‘You’re never so famous again as you were at Cambridge’
Michael Frayn
During his Cambridge years, or at least the latter part of them, Ian had a loving and intimate partnership with Brodie. It was to be as stable and secure as any relationship Ian has ever had, and if same-sex marriage had existed in those days, they would probably have tied the knot. Brodie has remained deeply loyal to him over the years, and they are still close friends.
But to his immediate and intimate family circle – sister Jean, father Denis and stepmother Gladys – Brodie was just a good friend, and in the tight-lipped way the family conducted itself, no one mentioned any other possibility even if they had thought of it. Jean most probably knew or if not suspected, while Gladys, who later admitted to Ian she knew all along, would no doubt have kept the McKellen senior silence, whatever she might have thought, given Denis’s deep biblical convictions about the sin of homosexuality.
Brodie had impeccable manners, was handsome and charming and no one said, or has ever said, a word against him. This was someone who, clean-limbed and with the received Cambridge image, comes over as a Rupert Brooke Grantchester figure in tennis whites, a racket in one hand, but with a bottle of Lucozade rather than champagne in the other. Perhaps too, there was rather a High Church Anglican aura about him, for he associated with members of St Augustine’s Church, with which Doris, his mother, with whom Ian got on famously, was strongly involved. Brodie was the perfect partner for Ian, one might well have judged, a secure, emotional anchor as well as secure home port, for one setting out on the perilous seas of an acting career. He was the dependable, faithful other half, or so commented John Tydeman, one who was always there.
With his Cambridge background Ian could count his blessings. This was England. Cambridge authenticated him in his father’s eyes. Overriding probably all else was the confidence that Ian never put to one side, expressed by Stephen Fry, who found that the one clear advantage – probably the only real advantage – in having gone to Cambridge, was that he never had to deal with the problem of not having gone to Cambridge, ‘which a lot of people regard as a problem and feel that somehow if only they had, their life would have been better and easier’. Fry also knew that having been there was not an automatic route to fulfilment and happiness.
Fry and many other Cambridge alumni he spoke for who became famous, tended to feel that instantly, from the start, they had superiority conferred upon them – as if when they walked around a corner everyone hopped into their orbit and behaved as if they were the only live person around. ‘It is not an uncommon adolescent vision. Everyone else is a kind of extra…’
Yet as with Peter Hall, they sometimes had the haunting feeling that they never did anything really worthwhile.
Provincial repertory companies with their weekly or fortnightly change of repertoire, selected from West End hits, well-made plays from the 1930s and classics, gave rich training and experience to their mainly young members. Ian applied to, and chose from, three companies who offered him work. He started at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on £18 10s a week, just over half the working man’s average wage. This was a step above Derby Playhouse and Hornchurch Repertory, which had also offered him jobs, but hardly up to the prestigious level of Derek Jacobi, who, narrowly missing Peter Hall’s new Stratford company with a bungled audition, had gone straight into the pedigree classical fold of Birmingham Rep, quickly rising to leading roles. As Ian put it, ‘he went off in glory again as expected, joined the prime company in the regions, Birmingham Rep.’ There is again a touch of the disingenuous self-putdown in the aged McKellen who says this.
Ian, a slow-progress stickler, learnt and improved through a series of modest roles, starting with William Roper, Sir Thomas More’s son-in-law, thoughtful and loyal, in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Ian lived parsimoniously on Co-op food discounted for actors, and in digs in Corporation Street. His theatrical fare was humdrum, and among a hefty ration of potboilers Ian kept in his hand with old men, with grey hair, wrinkles and wigs as Tredwell, the butler in Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee. He played Mr Snodgrass in Mr Pickwick, and a viperous old First Weasel in Toad of Toad Hall. His Konstantin in The Seagull hardly knocked anyone for six.
But he struck up an acting partnership with Bridget Turner, an ambitious rising performer like himself. Bridget, who died in 2014, was an ebullient and witty all-rounder. Ian gathered acclaim with audiences and critics until Bridget one day noticed something. Suddenly he got all the juvenile leads. And plays were chosen to show off his talent. She had been slogging away for two years ‘without the same thing happening to me’ and she baulked at the way the season was being shaped round him. Yet when she saw him as Simon Mason, an army officer, in an all-male cast, in End of Conflict, and notably revealing bare knees, ‘I couldn’t take my eyes off Ian … Fascination, charisma, call it what you like, he had it even then.’
After McKellen’s fifteen wide-ranging roles in nine months in Coventry, even learning how to raise laughs in drawing-room comedy, Elspeth Cochrane, in her early days as a West End agent, twenty years older than Ian and with an acting and writing background, was seeking up-and-coming talent and snapped him up after seeing him in End of Conflict. She proposed him to Robert Chetwyn who had made a reputation running the Arts Theatre, Ipswich. Chetwyn upped his wage to twelve pounds, and offered adventurous parts over the next thirteen months at the Arts Theatre. Twenty-one plays, opening every other week, saw Ian playing mainly leading roles, which in the first months included David Copperfield and Henry V (which he had already done at school). Ian’s unconventional approach, agreed between him and Chetwyn, involved the army entering through the small auditorium. He imagined it was in the audience and knelt down at the front of the stage to whisper the lines ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more / Or close the wall up with our English dead.’ He felt, he told John Barton, ‘I got more because it was more real.’ Not only was this production acclaimed locally, but it became the ‘most notable of Ian’s parts in Ipswich, together with the eponymous role in John Osborne’s Luther,‘ Chetwyn said to Barratt, claiming that Ian was more straightforward in his emotional intensity, and ‘rather better than Albert [Finney] who created the role two years before; tricky stuff, and not a crowd-pleaser.’
Ian listened carefully to comment and criticism, querying everything, which some could find irritating: John Tydeman says he always asked what you thought as his director, but then contradicted it. His curiosity was endless, the strong curiosity of a child that he was to keep all his life. His recall later of the roles he played was phenomenal. Yet while his consistency of memory was a fairly constant trait, he could be very contradictory at the same time. He had a tendency to be showy, dishing up to journalists, friends or fellow actors, exactly, even cunningly, what they wanted to hear. Like Jacobi, who was even more emphatic on the subject, Ian was dismissive of drama school and specialist training. He could voice equally the opposite opinion. To newcomer Nickolas Grace, with whom he acted at the time, who was just out of the Central School of Speech and Drama, Ian one day said that he himself really regretted not having been to drama school. Grace tells me in 2019 how Ian had ‘seen me doing my Litz Pisk and Cicely Berry movement and voice warm-ups alone on stage and how important they were to me.’ Yet Ian had had specialist voice training, admittedly less formal, and intense fight coaching with Barton, who was as Nunn says of him, ‘an extremely dangerous sword-fighter’, probably one of the best fight directors the theatre ever had. He had had three years’ leading roles, which no drama school could ever offer or match (for there is no star system at drama schools, where roles must be shared). Off-stage Ian was already delivering the self-humbling chameleon, contradicting himself sometimes as a result.
For the moment, with a steady partner who visited him frequently, and spending the occasional weekend with family and friends while in stable employment, he enjoyed a fruitful life, apparently only feeling disrupted and prone to frustration when he had to play small roles, especially in Shakespeare.
At twenty-four, Ian’s prospects could not fail to be expanding rapidly as he went from strength to strength. His agent fixed him to leave Chetwyn and join the Nottingham Playhouse company in its newly built theatre under the aegis of John Neville, who was tipped to become prestigious in theatre annals as the new Richard Burton or Peter O’Toole. But as the sharply ambitious and precocious Ian must in time have noted, he could be quickly forgotten over a longer time-span as a stage actor without any serious screen fame to count on.