‘Tell me who influences you, and I will tell you who you are’
Jean-Louis Barrault
By the time he left school, McKellen had seen half of Shakespeare’s plays and acted in a handful (‘I must have been quite a sweet little boy,’ he reflected in 2006). Now, in February 1958, he was venturing to St Catharine’s College in Cambridge to take the scholarship exams. His interest in Shakespeare was picked up on by his Cambridge interviewer Tom Henn, a war veteran and a W. B. Yeats scholar. Having noted that at school Ian had played Henry V, Henn asked him to recite the speech before the walls of Harfleur:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
‘I climbed up on a table and gave a rousing rendition of the speech,’ McKellen recalled. ‘That was enough. I was awarded an Open Exhibition.’
McKellen was following in the footsteps of a talented director in taking up a scholarship to read English at St Catharine’s: ‘I had been advised, as it was Peter Hall’s old college, to do this.’ Hall had made his debut at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1956 with Love’s Labour’s Lost and went on to direct Peggy Ashcroft in Cymbeline, the performance that had made such a strong impression on McKellen as a teenager. In 1961, Hall would formally establish the Royal Shakespeare Company before taking over from Laurence Olivier as the first of four Cambridge men to serve in succession as artistic director of the National Theatre.
Why were they all from Cambridge? There was no degree in drama at Cambridge, no certificates, no specialists, no qualified academics. All of it was amateur. Yet it could be claimed that Cambridge student theatre had a more profound influence on post-war theatre than any other formative institution. Hall was undoubtedly at the head of a ‘glitter list’ of Cambridge graduates who went on to become luminaries in British theatre, otherwise known as the ‘Cambridge mafia’. This notion of a mafia, sometimes naughty and jokey, sometimes pervasive and intimidating, was especially applicable to the students who had acted and directed, and then went on to become professionals. The word ‘mafia’ is supposed to come from the Sicilian word for bragging. On Peter Hall’s death in 2017, Richard Eyre, his successor at the National Theatre, unconsciously subscribed to the mafia idea by calling him the ‘godfather’ of British theatre.
John Barton, Hall’s close friend and contemporary, could well be thought of as deputy godfather. After graduating in 1954, Barton became Lay Dean of King’s and remained active in student drama until leaving academia to join Hall at the RSC. During Ian’s first two years, John Barton, together with George ‘Dadie’ Rylands, head of English at King’s, virtually ran undergraduate theatre as practised by its leading lights.
Heydays have only a short span, but this heyday was deep and explosive, and long-lasting in its impact. The most prestigious acting societies were the Amateur Dramatic Club or ADC, the Marlowe Society, which was run by Dadie Rylands and of which Ian was president in his final year, the Footlights Club, the Mummers and University Actors. The last was formed after the war to put on twentieth-century plays, often staging their English premieres.
In a 1993 article for the Observer Richard Eyre described how university drama was centred on the ADC Theatre, housed in a converted cinema. With the technical apparatus of a modest repertory theatre, he claimed that it tried to mimic the professional model to the point of extreme parody. ‘Intrigues, jealousies, stars and careers were conceived on the lines of what were imagined to be the real thing,’ he said, while actors if rejected started their own groups. Generally, in Eyre’s somewhat splenetic hindsight, he saw himself and his fellow thespians as ‘cocky, immodest, self-regarding, ostentatious, vain and self-important’.
Eyre came to believe that he suffered a ‘contagious condition’ that he didn’t start to recognise until he had stopped being an actor himself. This was ‘university acting’, the kind of acting that is all architecture and no heart, assembled by an intelligent mind conscious of meanings, content, style and history. Over-conscious, in short, and saddled with an implicit editorial commentary ‘that runs parallel to the performance, telling the audience what to think about the character and his predicament – and that the actor is more important, or more intelligent, than the character he is playing. It’s like music written by computer.’
Richard Eyre arrived at Cambridge in 1961, the year in which Ian graduated. Though they did not overlap as students, Eyre was to have an important presence in McKellen’s professional career, directing him in Richard III. As an undergraduate Eyre performed in a musical with naked Girton girls. During rehearsals the director, Stephen Frears, unhappy with what he was doing, had sent him to a hypnotist to unlock the rich seam of untapped talent and Promethean vigour that he was convinced lay within his ‘unpromising shell’.
The ‘contagious condition’ was not present in earlier years. The generation of actors of which Ian was part (covering the years of John Bird, John Tydeman, both of whom directed brilliantly there, and Clive Swift) were shaped by six years of war and over a decade of post-war austerity; its powers of expression and aspiration were earthed in the struggle for survival and emerged in performances and concepts of an extraordinary precocious maturity, even wisdom. The competitive in-fighting identified by Eyre had not yet raised its ugly divisive head, and love ruled the hearts of those who participated.
Everyone, even if not positively involved, was touched by the theatrical bug in McKellen’s Cambridge years. Mafia families, once they have gained control, have a tentacular spread into all areas of society. There was a host of Cambridge societies and clubs to supply the mafia’s appetite for performance and excitement not only about the theatre, but also for literature, cinema, travelling to foreign lands, politics, and of course intimate relationships. This urge as well as capacity for freedom was everywhere, as recalled by Glenys Roberts, who went on to become a journalist. ‘Today’s well-travelled younger generation cannot imagine the joy I experienced on a hitch-hiking holiday when I came upon Byron’s name carved by his own hand on Greek temples. Or saw Brigitte Bardot on screen openly enjoy her sexuality in a way previously open only to men.’
To begin his Cambridge acting career Ian had to perform two speeches, one by Shakespeare, one modern, in auditioning for the Amateur Dramatic Club. He chose Aaron’s speech ‘Now climbeth Tamora Olympus’ top’ from Titus Andronicus, as he had been impressed by Anthony Quayle performing it in the Peter Brook/Olivier production. His modern speech was from a role made famous by Olivier: that of Archie Rice in The Entertainer. Ian’s emulation of Olivier, which had begun in childhood with his toy figurine of the actor, was set to become a motif through all he did.
Head of the selection committee was John Barton. Trevor Nunn, who went up to Cambridge in 1959 and followed Richard Eyre as artistic director of the National Theatre, recalls his own first impression of Barton:
My mental picture of my first sighting betrays some of the impressionable eighteen-year-old student I was and something of the need eighteen-year-old students have for legends and larger than life heroes and enemies … He chewed razor blades for fun, he knew every line of the First Folio by ear … was hilariously absentminded, obsessed with cricket, a chain-smoker, an expert on Napoleon and somebody who enjoyed working sixteen hours a day without a break.
Ian recounts that ‘the panel was unimpressed’ with both his audition pieces, ‘but John insisted I be allowed into the ADC. So I was.’ On the basis of Ian’s audition, Barton picked him for the role of Justice Shallow in his Marlowe Society production of Henry IV Part 2. ‘He must have detected enough of the character man in me, that he might use and develop.’ This was to become an historic moment in Ian’s life.
I have in front of me an ADC programme: ‘Nursery Productions, Tuesday and Wednesday 28th & 29th October 1958 at 8.15.’ These were one-act choices from The Infernal Machine (Cocteau), The Voysey Inheritance (Granville-Barker), The Government Inspector (Gogol), The Good Woman of Setzuan (Brecht), Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) and The Apple Cart (Shaw). John Wood, who was to change his name to John Fortune and David Frost were respectively Sextus Pompeius and Second Servant in the Antony and Cleopatra scenes. Corin Redgrave played Edmund Voysey. Star of the night, in his first term already using that rather flat, gravelly, hesitant and yet unexpectedly emphatic voice as King Magnus in The Apple Cart, was – you might well guess – Ian McKellen. This was certainly an appropriate role for the scope of his talents, though perhaps he didn’t yet have the technical skill to carry it off. ‘It was all wrong,’ commented Richard Cottrell who was to direct him later as Richard II: ‘gangly, awkward, his voice whistling. But I thought, “He’s special”.’
He had no confidence, Ian said of his Cambridge performances as a juvenile, and thought of these performances, such as the morose, angry son in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author or Posthumus in Dodie Rylands’ production of Cymbeline, as self-conscious, embarrassed and embarrassing. As I directed him myself in the Pirandello play at the ADC I can vouchsafe that this was not so, and that his melancholy display of hurt was deeply real and affecting. I remember him as being very thoughtful to direct, easily accepting of comments, with the characteristic gesture of raising both arms above his head and folding them as he considered a point.
But then there were Ian’s roles as old men. He acted in twenty-two plays at Cambridge and among these the old men were the most singled out for praise. Ian’s mimicry of age was second nature to him. First the voice, with its cracked, slightly mumbled consonants, the sibilant ‘s’ and elongated vowels, naturally sounded old. Second, he tended without effort to stretch and bend his limbs somewhat eccentrically. In Love’s Labours, a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, ‘McKellen and [Michael] Burrell, as Holofernes and the Rev. Nathaniel, are themselves worth a visit,’ wrote the Broadsheet reviewer.
It was his Justice Shallow in Henry IV Part 2 that critics called the very best performance they’d ever seen by a student actor. Michael Burrell asked Ian to do a talk with him some years later in Soham at the Brook Theatre. ‘I know what,’ says Ian, ‘let’s do the Shallow and Silence scenes from Henry the Fourth.’ So there were these two men, seventy years old, now the right age, performing the characters with whom they had triumphed fifty years before when they were anonymous, as actors were in Marlowe productions, and had stolen the show. They both retained enormous affection for Shallow and Silence as crusty, warm-hearted old men recalling their early days.
London critics, agents, managers flocked during the McKellen Cambridge years to help that particular ‘magic’ gain a foothold in the professional theatre. Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, the two most influential critics (and the most eloquent pen-pushers), were poles apart as competitors and in social attitudes but about Cambridge they sang from the same hymnsheet. ‘The A.D.C. Theatre has become a true gymnasium of talent, where plays are staged with lively professional assurance; and the flow of this talent from Cambridge to London (from the Fen to the Wen, so to speak) gets swifter every season,’ wrote Tynan; ‘the tradition of slapdash amateurism in university acting has been decisively smashed.’
Hobson visited frequently, and the Arts Theatre production of the Henry IV plays sent him into raptures: these Cambridge performances gave him more pleasure, more illumination, he said, than he received nine times out of ten when he went either to Stratford or to the Old Vic. He asked, ‘Why should a group of Cambridge amateurs be able to put up not only a better show, but an infinitely better show, than companies that contain many of our best players directed by our leading producers?’ His answer was their simple, unadorned belief in the words Shakespeare has written, without any exaggeration. He singled out Clive Swift’s Falstaff, who did not supplement the words by ‘hawking, slapping, pawing, and winking’, and ‘the first time in my life I understood why Falstaff is supposed to be one of the great comic characters in English fiction … The virtue … also, in the Prince [Jacobi], in the Chief Justice [John Fortune], in Hotspur [Simon Relph], in Justice Shallow [McKellen], and in the King [Terence Hardiman] was intelligent speaking … It was because the foundations of this rationality were precisely laid that a structure could be raised on them of surpassing loveliness.’
Ian was a year behind Derek Jacobi, who also hadn’t done National Service, and two behind Clive Swift, who for him ‘had gravitas and seemed middle-aged’. When Swift went up to take his entrance exam, ‘hardly anyone went there to act’, he says. He smoked because it was so cold and recalled his shaving water froze. ‘Even if I get in I can’t live here,’ he wept, and could not write in the exam because of the cold.
Swift said Ian was hard to know, and if he talked about his family, ‘I seem to remember it was in a jokey way.’ He was perhaps the least complimentary of Ian’s friends about his acting at Cambridge, viewing him only as a character actor, and saying he didn’t show much distinction. John Tusa, in reviewing Six Characters in Search of an Author, did not in a complimentary review of other players even mention him, while Waris Hussein, who also directed him, thought his acting was full of mannerisms, although in time he learnt to tone them down. In Saint’s Day, John Whiting’s large-scale political allegory, Ian was commended with Jill Daltry by Ann Dowson for creating an atmosphere of tension and concealing ‘the shiftedness of the writing by the conviction of their acting’.
Hugh Walters, the resident comic actor, who held the record of appearing in thirty-three productions at Cambridge, remembers Ian played seven old men, ‘but could not play the lead, although his observation was wonderful. He had that swaying from the hips as the lead in Cards of Identity.‘ Walters also says no one bothered whether you were gay or not and was highly sceptical of Cambridge, which he called, like Eyre, ‘a place of spurious fame’. He was not very flattering about Jacobi either: ‘he had an old-fashioned voice … and acted with the mirror there in front of him.’
Derek Jacobi, who was at St John’s College, was undoubtedly the reigning star of the Cambridge stage of McKellen’s first year. Ian instantly fell headlong in love, not surprisingly given his passion for the theatre.
Clothes mattered at Cambridge, and sartorially the pair could not have offered a stronger contrast. As Cambridge men were predominantly drawn from single-sex public or grammar schools, they were not only snobbish but intensely aware of the attractions of appearance both to their own sex and the under-represented opposite. ‘Cambridge was an extremely self-conscious society that perpetuated its own values and bred introverted cliques, while the clothes everyone wore were important not as social badges alone, but as symbols of a particular desired persona,’ Colin Bell, an Open Scholar of King’s, wrote in an article in the student paper Broadsheet in 1959. This was relevant to both Ian and Derek. Bell claimed that wealth, class, even nationality, although often revealed in dress, ‘were not as elsewhere the sole conclusions to be drawn from any particular style; more important was the allegiance or ambition within Cambridge society that they were pre-designed to show.’
Derek Jacobi dressed undoubtedly as a ‘particular desired persona’ of his own design and creation, as he admitted to me once. McKellen recalls that Derek was very glamorous, and he was highly conscious of his appearance, wearing ‘very tight trousers and his hair done up at the back. We were in duffel-coats and corduroys, and Derek was very differently dressed rather like his mates in Leytonstone, rather dandified.’ Unsure how to express his hidden secret, in his duffel coat and tweed jacket, McKellen felt unattractive with his father’s ‘big hooter’, as he called it, and his ‘jug ears’. Adding to the abject sense of shortcoming was, perhaps, a touch of the heroic victim mentality from the early loss of his mother. Sometimes there were cracks (if only slight) in the North Country reserve, such as an evening Ian recalled from his first year: ‘After the Three Sisters party [in which he played Baron Tuzenbach], I was drunk and carried down from the Gibbs building [where Barton had his rooms] on the second floor.’
In contrast to Ian, Derek was at once aware of social rank, class, and radiated an instinctive sense of hierarchy. Derek, in spite of his apparently humble origins, could assume princes and nobility from the word go: ‘rather aloof with an aristocratic bearing, he trailed success and achievement – he was glamorous’, said Ian, who in his ecstatic hero-worship called him the ‘bees knees, and easily the most accomplished actor in Cambridge, and with a wonderful ability in verse’.
Ian joined the debating society, the Cambridge Union, and attended college meals, but Derek, apart from the theatre, was an outsider and never seemed to work. ‘He was never in college, he never had any connection with college, and he was always going to become a professional,’ says Ian. Compared to Derek, Ian believed himself a novice, having to learn painfully from John Barton and Dadie Rylands. Derek knew instinctively: ‘Derek was a born actor, whereas I was a plodder.’ While not exactly this, Ian certainly laboured very hard at every role. I directed him twice during his first two years, and while he said of himself his acting was all gesture and no heart, in the two juvenile roles he played he was very moving. The first was as the Son in Six Characters in Search of an Author. The second was a role in Deutsches Haus, the first play by fellow student Richard Cottrell, who had served two years of National Service prior to university. Ian played Harry, an army private who makes Anna, a German girl, pregnant. ‘Mr McKellen’s exploration of the emotion of disgrace when he recognises his moral inability to stand up to the responsibilities he has incurred is a poignant climax to the second scene,’ wrote Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times. Anna was acted brilliantly by Margaret Drabble. After playing at the ADC it enjoyed a run at the Arts Theatre in London, so may be counted as McKellen’s very precocious first West End performance. Terry Hardiman, also in the cast, recalls it being so real that one performance when they played with trepidation to an audience of servicemen in uniform, one squaddie shouted out, ‘Watch it, mate, he’s going for his knife!’
Ian and Derek performed together in Richard Cottrell and Clive Swift’s musical Love’s Labours, which transferred from Cambridge to the Lyric, Hammersmith. One Saturday night after the show Hardiman and McKellen ended up staying at Derek’s house (Ian could not recall why), and it was a long haul from Hammersmith to Leytonstone. He claimed he must have missed the bus ‘or something’ but insisted ‘there was no hanky-panky’. Next morning Hobson reviewed the show in the Sunday Times. Seeing the review, and that he, as Holofernes, was the only actor mentioned, Ian quickly hid the paper away in case Derek read it.
Another time during this run when he had nowhere to stay, he put up with Hardiman’s family in Billericay. Terry remembers how well Ian got on with his warm-hearted mother. Terry, who had taught for a year in a rough comprehensive before Cambridge, and whose father was a policeman, believed being in a play was a cocoon ‘against a very worrying world’. Ian, he observed, had ‘riveting mannerisms and a strange sibilant voice, almost a whistle in it’.
Love’s Labours became something of a cult for those who’d been in it and they went on celebrating it with reunions until its fiftieth anniversary, at which they sang the catchiest numbers with Swift at the piano.
Ian’s confession that for a while he was desperately in love with Derek was much repeated in later years but it was nothing that was explicit at the time. The passion McKellen felt for Derek continued throughout Cambridge. In 1959 Derek had his twenty-first birthday and his devoted mum and dad gave him a Ford Cortina. Cambridge and local Leytonstone friends were invited to the bash in a local hall, McKellen and I among them. No such celebration or present happened for McKellen. There was also from the start a difference between them sexually: Derek has always adored women and gets on famously with them, while love and affection towards women took some time with Ian: he appeared friendly but with an inner reserve, even uninterest. The reticence may have been related in some way to the early loss of Margery. Elizabeth Proud, who became a successful actress with the BBC Sound Rep, and who acted with Ian at Cambridge, says that in playing a love scene opposite him he would never look at you. This could also of course have been shyness. But another Cambridge friend, preferring not to be named, recalls Ian sticking his bum out when he had to kiss one girl in a scene.
It was at Cambridge that McKellen, aged twenty-two, supposedly lost his virginity, with Brian Taylor, known as Brodie. The novelist Margaret Drabble, who attended Newnham College, remembers Brodie well at Cambridge as a personable, very handsome young teacher. Keen McKellen watchers, of which there are legion, believe the love affair with Brodie started as far back as May 1958, when Ian was eighteen and acting at the Bolton Little Theatre, situated near the gasworks. Here, amateurs, mostly boys and masters from Ian’s school, had joined to put on plays in this venue reeking of gas burners. During Twelfth Night, in which Ian played Sebastian, piercing the Olivia with his powerful blue eyes so she went weak at the knees, he had encountered the ‘God-like figure’ of Brodie, two years older than him, studying to qualify as a schoolteacher. He was ‘a golden boy – golden-haired and very tanned, and so forth. Very long lashes,’ according to Geoffrey Banks, who played Feste. Banks, interviewed by Mark Barratt, an earlier biographer of McKellen, had taught in the sixth form and spotting his talent had put Ian on the path of his big Shakespeare roles with Prince Hal, Henry V, Malvolio, when he had impressed audiences with his commanding voice. Banks’s instinctive stage sense picked up Brodie’s matinee-idol appeal to Ian. Ian also, according to his oldest friend Michael Burrell, had an occasional fling.
While Brodie and Ian were clearly an ‘item’ at Cambridge, to those who knew Ian it was not at all public. As Ian says, he was a closeted gay boy who enjoyed disguising himself, though no such disguise was evident to his friends. He made a point about how ex-public schoolboys made fun of his Northern accent, though as he said, as a child he always had more than one accent. Again, this flexibility showed shrewd ambition. He had joined the Union when he first arrived, and far from being excluded from parties, where he claims he suffered agonies of self-consciousness, this was not an observation that most of his contemporaries would have made about him. Why he should have gone around with the idea that he had a dark and shameful secret, namely that he was gay, while everyone of the same age was not at all bothered by such a realisation and proclaimed that tolerance was universal, is something about which he has remained uncomfortable and reluctant to explain.
Awareness of the illegality of homosexuality in the greater world outside Cambridge had been reinforced during the 1950s by repressive home secretaries, an example of which was the arrest and imprisonment of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for ‘consensual homosexual offences’ in 1953 and ‘54. This provoked a backlash and led in 1957 to the Wolfenden Committee recommending the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private between adults. In 1967 Parliament enacted the recommendation. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest Ian’s susceptibility to fear of discovery had something to do with the way Denis the pacifist had gone through the war with his secret, not openly proclaiming his deeply held religious conviction and the McKellens’ need to keep their secrets.
To have problems with one’s sexuality was not unusual (either at that time or later) whether you were gay or straight. Noel Annan, Ian’s contemporary Provost of King’s, made the observation that it was hardly any easier for heterosexual men, especially at Cambridge where there were few women, and most could be described as bluestockings uninterested in sex.
Jacobi’s perception of being gay at Cambridge is different and at odds with McKellen’s. He felt there was no stigma about being gay, and it was never a shameful secret. Cambridge and his unreciprocated love for Richard Kay, another leading Cambridge actor, helped him to accept his sexuality ‘without making a song and dance about it’. For Ian, it remained the opposite and he found ‘he could only be confident when acting, because it’s a wilful escape from life,’ as he told the Sunday Times in 1999.
Ungainly as Ian considered himself, refusing to think, as most thought, he was good-looking, especially aware of and unhappy with his physical shortcomings, the size of his left ear for one, and his knees, he had already had opportunities to try his hand at many parts.
This is what Cambridge had done for him. He was already set on the course of converting himself to any size, shape, voice or condition to further his passion to act. To this he would become as constant as the Northern star, so that many years later, he could truthfully tell an Observer journalist, ‘My body, my face – they’re only interesting in terms of my work. Every haircut I’ve ever had has been for a role.’