‘How come Ian always manages to send a card or flowers or just be there?’
Trevor Nunn
I knock on the dark green door next to Ian’s. It opens and Deborah Owen, wife of David Owen, asks me in. David and Deborah, a distinguished literary agent whose clients have numbered Delia Smith, Jeffrey Archer and Amos Oz, are warm and welcoming. David takes me to the expansive window of the Owens’ now knocked-through two houses overlooking the Thames. The tide is almost in, the lifelike figure of the Antony Gormley sculpture imposingly stands in the eighteen-foot tidal Thames, purchased by Ian, and testimony to his community spirit. It took three years to go through the official channels to get clearance to put it up, and the police specified it should not be covered with the tide above the waist, as it might mistakenly be reported as someone in difficulties in the water calling for help. On the head a gull perches. David Owen tells me that once this beautiful terrace was to be knocked down and ‘developed’ but saved by the owners. It is an extraordinary corner of Limehouse, and the Owens enthusiastically tell me as Ian’s next-door neighbours how he champions and nurtures it.
A curious coincidence once again drawing together Ian and Jacobi is that Francis Bacon, the painter, once owned and lived at Number 40 on this street. In John Maybury’s Love is the Devil, Jacobi filmed in a studio recreation of Number 40 his portrayal of Bacon, in which Daniel Craig played his sadomasochistic lover George Dyer. In the 1990s while filming in New Zealand Ian had extensive developments made to his property, and there was a lot of noise that affected Deborah Owen’s home-based agency. ‘He was wonderful, so considerate a neighbour,’ says Deborah, for when away filming he sent flowers to her once a month with apologies for the racket caused. The Owens call his embrace and preservation of the neighbourhood generous, and he contributes to local Isle of Dogs and Canada Wharf performance events as sponsor or participant. He is never too busy or puffed up to join in. Deborah calls this rare. He has a devoted PA, Louise Harding, and he puts up friends or if they are painters allows their work to be exhibited.
When I left McKellen that day in 2006, even then I never realised the extent to which he stood alone and apart from that extraordinary mafia of Cambridge figures who came to dominate the entertainment and media world, or the degree to which, at least with fame and celebrity, he towered head and shoulders above the rest. I can think of few if any of this generation who commanded such attention; witness this surprise headline in the Daily Mail of 9 February 2018: ‘Sexual fluidity is the future, says Ian McKellen’ – a subject that sparked serious debate. Could one ever imagine Olivier or any leading actor in the last century pronouncing on such an issue?
In the decade and more since 2006, I have become drawn into determining what sets Ian apart from everyone else, and what has made him into such a world-wide presence, both as an actor and an activist for gay rights. As he passes the milestone of eighty, he is in a category quite on his own, as he has been a different kind of achiever from those distinguished actor knights or dames with worthy stage and screen credits, or those titled or untitled tireless campaigners for social justice, who sit on the back benches or carry shadow cabinet ministers’ briefs. He was an inspirational figure across generations. Is this because he combines in one person what most would think of as two separate lives and ambitions? Is it chance or design?
Ingrid Bergman, with whom McKellen once clashed at a dinner party, said the key to happiness was good health and a poor memory. As he heads from four-score years towards many more, the remarkable drive is there intact, and there is no intention of retiring. ‘Theatre is for now,’ he rightly said, like life, while young actors today haven’t heard of Laurence Olivier. He did have an eye, but here surely a mischievous one, on taking his final bow. ‘If it happens now, “Oh b—”‘ He invoked a friend whose hand he held while he died, and who said, ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’ This sentiment, too, haunted the lonely independent artist. So for the final curtain there was a running order for the Memorial Service in a large theatre, with his own words, ‘I’m sorry to be missing this show’ – so we’d better hold a rehearsal now. ‘I’m in favour of death. I’m in favour of a line drawn. I feel there is a purpose to it.’
Now has come my final moment in the traditional manner in attempting to sum up McKellen, the man and actor. The audience pulling power has never flagged. Just staging his one-man show, Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others and You in late 2017, in the 200-seater Park Theatre to raise funds, generated a quarter of a million for this unsubsidised theatre. It would be a mixture of high art, anecdotes drawing in the audience, and the by now predictable holding forth on politics and gay sexuality, the recurrent theme of his life. He wanted to go on working to the very end, and after ending King Lear in 2018 he took to the road again in his eightieth year with his one-man show, blazing a trail of glory and delighting audiences in eighty different venues and places. This redefinition of the birthday bash saw him appearing not only in main city centres of the UK, but back to Wigan Little Theatre and Bolton to celebrate his birthday in May 2019. Sean Mathias sprang a surprise dinner party for 150 people at Bolton School the evening before the performance in the Town Hall. Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others and You has extended its run to the end of 2019, opening in September at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End. ‘This isn’t a farewell tour – I’m saying hello again!’ he said before he set out. He compared it to the old days of music-hall artistes flitting from booking to booking. A good part of the tour would be ‘particular to the place … remembering things (such as acting opposite Margaret Drabble at the Arts, Cambridge). Not only would it keep him on his toes, but it would prove ‘quite emotional’.
This coincides with a Warner Brothers feature, The Good Liar, in which he plays Roy Courtnay, an octogenarian conman with an espionage backstory, and shades of lago’s ‘honesty’. Courtnay looks up Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren), a seemingly unsuspecting widow, to devour her and her fortune, but bites off more than he can chew.
But, after all, to sum up the professional side of his life, he has said, ‘I’m only an actor. I’m not a writer. I’m not going to leave any legacy … All I’ve ever done is learn the lines and say them.’ He has said others were better than he was, and he had spent his life disguising these limitations – overtly emotional scenes, when a character breaks down, cries, or has a speech about his deepest feelings. He freely admitted he didn’t have much experience of expressing deep, complicated emotions for the benefit of somebody else. ‘That’s not how I’ve gone about my [private] life. So when a character does that I suppose sometimes you come up against a block and say, “I can’t imagine what that’s like.” And then you start using other little triggers and ways of stirring it all up.’ In not claiming too much for himself, he would share the famous dictum of Ralph Richardson, another great actor: ‘Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses and we simply make them run.’ And again in this statement made in 2019: ‘Derek and I and Patrick are all the same person really. We’ve all played the same parts. And all of us were at the New York Pride when we were Grand Marshals a couple of years ago, so our public and private lives have over-lapped a bit.’
Yet as an actor that, as Hazlitt wrote, ‘we only have for a few moments’, his strong sense of rivalry and competition with other great actors has continued to the very end, in particular with Olivier. Retiring was simply not an option.
But what of my belief, encompassing both his acting genius and his social activism, that he is a significant phenomenon of our age?
Close friends like Jacobi have mentioned his determination to ensure his legacy lives on. Was he seeking a kind of immortality in the late flowering of a cause, his notable contribution to social change, when he insisted that his CH (Companion of Honour), awarded by the Queen in 2008, should be for services to society as well as for the arts? Other friends aver that while he has turned down a peerage, his ambition was quasi-immortality, which meant a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, and burial next to Garrick and Irving in front of the plaque to Shakespeare. Perhaps they would also be playing a recording of him reading Henry V, as happened at Olivier’s funeral. But this doesn’t fit at all with my different reading of McKellen the man, and his innate modesty.
Perhaps as a child in the zeitgeist of the fifties and sixties and Colin Wilson’s landmark book The Outsider, one key note is that he still likes the feeling of being an outsider, and notably because of his sexual orientation. This was how Brian Cox, along the same lines, had seen him as ‘a construct. He nailed it [the construct] down and encased it in lead.’ Cox wondered if he ever really wanted to know himself, as if there was something he was in fear of discovering, and was just not interested. As Cox also said, he was the first ‘secretly to question his own worth’. As such he was very isolated. But this was at the core of his being and a necessary part of his greatness as an actor: impenetrability.
Joy Leslie Gibson saw him back in 1985, taking an image from seventeenth-century England torn by religious and political strife, as ‘a Cavalier at heart. But that he has had a Roundhead upbringing.’ She called attention not only to this divide in him, but also to ‘his essential Englishness’, but wondered ‘if he would be considered intelligent in the outside world’. She answered that while she is struck by the vividness of phrase and the immediate communication of emotion or thought, when considered more carefully, ‘the thought is not carried through’, and the effect is ‘more of a clever undergraduate than a true thinker’.
Paradox perhaps ultimately is something that can never be wholly plucked out, yet it goes to the heart of the McKellen mystery. A man of extreme secular views, a Corbynista dockland gay socialist with no belief in an afterlife or attachment to Old Testament fundamental beliefs, or even in an underlying difference between good and evil (and especially ‘Nature’ as found and often defined in Shakespeare), the extraordinary paradox stood, and will stand. Apart from the simple answer that he is an actor, this paradox played a central role which brought him tens of millions and worldwide fame, moulded in the traditional and strongly devout Roman Catholicism of J. R. R. Tolkien. ‘A lot of people who came to see King Lear [in 2017 and ‘18] were drawn by Tolkien rather than Shakespeare,’ he told the Evening Standard in November 2018.
Where had the spiritual imperatives, instilled in early years by Margery and Denis, gone in all this jockeying for place among celebrity actors and artists? Descending deeper into the man, as I must try finally to do, one thing for sure can be said: his love of pleasure is open and undeniably visible. From an early age he has gone after what he most desired without conflict over it or self-recrimination. He has provoked and gratified extreme desirability, respect and admiration in others, and done this both in life and in art, yet maintained deep reserve. Mathias was accurate about him when he said, ‘He’s the most extraordinarily private person. Very secretive.’ He gave himself pleasure in many areas, and in so doing brought huge and abundant pleasure to everyone else. He freed himself gradually from self-denial and self-obstruction with permission to have all that life and art had to offer. He has ended up, successfully, creating himself as almost a universal brand and certainly a phenomenon. In a similar way, when he came to enjoy the pleasure of social power, he showed he had that power to share with others. Yet he only ever answered to himself and his personal god or instincts.
‘When my contemporaries were having babies, I didn’t feel anything but pity for them. People are always complaining about being parents and children seem to be nothing but a problem. If I’d had children, I couldn’t have behaved as selfishly as I have.’ How could he know? When he was last tackled on this sensitive issue, namely that acting is transient, and being exclusively gay meant he would be without issue, he was quick to backtrack on the reference to children. Appleyard, here his interviewer again, mentioned the philosopher Roger Scruton’s argument that homosexuals have less right to a stake in society since their ‘barrenness’, by which he meant lack of children, made them so, but Ian contradicted this, saying he was not depressed by his lack of children, although to his questioner he betrayed loneliness and a yearning for continuity. Apart from the simple answer that he was an actor, and this went to the heart of his mystery, ‘But the secret has been my own life, and if I had been at ease with this … I don’t think you necessarily do that by putting more human beings in it.’ At another time he has claimed he would be ‘an awful father’, and adds, as most people are, of course.
This should be placed perhaps against what he said about his mother dying when he was twelve: ‘I can remember nothing but love … 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.’ There was his father Denis and their failure to connect.
As far as the defining moment in his life – his coming out – goes, it is interesting to hear him on the subject of ‘Michael’s Letter to Mama’ from Armistead Maupin’s novel More Tales from the City. ‘It is,’ he says, ‘so, so well argued … It’s very much the letter that Armistead wrote to his mother when he came out, and it’s so beautifully argued.’ ‘Argued’ is the operative word here. Argument in matters of the heart never brings final redemption from pain.
At the end of the show, having read it, I give it to someone in the audience. I say: ‘You just pass it along until it reaches somebody who knows somebody who would benefit from reading this letter.’ A number of people have used it as a model for coming out themselves, so that’s always very moving.
He continues: ‘And of course, it was a letter I didn’t myself ever write. That’s how deeply I was in the closet. That bloody door is so hard to open.
‘You don’t want to be in there. A closet in English is a cupboard. And cupboards are dusty places. You keep skeletons in them. You can’t live in a cupboard. It’s a very good image for what it feels like. You’re enclosed, the whole of the world is outside. All you’ve got to do is open the door and walk out.’
He and Denis had battened down their emotions when Margery died. Forty-six years later, when Princess Diana died, Ian realised that Prince Harry was the same age that he had been in 1951. ‘My joining in that communal experience of grief was very much a personal thing related to my mother. I think a lot of people had myriad reasons why they were so affected by her death.’ Yet even this had to be acknowledged publicly, in the one-man show Knight Out. He went as far as identifying with Prince Harry over his mother’s death, encouraging children to go to funerals and express grief over the death of a loved one. Going naked as the best disguise had become a habit, as was so evident from the abundance of recent articles, interviews and so on in the press and on television.
And so we are drawn into his choppy waters of unease, uncomfortable conflict, and continuing uncertainty, while the manner – ‘verbose, and a touch grandiloquent, tinged with self-doubt’, as Appleyard noted – shows him sometimes more tortured and disturbed by these issues than his ‘born again’ buoyancy would suggest.
If he ever had written his memoirs, Ian said he would ask, ‘Why did I become an actor?’ This is a variation of the question Sam Mendes said he always posed to actors: ‘Who was I doing it for?’ Perhaps in Ian’s case the answer could be similar to Jacobi’s ‘My mother and father’ – perhaps subtly metamorphosed into ‘The shadows of my mother and my father’. There had been an obstacle in finishing the business with his parents, and here glorious art took its place. There is a flash of inspiration in his realisation when playing Widow Twankey, as he was shaking his legs on the Old Vic stage, that he was his dead sister Jean.
Was there not also a lifelong Don Juan element in this life, like Mozart defying his father who appears as the Commendatore figure in Don Giovanni – and the bottled-up, yet avowed homosexuality, an integral part of him, similar to Mozart’s waggish rebellion and amorous foulmouthed-ness? Elton John was quoted in December 2017 that his father wanted him to be something else than what he was. ‘I’ve spent my life trying to prove to my father that I was a success. He has been dead years and I’m still trying to prove the point. It stays with you. I tried to outrun my darkest secret, that I couldn’t love myself. I thought I didn’t deserve to be loved, cared for.’ Does the shadow of his dead father still stalk Ian with what he imagined would have been the reaction to his being gay?
To pluck the heart out of the mystery we have peeled away as many layers of the onion as we could. But, as with an onion, what is at the centre? An actor taking on many roles, including those of himself?
One thing for sure we can say: McKellen wholly inhabited the actor’s role in his own time and continues to do so. Sharing his longevity and knowing him well since they met in 1958, John Tydeman, reading this account and feeling for him the greatest love and admiration, wrote at the bottom of the last page, ‘A protean chameleon caught in a kaleidoscope tube. Just a mere boy full of questions who really didn’t want to grow up.’ A true Enfant du Paradis, a child of paradise. McKellen remains an extraordinary if not the extraordinary figure of our age, its perfect mirror, like Judi Dench, whom he partnered in Macbeth.
Before I leave his neighbours’ house in September 2018, I head out onto the terrace to have a look at the Gormley sculpture again, and Ian’s luxurious plants and staircase next door. As I stand there the presence of the figure partly covered by the tide commands awe and sends shivers up my spine. Gormley is justly celebrated for his Crosby Beach, Liverpool, statues. The incoming and outgoing tide is a specific attraction to him. ‘You are encouraged to linger a bit longer by the tide coming in.’ He has said of these human forms based on his own body that they are an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live.