Reticence and tight lips still ruled the household in their next home. As a better-off, middle-class family they had a television. In the limited prosperity of immediate post-war years, material circumstances had improved. Denis was now appointed borough engineer and town surveyor in Bolton, ten miles east of Wigan, an increase in responsibilities that showed his reliability and broad practical grasp.
Margery, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which Denis knew but kept to himself, was no longer the brave and feisty woman she had been in Ian’s earlier years. She tired very easily and, barely remarked upon by Ian at the time, her condition worsened.
Denis clearly loved parks and open space, for 34 Barrow Bridge Road in Bolton, their new home, in much more propitious wooded surroundings, is on high ground well away from the dark Satanic mills and foul colliery air. A detached white pebble-dash mansion lies in extensive grounds that descend to a private estate. Over on the other side of Barrow Bridge Road, along which trotted equestrians from a local riding school when I visited in 2018, is open country. A monumental bleach works chimney stands sentinel at the end of Barrow Bridge Road, in homage to the past industrial era.
The family by now had enviable status, though people never used to talk about how much they earned for fear of envy. Denis’s salary had risen to between one and two thousand a year, when the average working wage was £300; next door lived the director of Ebro Engineering works and his family.
Ian swapped the place won with ease at Wigan Grammar for the more elitist Bolton School, a direct-grant grammar school. Among its alumni was Irving Wardle, later the influential drama critic of The Times, who had played Hamlet at Bolton. Yet still Margery weakened as her cancer spread and she was more confined to bed. As she grew fatigued so easily she then moved downstairs into a living room and then was taken into the Royal Bolton Hospital.
Much that was going on engaged Ian and distracted his mind from this profoundly disturbing development. No school could have suited Ian more than Bolton. Everyone liked him here, and extra-curricular pursuits such as acting and debating were pushed as vigorously as academic achievement. Ian excelled at everything and looked forward to the Sixth Form Camp each year at Stratford-upon-Avon. Out of school we see his more reckless side. On days off or during holidays, lazily stretched out in Bolton’s Central Park, he had a much stronger, wild and overwhelming urge to run off with the dark-eyed, greasy, long-haired, fair-hands from the Silcocks Brothers fairground campsite.
Like Denis’s unacknowledged pacifism, Margery’s illness was barely if ever discussed, only mentioned at the time of prayers in chapel or at bedtime. In August 1951, prior to his second year at Bolton School, Ian went with his form master to summer camp in Saundersfoot, West Wales. He had no prior warning of his mother’s deterioration until other friends arrived to tell him gently that Margery had died – without him having had any further contact with her. She was forty-five and Ian was twelve. He must have been distraught, inwardly inconsolable. But he showed nothing.
Margery, he had hoped during the time she was in the bed downstairs, was getting better. How could God have let his mother die like this? It was little wonder that he turned almost at once, even if again he showed no sign of this, against the deeply practised religious ethos of his family. He was not by his father’s and sister’s and grandparents’ side at the funeral in Bolton’s Congregationalist Church. In spite of their pleading with him, he refused to attend. Ian had been close to Margery, but Denis had little rapport with his son and remained remote and unapproachable to him. The fault must be laid at Denis’s door, for it should have been from the father that affection was forthcoming. Correspondingly, Ian may have felt some unconscious anger towards Denis over Margery’s death: if God the Father had let Margery die, so could his own father have done the same. Ian had no place to channel his grief or anyone to share it with; mourning by himself in an unexpressed and even secret way, he became somewhat lonely, shy and introverted. The little orphan boy persona perhaps began here and stayed part of him.
Many years later he was to tell Lynda Lee-Potter of the Daily Mail, ‘I thought she was recuperating.’ He would confess that the only fortunate thing about her dying young ‘is that I can remember that love. There was never any bad feeling, nothing to disrupt our relationship. The memory I have is of a person who felt fulfilled by her life, by looking after me and my sister, and running the home.’ One feels, from the way he describes her now, that had she lived, she would have understood him in later life.
One day in the late 1990s, he returned to his first house in Barrow Bridge Road. He knocked on the front door. The current dwellers had bought the house from Denis after Margery died, and the lady, who had done all the dealings with Margery, told Ian that when she went to bed one night with her husband, she had seen the landing light on when she believed it had been put out. She went to turn it off. ‘As I did that,’ she said, ‘I saw your mother standing on the landing.’ Half-asleep the following morning, still in that same state, she heard the phone ring. The caller said that Ian’s mother had died the night before.
She believed in this return of Margery’s ghost to the house, adding that she always thought that his mother came back to the place where she’d been happy, just to say goodbye. ‘She’d never told anyone, but she wanted me to know.’ For Ian, learning this – and he clearly believed it was true – helped to lay his mother to rest.
But at the time of her death Ian repressed his love and grief. The bid for needed love, squashed and unfinished towards Margery, and denied expression, became a driver towards endless achievement and ambition.
With everything firmly if sometimes uncomfortably hidden, Ian, popular with classmates and teachers alike, progressed to the highest reaches of Bolton School. Mrs Parkinson, waitress in the school dining room, served him his dinner many times when he was on one of her tables. On one occasion he showed her a photo of a girl he was friendly with and she summed up, ‘He was always a likeable lad.’ Mr Poskitt, the headmaster, much admired as a Jehovah-like figure and a force for good, made McKellen head boy.
Like recognises like, and McKellen was to encounter many head boys in his future profession. They tended to retain the sense of entitlement that such a school position entails, relaxed and assured in the way they straddled the worlds of art and management.
I was at a similar kind of school as Bolton, then called a direct-grant public school. I cannot recall girls being talked of much – it was an age when private emotions and desires, of whatever complexion or tendency, were not discussed or shared. Those boys with the position Ian won for himself, who had rather grand roles at school to uphold, such as head boy, secretary or chairman of this or that school institution or society, were treated generally with awe and admiration. The leaders who emerged from those schools had impeccable records and standards to maintain, and as so many boys were late in sexual development, dating, courting and scoring was simply not an issue as it is today.
Excitement was confused with the terror of expressing what McKellen always knew from the start, that he was gay. In contrast to Stephen Fry, Ian experienced no sexual awakening which brought love, despair, pain and disgrace. Nor was there a simple, buoyant optimism and respectful disregard of women, without specific gay attachments but with silent acceptance of his orientation, such as Derek Jacobi experienced all through his growing-up. Ian’s own awareness of good and evil, and his puritan Nonconformist roots that were steeped in John Milton and John Bunyan, probably stemmed from the time before he was able to understand them.
It was in Ian’s ambition early on as a child to become an actor that his true soul was formed.
Grown-ups had laughed when they had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he answered, ‘an actor’. Aged three, he was in the audience at the Manchester Opera House Peter Pan, where he pointed out you could see the crocodile wires. This was the start, and from then on, he saw a whole range of vivid performances at weekly repertory companies in Wigan and Bolton. His sister Jean appeared as Bottom in her all-girl cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; John Gielgud’s Japanese-style Lear entranced him in Manchester, too, just as Ivor Novello had.
His first experience of Macbeth was seeing Doris Speed (later Annie Walker in Coronation Street) as an amateur, murder-fuelled alpha female. Aged eight, beneficiary of a Father Christmas visit, back at home he mounted on his Pollock’s toy stage a Laurence Olivier cut-out from the film of Hamlet, waggling and jiggling him at Jean Simmons’ Ophelia. The figure of Olivier became a prime object of early hero worship.
He graduated to play numerous roles, both male and female, in the Bolton School plays, in the converted mansion playhouse known as Hopefield Miniature Theatre, as well as in the school’s Great Hall. Among these in successive years were Prince Hal and Henry V. The Boltonian, the school magazine, found his ‘originality in youthful majesty a breath of fresh air’. It was noted, presaging a concern of future critics, that the way he modulated some lines ‘appeared rather odd’. He appeared in these plays in the sixth form, but earlier he had cross-dressed as one Rosie Meadows, and Margaret, the Fair Maid of Fressing-field, in the Elizabethan comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. He suffered, playing Malvolio, from being upstaged by Toby Belch, and had firmly instilled in him the principle that ‘the actor furthest from the audience is the most dominant,’ as he read in a stage manual. He was ticked off by his classics teacher for trying to get his own back on Belch by craning his neck, with the prophetic ‘Of course McKellen has greasepaint flowing in his veins.’ He was present on stage the whole of Fritz Hochwälder’s The Strong Are Lonely as the Father Provincial of the Jesuits. This difficult assignment was applauded as demonstrating ‘an astonishing degree of maturity’. Just as important, it was the very first of his old men: a study in failure and eventual despair.
With yearly visits to Stratford-upon-Avon to camp near the Memorial Theatre, queuing for a half-crown standing, he was overpowered by Peggy Ashcroft as Imogen in Cymbeline. He was sure her grace and beauty was targeting him alone. When he went round for her autograph, up close he could see she was old enough to be Imogen’s mother. Yet on stage she was essential youth in voice and gesture, and this feeling of her divinity stayed with him. In Susan Hill’s People, he was quoted as saying his emotion at this was akin to falling in love.
So there was plenty to exercise mind, body, voice (learning how to drop the Lancastrian accent when necessary, how to project his voice in the appalling acoustics of the Great Hall), and his emotions in public. It amused him to think how his parents once boasted to a friend that he had two accents, the one that he used at school and the one that he used at home.
Debating, too, was his forte, on one occasion on the controversial Shavian subject, ‘This House considers that the emancipation of women has led to the enslavement of men.’ He opposed this vehemently, so with Susan Parry his co-opposer it was overwhelmingly defeated, 129 to 7, with no abstainers. He delivered a paper on Samuel Beckett with a compelling selection of quotations from Beckett’s Endgame, showing early on his confidence in public speaking and expressing his ideas. He criticised Beckett for pessimism and a negative reflection of life, which he showed to be facile and cynical, but praised him for his accurate observation. Perhaps, deep down, the despond struck a chord.
From 1957 onwards he drank deep of Peter Brook’s production of The Tempest with Alec Clunes’ Caliban, John Gielgud’s Prospero and his Lear (knocking the hat off a woman in front when she giggled in the mad scene at the St James Theatre). Olivier and Vivien Leigh performing Twelfth Night and Macbeth, and Peggy Ashcroft as Rosalind. He saw Judi Dench as Juliet with John Stride as Romeo at the Old Vic. Observing performances of the great actors of his teens was a pointer to the future. Sometimes he went with friends, sometimes on school visits, and further afield with Denis.
By contrast, he warmed instinctively to the rich music-hall and variety stage, then at its height. He first saw Joseph Locke, the tenor, famous for his signature tune ‘Hear My Song, Violetta’, at a Thursday afternoon matinée in early 1953 at the Bolton Grand Theatre. He obtained permission through his father’s contact with the manager to stand in the wings backstage. He said he could see the ‘theatricals’ coming through the stage door ‘reeking of Guinness and fairly drably dressed … then putting on their shining suits, going out and doing something rather smashing.’ This was when he became irresistibly fascinated by the lure of the theatre. The singer, having done his ‘act’ of Irish songs and in between chatting to the audience, left the stage to Sigmund Romberg’s ‘Goodbye’ from The Student Prince. His rapt audience would not let him go, and kept demanding an encore until the stage manager, in white tie and tails, came on and ushered a reluctant Locke into the wings. The contrast between the glamour portrayed on stage and the dressing-room seediness of old troupers, a kind of nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia for the seamy side) became a lasting thread in Ian’s theatrical soul. But from those early years, too, came the dark shadow that the unfinished business with Margery cast over him, which remains part of him to this day.
Visits to the cinemas were disenchanting. The half-dozen cinemas in Wigan were grubby, with threadbare carpets, smelly toilets and rickety seats. Cigarette smoke floated up and along the beam from the projectionist’s lantern, and in the smoky haze, courting couples necked in back-row double seats in the dark, which faintly disgusted him. With the Big Feature, watery ice-creams were on sale from the pinafored sales-girls sauntering up and down the aisles, waving their flashlights. The fleapits with dreams and fantasies bred among germs inspired Ian so little it is hardly surprising he didn’t get around, for a long time, to making films. On leaving Bolton School in September 1958, the young idealist McKellen wrote in the Bolton Evening News that he longed for a community ‘where a faultlessly complete library is at hand, where a cinema declines to show bad films and a theatre presents new, good plays before they are old or have gone bad. Utopias must be dull places, full of satisfied people … perfection, like complete virtue, is fortunately inhuman. But when will a local cinema and a professional theatre give what I also may want?’
One day, out of the blue Denis asked Ian how he would feel about him marrying a new girlfriend called Gladys. Margery had been dead for two years and Ian was fourteen. Ian concurred, on the condition that he had a dog, which became part of the marriage settlement – a corgi called Glyn. Gladys was a devout Quaker, a religion closely allied to the Baptist and Congregationalist Churches. As we see her in photographs, she was tiny compared to the much taller Denis and unusually for that era, wears slacks. She and Denis took their vows informally at the Friends Meeting House in Liverpool. Over the following years, she and Ian were to grow close.
For a while his ambition on leaving school had been to become a journalist. He applied to the editor of his local newspaper who turned the sixteen-year-old McKellen down, and he says (again perhaps slightly underplaying himself in an offhand way) he ‘drifted to university’, and then to acting.
Gemini, the zodiac sign under which McKellen was born, is said to be a cold-blooded sign, and for those who are great believers in astrology it points to a calculated love and dedication that might be called ‘driven’ ambition. This now took over. Not only McKellen, but many of the post-war generation of grammar and direct-grant public school alumni who sat examinations or were interviewed for places and scholarships at Cambridge and Oxford showed an astonishing ambition. In the words of Henry V‘s Chorus, after long years of war and toil:
Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies –
Yet it was specifically the intelligent, well-educated children of upwardly mobile parents who never before had dreamed of their offspring entering those bastions of privilege and class, who now took on their more blasé and condescending rivals to show their mettle in every aspect of university life. This was especially true in the burgeoning media and performance arts.
Apart from the beauty and romance of Cambridge’s architectural glories and, unlike Oxford, its idyllic atmosphere of academic seclusion, a new emancipation was unlacing and exposing itself everywhere in a generation of outsiders who wanted to claim the inside for themselves without the dead hand of the past upon them. As Glenys Roberts, a Girton girl undergraduate and friend of Ian who had escaped ‘stifling suburbs’ at the time McKellen applied to St Catharine’s, says,
It was a cusp of time and we were well aware of it … You could feel the combustion in the air. Cambridge was the place to be. The philosopher Wittgenstein was a recent memory. E. M. Forster could still be glimpsed returning to his rooms by the Cam in King’s College. F. R. Leavis was teaching in the English faculty and scientist Francis Crick, about to win the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA, was researching in the science labs and giving bohemian parties on the outskirts of town.
It was in the theatre that the most extraordinary explosion of talent happened.
McKellen, as full of restless energy as anyone of his age, but able to focus and single-mindedly direct his ambition better than most, soon found it would be an unlooked-for plus to read English at St Catharine’s. He was head boy of Bolton School, brimming with confidence, well versed in public debate, the beneficiary of his headmaster’s ambition to increase the number of places won from his school to Cambridge. To crown everything, he had not only played all those leads in school plays but also significantly (and even perhaps ironically, given Denis’s pacifism), he knew the role of Shakespeare’s Harry V by heart. It was part of him even when aged eighteen on his first visit to Cambridge and would forever be: king and commanding officer.