‘Serendipity is my favourite word, both for the sound it has and its meaning’
Ian McKellen
‘Seventy-five? You don’t look like an old man,’ says Don Antonio in Eduardo de Filippo’s The Syndicate (Minerva Theatre, Chichester, 2011). By 2013 Ian was aware of growing older; among people of his own age they talked of nothing else. How’s your back? And so-and-so’s going blind … In 2006 Ian was diagnosed with prostate cancer. ‘You do gulp when you hear the news. It’s like when you go for an HIV test, you go “arghhh is this the end of the road?” They say you have cancer of the prostate, and then that you can have it zapped. You can have it snipped but you are not a candidate for that. You are waitful watching.’
He grinned broadly at the Daily Mirror man, with a glint in his eye. ‘You’re going to write “Ian McKellen is decrepit. He can’t see, he can’t hear, he can’t pee, he’s having his teeth done.”‘ He also confessed he had hearing aids (on the NHS, which otherwise would have cost five or six thousand pounds) and a cataract. But over the next six or seven years the cancer did not get worse. ‘When you have got it you monitor it and you have to be careful it doesn’t spread. But if it is contained in the prostate it’s no big deal … Many, many men die … but it’s one of the cancers that is totally treatable so I have “waitful watching”. I’ve not had any treatment.’
There was another scare when he discovered he had shadows on his lung that he believed were caused by his heavy smoking, which he gave up (for as long as he felt he did not desperately have to have a fag and then lit up again). He found subsequently the shadows were his nipples.
Doctors had initially prescribed the radiotherapy option for the prostate cancer. He told them, ‘I have to do this pantomime first.’ And so he did. ‘He’s been wanting rehearsal after rehearsal late into the night,’ commented a laconic wardrobe worker on Ian’s engagement as Widow Twankey in the Old Vic pantomime – Aladdin – directed by Sean Mathias, in the winter of 2004 when Kevin Spacey was artistic director. ‘He tries on dress after dress.’
When it opened we had a wonderful display of McKellen ad-libbing and endlessly stopping the show with laughter at topical jokes about David Blunkett, busty model Jordan, Jacobi, Peter Hall and the RSC’s ‘way of spouting Shakespeare’. Twankey became a plumpish, frumpish and of course Lancastrian housewife with a complexion of leather and rouge. He sent Derek up as the marble-mouthed Shakespearean actor, saying at one point, when Aladdin rants with passion, ‘What an honour working with you, Sir Derek!’ According to Frances Barber (Wishy-Washy), Ian ‘becomes Derek without saying a word, and you can easily guess who it is’. He joked the panto was ‘longer than a Trevor Nunn production’ and made a mock-agonised plea for ‘no more Shakespeare directed by Hall’. Character-acting to the death, as if it would never go away, he brought pick-axe demolition to the whole still luminous seam of Cambridge theatre. What a riot of fun! ‘Dame Ian is this show,’ wrote Quentin Letts. ‘He engulfs it in his voluminous skirts … Troublingly good legs he has, too. Widow Twankey, in Sir Ian’s big, butch hands, is a lascivious man-eater and a bow-legged fashion disaster … One moment he is mincing (actually stomping) about in something Yves St Laurent-ish, the next moment it is a Pucci frock that if ever televised would make cathode ray tubes explode.’ Nicholas de Jongh, hardly much of a McKellen aficionado, proclaimed him ‘The mother of all drag queens!’
After all this barnstorming the cancer cells took flight and retreated. On his next examination his doctor confirmed him ‘completely cured!’ As one of Ian’s immortal performances it had to be unifying body and soul work.
Mathias was Ian’s main, if not sole director, and whatever way one may view this (for example, that he was directing himself through Sean), it worked. Here, surely, we were back to the old actor-manager syndrome of leading the company, although there were first-class other performances. He played the sub-Pinter civil servant rogue in an undistinguished play called The Cut by Mark Ravenhill, displaying beautiful subtle gestures, but leaving critics unable to imagine why he was in it.
With a curious twist of logic McKellen seemed to have got it into his head that, ‘If I was a star, it would be difficult to go off and do Coronation Street. So I guess Ian is not a star.’ Now in ten episodes of Coronation Street he impersonated the eccentric novelist Mel Hutchwright whose bodice-ripper Hard Grinding is a favourite of the Weatherfield Book Club. He had a fantastic time in the ten weeks before Hutchwright was exposed as a con-man, and struck up a friendship with Antony Cotton who plays the witty and gay Sean Tully. Cotton in his little Fiat had been running Ian around in Manchester during the filming, and Ian invited Cotton to be his personal guest at Sir Elton John’s lavish annual White Tie and Tiara Ball so the tittle-tattle factory, under the banner headline Lord of the Flings, went into overdrive with a new McKellen ‘affair’.
That was about the sum of it! Cotton brought his mother to meet the star when he gave a final-day party, and in spite of the lurid headlines, it would seem discretion ruled. He just wanted a companion. He continued on uninterruptedly from one diverting role to another, gracing each and every one with complete dedication and unvarying excellence, as well as unbounded pleasure still to be working full-time. ‘I think ten years more is probably all I’ve got as someone who can hop on a plane and remember the lines and not fall over.’
Meantime The Lord of the Rings was earning $3 billion at the box office and boosting tourism to New Zealand by 40 per cent. In 2008, three years after his Corrie appearance, The Fellowship of the Ring was voted ‘The Greatest Movie of All Time,’ well ahead of Star Wars, Pretty Woman, The Godfather and Gladiator. By the end of 2012 the prequel based on The Hobbit had turned from two projected films into three, with Jackson justifying this by saying Tolkien’s 1937 novel was ‘breathless’, in which ‘very major events are covered in two or three pages … Once you started to develop the scenes you wanted to do a little more character development.’ High-level casting was the major concern, as they could not be given slight material, while McKellen, set to reprise Gandalf, defended Jackson, saying, ‘Anyone who thinks Peter Jackson would fall for market forces, instead of artistic imperatives, just doesn’t know him, doesn’t know the body of his work.’
McKellen renewed his love affair with New Zealand in 2012 and in that year he earned £6.3 million after paying tax. He called his company Kirikir, a Maori word that means ‘sand’. He was as crucial to the publicity, in spite of some negative feelings about being away from London, as he was pivotal to the plot. Ian Nathan saw him as supplying the continuity between the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit. He reassured fans and backers that the new trilogy would be good and bring gravitas to what might otherwise be dismissed as just a fantasy film. The studio rubbed their hands in glee, knowing they were going to make the money back.
The filming of the prequel, three films based on Tolkien’s 1937 The Hobbit with additional material from appendices and postscripts to The Lord of the Rings, entered once more the ring of epic endeavour, uncertainty, hysterical skulduggery and in-fighting. The trilogy was An Unexpected Journey, due for release in December 2012, The Desolation of Smaug, to be released a year later, and The Battle of the Five Armies, expected in July 2014.
The Jackson team had wanted to film The Hobbit since 1995, even possibly their choice before Lord of the Rings, but the success of the latter turned planners and story-boards for a follow-up to sixty years before The Fellowship of the Ring starts. While McKellen toured his Lear (to bypass the finger-jabbing, the legal writs and studio manoeuvring, the wrangling between the Tolkien estate and MGM, United Artists, New Line Cinema), a plan crystallised to make two films in 2007. Development of scripts progressed in 2008. The fantasy cinéaste Guillermo del Toro was engaged to direct them in spite of his reservations about ‘little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits’. He became the prime mover and motivator of the project.
The overall arc of the storyline, assembled from disparate sources by a quartet of writers, including the Jacksons, del Toro, and Philippa Boyens, is initiated up front by Gandalf the Grey. He convinces Bilbo Baggins to recruit the thirteen dwarves in the quest primarily to find gold and reinstate Thorin Oaken-shield to his rightful heritage as King, by reclaiming the lonely mountain from Smaug the dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch), who lives underneath Lake Tom and terrorises its people. The plot-line is clear and easy to follow, much more so than The Lord of the Rings, and highly satisfactory via well-paced suspense adventure, which over the three films climaxes (in Part Two) in the destruction of Smaug, by the bowman Bard (Luke Evans), and then the extended battle between dwarves, elves and orcs. It was nearly not filmed in New Zealand, but in Eastern Europe, for after the go-ahead was given for filming by New Line and Warner Bros, they refused to engage performers on union-negotiated agreements. The response of the International Federation of Actors was to proclaim a ‘DO NOT WORK’ order; where Ian’s trade unionist’s DNA was in all this, is not recorded.
Rallies organised in New Zealand protested that if the films were made elsewhere the country would lose up to $1.5 billion. Warner Bros withdrew the threat when the NZ government, headed by the outspoken John Key, passed laws to remove the right of workers to organise trade unions in the film production industry. Ian’s hero Jeremy Corbyn would not have approved. Everyone came round in the end, with the unions (changing their minds) calling those who demonstrated ‘patsies’.
Casting McKellen had been crucial, although beyond being the initiator, his Gandalf the Grey role, to begin with that of commander in chief, and later as supporter of Bard the Bowman, when he tries to convince Thorin and the elves not to fight each other, is not nearly so central to The Hobbit as it had been to The Lord of the Rings. He was an altogether more heroic and less spiritual wizard than Gandalf the Grey in The Fellowship of the Ring.
There was still something unusual to pick out when Gandalf is giving Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) a sly, understanding and complicit look – I had seen this before in Alec Guinness’s performances. It is a look of recognition of who you are, but also of a fellow soul, of brotherhood (or sisterhood). In other words, you are just like us, you’re one of us. This moment came when he arrives at the conference with Saruman and the beautiful Galadriel appears. She understands that something more profound is going on, that he is concealing something and has a secret. Ian, at this deep level, knows how to convey this perfectly and without words. It tells you much about Ian. About his power (and Gandalf’s).
Apart from intimate, knowing looks, the vintage Gandalf on display showed all the well-honed customary and warrior qualities of Gandalf the White. There was not much of a poetic or spiritual nature, but endless warlike operations and commands of the military leader. There is virtually no philosophy in the suffering he undergoes in successive batterings and orc torture, until he is saved by Galadriel and Saruman the White (Christopher Lee), nor does the outcome of the running battles depend upon his wizardry and spells.
The main relationship is that between Bilbo and Thorin. Gandalf is employed to comment, almost as a therapist, that evil as always will destroy itself. The scarcity of his appearance in The Battle of the Five Armies smacked a bit of tokenism, as if writers and director were at a loss as to what to do with him to give him a bigger say in the computer-generated adventure playground. Gandalf’s quasi-infallibility in The Lord of the Rings gave him an ambiguity which had little place in the trilogy of The Hobbit, and he does not quite fit in the relentless action pace. His triumph, even moral triumphalism, pared down as in The Lord of the Rings, and sacrificed somewhat to the building-up of the characters and the choices they make, but best expressed in his statement, ‘the old heart is strong, does not wither,’ gave way to a more modern, novelistic, free-and-easy, even opportunistic, narrative.
Jackson’s final statement applauded the spirit of complexity and defended his introduction of new characters such as Tauriel and Bard the Bowman. He caught something fundamental, something very complex, as Milan Kundera expressed in agreement, about the very nature of the novel and storytelling: ‘The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.’
Some were highly sceptical of Ian’s ‘artistic imperatives’, as Toby Young in the Spectator described them in The Hobbit: ‘an Unexpected Journey in its one hundred and sixty-nine minutes’. Young quoted an American critic: ‘It begins to feel like a Buddhist exercise in a deliberately inflicted death wish.’ The cost of the trilogy was over $620 million dollars, $250 million more than Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the most expensive single film of all time. A veteran Telegraph reviewer said, ‘As a lover of cinema, Jackson’s film bored me rigid; as a lover of Tolkien, it broke my heart.’
In November 2017 Graham Norton pulled Ian up sharply in his chat show with the disclosure that a new Lord of the Rings film was in the offing, made by Amazon. ‘What do you mean, another Gandalf?’ he reacted. ‘I haven’t said yes because I haven’t been asked,’ McKellen replied. ‘But are you suggesting someone else is going to play him?’ News was announced in February 2019 that writers were at work on a £1 billion prequel, for which Amazon beat Netflix to acquire the rights for £200 million, which was due to air in 2021.
How the trilogy would have turned out if del Toro had not been obliged for reasons of time to leave the directing to Jackson, is speculation, although many believe it would have been more of a fairy tale. The upshot was that the films bear the distinctive Jackson hallmark, are gripping and watchable, and especially moving in the vistas of great scenic beauty and flower-covered landscapes, thus providing relief from the relentless battles, carnage and special effects. Although much criticism has been levelled against them I cannot fault them for what they are: pure entertainment. The public flocked!