the whole enterprise still had the air of a cottage industry. Members, mostly ladies of a certain age, of the Wellington Knitting Club knitted armour for fifteen thousand extras out of string. In contrast to this they logged every single frame they had shot ‘into a computer for digital manipulation in post-production … [so] the green grass of the Shire could be made just a little greener and all the colour could be drained from the landscape of Mordor.’
‘I think now that the camera is a very small theatre, with the audience very, very close – and very friendly, too,’ Ian confessed about his experience shooting the three parts of The Lord of the Rings. But this was only half the battle. They had to let slip the dogs of Promotion.
On 13 January 2001, the day before the launch, prior to the fifty-fourth Cannes Film Festival in June, New Line Cinema screened a special trailer from all three films to excite fans with a first glimpse of the highlights at Château Castellaras in Provence. There were dumbstruck but somewhat basic reactions from the fans amid the euphoria: ‘Then I saw Balrog … I’ve seen the Thing of Shadow and Fire as it breaks through a wall. My God.’
Dating back to Roman times, Château Castellaras had a chequered history, and was mostly in ruins until imaginatively restored by Jacques Couëlle, a twenty-six-year-old architect tycoon who made a worldwide fortune by inventing an earring clip and taking out a patent. It had been the setting for Gérard Philipe’s Fanfan la Tulipe – who could ever forget Fanfan’s dream of a disrobed Gina Lollobrigida bathing in its fountain? One of its owners was Duško Popov, claimed by some as the original for 007. Now it became a roaming ground for Tolkien’s world – and with easy access from Nice airport.
The cast turned out in force. The château. decorated to create the spirit and essence of Middle-earth, had Gondorian banners and pennants fluttering overhead at the entrance to the hall, where horse-head beam-ends, tapestries, braziers and Théoden’s throne replicated the Golden Hall at Edoras. Gandalf’s staff, Galadriel’s vial, elves’ swords and dwarves’ axes were laid out on display. Bilbo’s Bag End had been built for guests to crouch in, while seven-foot barmen made them reach up like hobbits for tankards of ale. A giant polystyrene cave troll stood in the grounds. All members of the Fellowship of the Ring had been tattooed with matching souvenir symbols on the arm, and when asked what this stood for Ian answered cryptically, ‘This means you’re in the Fellowship.’
He and Christopher Lee exchanged wizard-lore as Gandalf and Saruman. The Hobbit actors raced around like children, while John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) told everyone it would be bigger than Star Wars. What a great reunion for everyone after shooting, and for Elijah Wood a ‘bizarre’ invasion of France for a Rings vacation!
Once ignited, the anticipation spread over the following months with the two legends coming to life, the actual history of the shooting, and the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring. New Zealand’s newspapers had a story every day; the wider press sheepishly followed, while film and entertainment magazines ran special supplements. Tolkien’s publishers campaigned to sell copies of the book with the publicity pitch ‘Read it before you see it.’ The BBC transmitted the original radio dramatisation with Ian Holm. Ralph Bakshi’s earlier animated version came out on DVD with an account of how it was made. And then there were New Line’s official tie-in books.
Towards the end of 2001 the film was ‘locked down’. For Jackson, that instinct that says, ‘You know what? The film’s done!’ had arrived. ‘You keep on going until that moment when you get that gut feeling … the movie has found its shape and it’s time to leave it alone’. Jackson and Fran could breathe with relief.
Remorseless Ian was straight away back on the Olivier emulation track in September 2000, rehearsing with Helen Mirren the two-handed marital bloodbath of Strindberg’s Dance of Death, directed by Sean Mathias. Apparently, he told Mathias, he had seen Olivier, when performing this, throw a cat out of the window, though Mathias said it never happened. He rather relished the timing of this Broadway offer, saying with tongue in cheek, ‘I’ve always thought that was the most glamorous thing an actor could do, starring in a play when his new film is coming out. What more could an actor want?’
He had a mind here to improvise and move about, feeling his way on stage as he had in the National Theatre Cherry Orchard, directed by Mike Alfreds, but with Mirren this had not washed. She did not respond to this approach. ‘Tricky,’ Sean Mathias had called it. ‘Mirren doesn’t like to do too much working out; it sort of kills it for her. She didn’t enjoy the method. I think she found him self-serving.’
To which Richard Eyre’s perception adds weight: ‘Meaning is everything to Ian … He’s fantastically intolerant of other actors if they just come on and generalise. I’ve seen him actually shake an actor to try and get the actor to be specific. He’s intensely demanding. I can think of one production in which he was so irritated by the inadequacies of an actor that he would physically move him across the stage.’ It was good he did not try to shake Helen Mirren. Well, here was the rub, ably expressed by Eyre: ‘The difficulty for a director is squaring the circle between Ian’s all-consuming working method, and other actors, some of whom prefer to approach through instinct. The hardest thing for him to curb is his instinct to draw all the energy of the event to himself.’
A week after the 9/11 Twin Towers devastation, they opened Dance of Death to a mixed critical reception. Soon he didn’t feel that he had done the play justice, and was rather ashamed of his performance, he told Benedict Nightingale, because it was far too big. Later, stickler that he was for self-improvement, he did not want to let it stop there, and brought Dance of Death to London to the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, with Frances de la Tour replacing Helen Mirren.
Back on home soil with a new Alice to lacerate, more comic and malleable than Mirren, he could have things more his way and he toned down. He felt more relaxed with de la Tour and with the role in New York under his belt. Both performance and production turned into more of an intimate conversation piece than tooth-and-claw conflict. As someone becomes unsure, his or her own performance comes more to the fore than his relationship with the other characters. With a sense of security he can relate and connect. In one mea culpa confession, discussing earlier roles and bad habits, he explained that he had grown out of that insecurity: ‘It’s Ian McKellen running alongside the character, commenting as they go arm in arm, “Get this! Got it?” Being the messenger. Now I’m the message. The character I now start with is me. The one quality I’ve got now – I suppose I’ve been working towards it all my life – is confidence. No greater gift to be given to an actor.’
On 10 December 2001 he boarded a Concorde to be at the Odeon, Leicester Square, for the appropriately English world premiere of The Fellowship of the Ring. True to form, cutting through all the hype and extravagance of this memorable occasion, Peter Jackson arrived under-dressed in shirt-sleeves muttering to a reporter how all-consuming and exhausting a passage it had been and almost driven him insane. Ian sat in the circle with his cousin’s children, whom he had brought to the premiere, confessing slight shock at his screen image as he had no desire to think it was him. He suddenly forgot it was and found it all moving, which was ‘highly unusual’. He forgot insecurity for a moment and ruminated, with his undercutting and endearing Lancashire wit and self-deprecatory shrugs of the shoulders in between sentences: ‘I was aware it might make a big impact.’
Sadly for Ian the Oscar never came that year, or the next; or the one after for The Return of the King, the final film and considered, at least from the box-office view, the biggest and best. Hollywood visits came and went, but the ultimate laurel evaded him. Oscar-nominated for supporting actor – as he was for The Fellowship of the Ring – would he have to settle for that? The media quotes this supporting-role accolade every time, but it was not enough, it did not quite fit the McKellen profile. Harvey Weinstein’s companies had five hundred Oscar nominations. Ian grumbles on forever about it, ten years, fifteen years later. The theme keeps coming: ‘There’s never been an openly gay actor who won an Oscar.’ When it is pointed out 82 per cent of Oscars go to ‘straight’ actors – this is Ian’s statistic – ‘You shouldn’t look to Hollywood for social advancement.’
Success, yes, with the enormous financial rewards, and the occasional brush with royalty. He found a slight but strange affinity with a fellow cigarette smoker, Princess Margaret, when he met her. He felt ‘sorry for her, even though [she is] a hopeless bigot, anti-Semite and the rest – quite a homophobe. But still … she was rather pleasant.’
According to Euan Ferguson of the Observer, to whom Ian recounted this episode, she took Ian into the garden at Kensington Palace. She pointed ahead to an archway, and whispered to him, ‘That’s my escape.’ Between the trees, a little archway, grass beyond, and it was a secret door where she could nip out to be alone in the park. Nice.
‘And then, you know, I looked again. And it was a mirror. No escape. And she knew it. Says it all, really.’
The embrace of merchandising, this did not quite fit either. Challenged by the Sunday Times over the selling from his website T-shirts decorated with his drawings of himself as Gandalf and Magneto, this was said to be all very ‘schlocky’. ‘I think my schlock is rather superior,’ he parried with a camp flare of the nostrils.
Magneto and Gandalf are two of the seminal icons of the twenty-first century for anybody into comic strips or fantasy literature. With Gandalf dolls sold in the supermarket in his image, his face on New Zealand postage stamps (he asked specially that it be used for international postage: ‘It’s not the stamp that’s used the most,’ he said, ‘it’s the stamp that travels the most’), his image painted on the fuselages of Air New Zealand airliners, or with slogans: ‘Gandalf for President’ – McKellen feels quite happy with all that. When asked, ‘What would the wizard have been like if played by Mr Connery?’ – as if the question was not already self-answered, Ian defined the role so much – Jackson answered that he couldn’t imagine anyone else.
Undoubtedly too there is a mystical side to McKellen’s self-enhancement with Gandalf. The character refuelled in an extraordinary way the inner sense of his own being, so that he would never run out of energy. Interacting continually with others as the embodiment of Tolkien’s character was a transfiguration that would never wear off. In the highly unusual way his life and role-playing had evolved, it would seem, in those first years of the new century, this self-enhancing adventure reached its peak. He was as near as he would ever be to becoming ‘an immortal’, a cinema god as well as a wizard. Long ago, in his performance as Richard II, Harold Hobson had pointed to ‘the ineffable presence of God himself’, and here he was almost set in stone as the ineffable personification of good advice, telling you on BA flights to fasten your seat belts, or appealing everywhere for charitable causes. The one-time Burnley boy sat next to Meryl Streep at the Oscars. Colin Powell called himself ‘Your mailman’ as he dropped a fan letter from his niece into Ian’s lap. Children stopped in the street to stare at him, he had a passport to chat to all ages at schools the world over. At a midnight showing of The Two Towers in Vancouver with a packed-out audience, when the loudest, deepest voice he had ever heard boomed out ‘Gandalf!’ he scampered to the front and eleven hundred people leapt out of their seats and cheered and waved and shrieked.
‘It didn’t prove anything except that they love Gandalf and The Lord of the Rings, but to be at the receiving end. The affection!’
The partying went on and on over the next two years or more as the sequels had their previews, with ultimately the three parts winning the 161 award nominations, which included eleven Oscars among them – on Sunday 29 February 2004 those for Best Film and Best Director. Ian had, in the words of the headline press, ‘made it big as the aged Gandalf’, but still went on stating his belief till the end that the reason he did not win an Oscar was that at the ceremony he had a speech in his pocket denouncing Hollywood homophobia – and that the reason was political. When The Return of the King won its eleven Oscars (only two less than Titanic and Ben Hur), it was no longer his New Zealand boyfriend who accompanied him but Sean Mathias.
By the end of 2003 the Lord of the Rings franchise was on the way to its multi-billion-dollar gross earnings and The Fellowship of the Ring was high in the rankings of the best films ever made and was to remain so. The completion of The Return of the King was celebrated in Wellington with a city-wide street party and a parade from a parliamentary reception hosted by Prime Minister John Key to the cinema for the first screening. A hundred thousand fans were out on the streets. Outriders of Gondorians and Ringwraiths followed by gangs of orcs and troops of hobbit folk preceded an open-top motorcade carrying the stars and the film-makers, past cheering throngs and through a tickertape blizzard. Jackson described the experience as feeling they were ‘the first people to land on the moon or something’, and he looked, as Reuters told the world, ‘like a victorious general at the front of his army’.
What the reporter overlooked was that, with video camera in hand, Jackson – ever the film-maker – had his own director’s-eye record. Later the following year, in Hollywood when Jackson won the Oscar for Best Director, he expressed how this had taken the pressure off him, paying tribute to film-makers who never ever won an Academy Award – ‘incredible directors like Hitchcock and Kubrick … what it must be like to have had their careers and to have had that body of work behind you and not to have won an Oscar. So, having now won means I never have to do it again!’
That pressure was there, and still would remain, on McKellen.
What of the two families behind the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy which by 2018 was reckoned to have made well in excess of $3 billion? The Tolkien family began suing New Line Cinema for $150 million, claiming they had not received ‘even one penny’ from the films. Christopher Tolkien, the author’s eldest son, with Priscilla his sister, accused in their Los Angeles lawsuit the film-makers of ‘insatiable greed’, engaging and ‘engorging’ themselves in the ‘infamous practice of creative Hollywood accounting’.
The Tolkien estate, even so, had received royalties, for according to the Daily Telegraph Tolkien had sold the film rights in 1969, receiving £10,000 and a percentage, while in 2007 it had distributed £1 million to charity and to furthering the works of Tolkien, including a donation of £450,000 to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for an archive. With plans afoot for the three-part prequel of The Hobbit, also to be filmed in New Zealand, lawyers for the estate were now claiming 7.5 per cent of gross revenues after deduction of certain costs. Fearing loss of rights to make The Hobbit, New Line finally paid up $133 million.
As the success of The Lord of the Rings took off for Ian, the older members of his blood family gradually left him. Just prior to the release of The Return of the King, his sister Jean, who had been fighting cancer of the eyes for eighteen months, suffered a stroke and died. She had been a schoolteacher all her adulthood, and had four grandchildren from her two children. Unhappily for Ian he was in New Zealand and unable to return for the funeral. When he was back he organised a private show in her memory in the village of Nayland on the Essex–Suffolk border where she had been one of the Nayland village players.
Ian had never talked much about her, and it would seem the McKellen family reticence and observing of privacy ruled here. After his coming out in 1988 he had told Jean he was gay. She answered, according to the Evening Standard, ‘I wish you had told me earlier because I have a gay friend who is going through a lot of problems. I would have loved to talk to you about it and I couldn’t. I didn’t feel you wanted to.’ She had been a devoted sister and a keen amateur actress to the very end.
Her death was followed a year later when Gladys, his stepmother with whom, he revealed somewhat unexpectedly, he had endured a strained relationship in earlier days before he came out, when she had clearly known he was gay, but not told his father – passed away at the age of one hundred.
They had grown closer with her increasing age, and he had visited frequently, but when dementia set in, less so. He was just about to play King Lear: he had seen her decline and applauded her spirit: ‘– my God! – and her raging against a life she didn’t enjoy … That’s quite useful if you’re playing Lear because he makes so many mistakes, behaves so badly, he upsets so many.’ His stepmother behaved badly, but ‘only because she was old and didn’t understand what was going on always … She had an absolute unshakeable belief over the last 10 years of her life that I was only going to visit her because I was having an affair with her cleaner, who’s a woman. She had confused her resentment about being dependent on the cleaner and on me and saw us as the same person. Right up to very close to her death she still had this belief and she was absolutely horrible to me. She wasn’t mad. So when people write about King Lear and Lear’s madness, I’m just aware that he’s all too human.’ McKellen also spun this story for John Lahr in the New Yorker. But, Ian told Lahr, the cleaner wasn’t even attractive. ‘She had an ass like the back-end of two lorries.’ His stepmother persisted, until he burst out, ‘Gladys, for heaven’s sake, I’m gay!’
As close as a family loss, if not more so, was the death some years later of an old and dear friend, Roger Hammond, to whom he spoke almost every day. Hammond was famously rotund, and had become ever more so since being a bit ahead of Ian at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. As well as satire and review artiste of the Cambridge undergraduate rep, he had later become the resident TV series cleric in numerous sitcoms, and the avuncular noble or tragi-comic butt. Unusually for that generation, when he left Cambridge he went to RADA, from the basis of which he was for most of his life never out of work, gaining a considerable following for his qualities both in roles and his real life, of kindness, and in a phrase especially true of him, his malleable benevolence. A mine of gossip, good humour and caring concern in friendship when, ever more in his Chestertonian girth, he increasingly found it difficult to mount the long stairs to his flat. On his seventieth birthday, at a party at which Ian says he got drunk, Ian bought Roger a year’s subscription to a health and fitness regime. When he, too, went under the dark shadow of cancer, Ian took a hand in generously supporting his old friend, sending him on an extended trip to New Zealand. He was always optimistic and fun. Michael Coveney, among other long-lasting friends, attested to how he contributed rotundity to figures of authority and ‘a wry gravitas’. Friends were and would always be an integral part of McKellen’s history. He never forgot them, even though Gandalf had now conferred on him a globally recognised image of godlike wisdom and power.