‘I love anecdotes. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into systems, he may be long in getting them and get but few.’
Dr Johnson to Boswell
McKellen’s workaholic years from The Lord of the Rings on didn’t stop being feverishly filled with roles. He said ruefully in 2007 that he had turned down highly paid small parts and that he’ll do them when he’s decrepit. But, as we have discovered, McKellen takes on a small part or walk-on role in a play, and it immediately becomes a leading role. Sometimes he confessed to being very tired and exhausted – and even claimed to be fed up with being such a public gay man, and wanting a quiet life. ‘I’m going back into the closet. But I can’t get back into the closet because it is absolutely jam-packed with other actors.’
He played the minor role of Sir Leigh Teabing the historian in the £40 million Da Vinci Code in 2006. Even involved in this he hit the headlines: ‘Money, not Christianity, behind [Westminster] Abbey’s rejection of The Da Vinci Code, says Sir Ian.’ He was ‘happy to believe Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene … I thought that would be absolute proof Jesus was not gay.’ He believed every word while he was reading the book, but when he put it down he thought, ‘What a load of potential codswallop.’ His performance in the film was perfectly all right and passable, if not greatly memorable.
He was never one to turn the other cheek to a slighting reference or some mockery of his position – and yet had this mischievous ability to turn it round to his advantage. Perhaps the first instance of this goes back to his rival Richard Harris who commented, ‘Sir Derek and Sir Ian, let’s get their titles right, are technically brilliant like Omega watches. But underneath they are hollow, because their lives are shallow.’ Ian had responded he was happy to be in Derek’s company, as well as Kenneth Branagh’s, all included as ‘passionless’. Later, in 2000, he accused Harris of having failed an audition for Gandalf. ‘Dumbledore was a poor second to Gandalf,’ said Ian.
One day in 2013 a spat erupted with Damian Lewis. Lewis made a generic comment that he did not want to end up a ‘fruity actor who is known for playing wizards’. While it might be said there were a number of these, Ian took it personally: ‘No one need feel sorry for one,’ and ‘I wouldn’t like to have been one of those actors who hit stardom quite early on and expected it to continue.’ Lewis apologised. Ian seemed to enjoy this Schadenfreude display.
When he was approached by Ricky Gervais to appear in his programme Extras, which irreverently poked fun at fellow luminaries such as Ben Stiller and Kate Winslet by having them send themselves up, Ian came in for burlesque in the script Gervais sent him as the vain and self-important luvvie. (‘How do I act so well? What I do is pretend to be the person I’m portraying in the film or play.’) At first he objected to Gervais poking fun of him as gay and insufferably pompous, adding darkly this ‘made for tricky territory’, especially by the ‘queenly insistence’ he should be addressed as ‘Sir Ian’. He grumbled on: this was ‘wrong a little, as he was one of those knights who prefers not to use the title professionally’, and Gervais had confused him with another Sir. He instanced another: Ben Kingsley, whose knighthood was displayed on posters of Lucky Number Slevin.
Gervais got back to Ian that he had not got the point of being sent up in the script. ‘That’s it, you see. My job is to make you look crap so I can win the BAFTA.’ McKellen relented, and took it in good part. Finally, his participation was applauded. One journalist commented on the end result: ‘If there is an apogee of acceptable modern celebrity, he reached it in 2006 with his own self-parody, on Ricky Gervais’ Extras.‘
Small parts aplenty lined up to be played by him, which mainly he turned down. Stephen Frears reports that when he offered Ian the role of Sir Joseph Cantley, Jeremy Thorpe’s judge in A Very English Scandal in 2018, he said no. He gave as his reason the fear that his performance might be compared unfavourably with Peter Cook’s 1979 impersonation of Cantley when he addressed the jury: ‘You are now to retire carefully to consider your verdict of not guilty.’ Yet he made a palpable hit in 2019, appearing just in one scene with his aristocratic peacock Earl of Southampton, who visits the ageing Shakespeare played by Kenneth Branagh in All Is True. Extravagantly bewigged, he rebukes the poet of the sonnets dedicated to him for his retirement into Stratford domesticity and anonymity, and becoming just ‘a small man’, when he could enjoy wealth and worship for his success. He reproaches Shakespeare for his early infatuation (clearly not reciprocated) and ruefully admits he is ‘straight’ and married to Elizabeth, although his body language mischievously displays ambivalence over this.
He kept a close eye on his profession, worrying about its future. He complained in 2012 at the death of regional reps. For many actors, he said, ‘There’s a desert.’ He held up his three years’ experience of rep in Coventry and Ipswich as proof of how much better actors had it in the past. The system couldn’t produce another actor like him, nor like Derek Jacobi, Mike Gambon or Judi Dench. Films were no good to give actors a grounding because they had no audience. At awards ceremonies you see recipients who can hardly make it to the centre of the stage, they are so nervous. ‘I’m still getting better,’ he adds. Libby Purves, the Times theatre critic, took exception to the Cassandra utterance. ‘With due respect to grumpy Gandalf, rubbish.’ She made the case for local theatres being now just as vivid and exciting as they were in the past, while opportunities for actors had increased and were more diverse.
He claimed he invented blogging long before it was invented – ‘e-pods’ he called them then. He is far from being a dinosaur harking back to the past. He embraces the future and he is an enthusiast for communicating on the internet. Millions and millions of people, Ian declared to an Observer journalist with self-deprecation – with ‘bafflement’ – visited his website and follow his tweets. ‘There was a time when I was the third most visited website in the world.’ The bafflement was quite genuine, as was the modesty, as he did not want or like to hear friends praise him, and as Judi Dench pointed out, he once left the room when those there started talking about him.
Like most of his generation, McKellen’s admiration for Paul Scofield surpassed that for most other actors, although not without a tinge of rivalry. When a celebration at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, was proposed for Paul in 2009, a year after his death, Simon Callow approached McKellen, saying to him, ‘You’re head of the profession, you have to give the valedictory address.’ But he declined, saying, ‘I can’t. I would look like a hypocrite.’ Why? Why would it compromise him to say how great an actor Scofield was? On the other hand, I can understand why he said this: to allow no leakage from the construct, as Brian Cox believed McKellen had made of himself. Finally he did agree that he would read at the end of the service from St John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ while complaining to Canon Wright, who conducted the ceremony, ‘What does this mean? It’s all nonsense.’ Among the many generous tributes to others on Ian’s website, in his one on Paul and after expressing great admiration, he sums up, ‘His acting intelligence was emotional and physical, not rational.’ Nothing could be further from the truth, because Scofield’s emotional and physical powers were forged and tempered by his supreme acting intelligence.
Gyles Brandreth’s anecdotes about Ian nicely sum up both the mischievous and the generous, open-handed side of his character. Gyles recorded in his diary, he tells me, that when in April 2007 he hosted a Shakespeare quiz with star RSC actors for the end of year-long Shakespeare birthday celebrations in Stratford, he appointed Ian and Juliet Stevenson as ‘captains’.
Ian had ‘come dressed as a mad scientist – beady eyes, lab assistant’s coat and the Macbeth tartan tie.’ He was ‘full of Lear: “Did it last night. It drains you. But then one night we just flew. It simply happened. The question is, once we’re there, will I be able to act what I now feel?” He delivered for us in full measure.’
When Donald Sinden answered correctly that Anne Hathaway was eight years older than Shakespeare, Ian observed with a twinkle, ‘Of course Donald had the advantage of knowing them both personally!’
When Brandreth appeared in ZIPP, a revue attempting to perform one hundred musicals in one hundred minutes as part of the Edinburgh fringe in 2001, Ian, reports Gyles, at the end ‘generously led the standing ovation’. In their skit of The Rocky Horror Show Brandreth wore fishnet stockings and suspender belt. This had an unintended consequence. Next day Brandreth met Ian in the street and they had a coffee in the sunshine. ‘He pushed his head towards mine and whispered. “You’re wearing your suspenders and your stockings under your trousers, aren’t you? I know you are.”
‘“I am”, I said. “How did you guess?”
‘“Because I’m wearing mine!”‘
‘He treated me (an enthusiastic amateur) as though I were Donald Wolfit. When my son wrote to him from Cambridge asking him to talk to him about Cambridge – he had no idea who he was – he said, “Come over” and my son was given a morning and a marvellous interview. Later, partly as a consequence, my son is now an authority on rhetoric and though a QC by day also teaches rhetoric at the RSC.’
At one of the reunions of the former cast of the Love’s Labour‘s musical from Cambridge, at the house of the late Simon Relph in Islington, Simon told me a story of how Ian and Derek were trying out some kind of anti-ageing product or cream in his photographic dark room. I put it to Ian at our meeting in The Grapes. He remembered nothing – then laughed as he did.
‘About twenty years ago I was given some make-up product by a person who worked in films, a sort of cream and you put it under your eyes, and in five minutes all your bags disappear.
‘I don’t remember showing it to Derek, but I showed it to everyone, because it was absolutely magical and I would sometimes wear it if I was giving an interview and the bags would vanish, it made you look like … slightly Asian, and eventually it hurt the skin, so when my bottle ran out that was that – so I may well have shown it to Derek.’
Ian was the subject of two South Bank Show films shot at twenty-year intervals, and after the second a somewhat coy fan contacted his website. ‘Not only was last month’s South Bank Show a tantalising peep into Sir Ian’s busy life but we got a wonderful view of his rather nice bottom.’ Explaining further this comment Ian remarked, ‘In the South Bank Show in 1984 there was a full-frontal shot as I showered during the National’s Coriolanus. I suppose the SBS thought it was time to see things from a different perspective.’
Patrick Stewart has generally been flagged as Ian’s close friend from X-Men onwards, although they had not been close before. The friendship was cemented with the sequel, X-Men 2, again directed by Bryan Singer and filmed in Canada. Stewart celebrated his sixty-second birthday there, with Ian doing George Formby’s ‘I’m leaning on a lamp post’ as a party turn, while Brian Cox, who had joined the cast to play William Stryker, recited Burns’s ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’. X-Men went on, with McKellen and Stewart appearing in the series, but not in all of them, until the seventh in 2014 when in X-Men: Days of Future Past both appeared together again. By this time the franchise had grossed over two billion dollars. With Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News to mark the release of Days of Future Past, the McKellen–Stewart friendship, or ‘bromance’, as it was now dubbed, had become legendary, with even academic articles exploring the authenticity of the union. Both actors couldn’t resist the chance to express views about immigration and have a dig at Nigel Farage and Ukip.
Ian has appeared on the Graham Norton chat show many times, and in one instance in 2013, when he was soon to officiate at Patrick Stewart’s wedding, he made the audience respond with uproar and laughter when he declared bluntly, ‘I’m going to marry Patrick.’ It became a jokey headline talking point as ‘McKellen marries Stewart.’ As if to reinforce the tongue-in-cheek game, both friends mouth-to-mouth kissed on the red carpet at the premier of Mr. Holmes in May 2014.
Gay banter with sexual innuendo on chat shows had become almost obligatory. Presided over by dapple-whiskered Graham Norton, in a further show both knights appeared, with Hugh Jackman (who plays Logan/Wolverine in X-Men). ‘Sir Patrick’ – ‘call me Beef-Stew’ – revealed how moving it was for him that Ian now called him ‘my brother’. McKellen told a tale of the Oscar ceremony when prior to it he was carrying a Pounamu, a New Zealand charm, visibly round his neck, and encountered Maggie Smith, who asked him what it was for. He imitated her cynical accent. He said it would bring him luck when the Oscars are announced. After, and when he hadn’t won it, he met her again as he left: ‘It didn’t do you much good!!’ – sending up Maggie Smith’s voice. Again loud laughter greeted this self-put-down. As ever Ian’s face creased, and he laughed and his body language exuded many-sided roguishness and charm.
His unforced, natural domination of the media or chat shows has continued into his eightieth year, and he is always good value. On a visit to a Russian literary festival he plied his social activism in favour of gay tolerance in defiance of the anti-homosexual laws there, but then was arrested for smoking outside Koltsovo international airport, which was against the law. Fierce public debate followed locally as to whether, as a well-known foreign celebrity on a visit, he should be put on trial and fined.
In January 2018 he provoked a mixed reaction when in Oxford he commented on the sexual misconduct of celebrities and that ‘some people get wrongly accused – there’s that side as well.’ He illustrated this with an example from the 1960s when the director of the theatre he was working in showed him photographs from women who were wanting jobs. Some had written ‘DRR’ at the bottom of their pictures – directors’ rights respected. In other words, ‘If you give me a job you can have sex with me.’ He pointed out that it was madness. Yet the espousal of his cause meant much to many who suffered the long-lasting effect of being a victim: ‘I get letters from preachers, school-teachers and businessmen who feel it is too late to tell the truth,’ he avouched. ‘A seventy-year-old said he was facing death but had told no one he was gay. I wrote back and said: “Well now you have told me, so it is not too late to start!”‘
‘He can wear what he likes,’ wrote the Sunday Telegraph, rainbow-coloured bootlaces or gay ribbons on straw boaters, which can explode suddenly in an utterly unrestrained way and completely captivate in its two extremes – anger and riotous anarchic comedy of mannerism. Unlike Laurence Olivier, who kept to his mission of ‘I want to make everyone in the audiences want to fuck me,’ McKellen wants everyone to laugh with him, cuddle, and revere him. He bounces back, adroit and acute in the self-management of his image. He coasts along easily with persiflage, saying, ‘Don’t take any of this too seriously.’ He shows such a rare status, able to be popular, credible, lauded and loved, yet plays suitor straight-faced, old or young. ‘Rot them for a couple of rogues,’ says Gainsborough on David Garrick and Samuel Foote. He might have been writing of Ian and Patrick. ‘They have everyone’s face but their own.’ Ian would never stop: ‘With the new technology you can look younger! Maybe Patrick and I can play Romeo and Juliet? It could be the end of cosmetic surgery – or the end of the need for it.’
By the time they played in Waiting for Godot in New York the McKellen–Stewart ‘bromance’ had become overplayed. On a fun day off touring the city they posed in Beckett tramp mode wearing shorts and bowler hats, holding hands, munching corn on the cob with Elmo, and on top of the Empire State Building. The photographers had a field day. ‘The world needs more friends like these,’ admirers posted on social media. There was more kissing at the awards ceremony of the British film magazine Empire in May 2017 when Patrick received the Empire Legend Award presented to him by Ian, who said of Patrick, ‘He’s one of my heroes. He’s that actor of my generation people would like to be.’ Ian did mollify the hyperbole somewhat by quoting Nietzsche: ‘Success is an impostor. It conceals the flaw, the wound, the fundamental doubt at the core of the artist’s being,’ but added, ‘I wanted to go down as the only actor in history to quote Nietzsche!’