Lord of the Rings star Sir Ian McKellen confirms he will reprise his role as Gandalf in the new Middle Earth blockbuster
Hopes of the star ever uttering his character’s iconic line, “You shall not pass” again looked bleak last summer, after Sir Ian fell from a West End stage in a freak accident.
Now recovered, he plans to start work on the fourth Rings movie, The Hunt for Gollum – to be filmed in New Zealand next May and directed by Gollum star Andy Serkis.
Sir Ian, 86, says: “Next year, I’m talking about going back to Middle Earth and reprising a little bit of Gandalf, I am not slowing down.
“Well, I am in the sense that however hard you are working on a film, it’s not as hard work as being in the theatre or, as I now realise, anywhere near as dangerous.”
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Bouncing back after he tripped and fell into the front row of an audience during a performance of Player Kings at the Noel Coward Theatre in London last June, fortunately, Sir Ian escaped serious injury.
Protected by a padded fat suit he was wearing for the role of obese knight John Falstaff in the Shakespearean adaptation, he fractured a wrist and sprained his neck. “In the middle of a performance one night, my foot caught in a chair,” he recalls. “As I tried to shake it off with the other foot, standing on a newspaper, I started to glide on the polished surface of the stage, inevitably towards the audience.
“I think if I had been a bit younger, I might have jumped up or sat down or something to stop it. There was something in my head that was saying, ‘This is the end’. But it was the end of that production for me. I fell into the lap of someone on the front row. And thanks to that lap, and thanks to the padding I was wearing, I did very little damage, but I thought I was a goner.”
Speaking about his colourful life at the Two Brewers gay bar in Clapham, south west London, Sir Ian says he led a subdued existence, focussing on his acting ambitions, while studying English at the University of Cambridge. He explains: “It wasn’t until I came out aged 49 that I began to discover the gay life of London. I mean, my gay life was living with a series of partners very happily and openly.
“Everybody knew I was gay, who knew me. But I didn’t go out, probably because I was working too hard. All through the 1960s, when everyone else was supposed to be having fun in swinging London, I didn’t know anything about it. I was just busy getting on with being an actor.”
Born in Burnley, Lancashire, Sir Ian’s background remains extremely important to him. His passion for the stage was inspired by his parents, Margery and Denis and his older sister Jean, who took him to cinemas and theatres around Wigan, where he lived until he was 12. He remembers: “My father was a civil engineer, a borough engineer of Wigan and later Bolton. So I lived in both those towns in Greater Manchester.
“My sister, five years older than me, was the one who took me to the theatre, but my parents loved going to the theatre, rather than the cinema. In fact, the cinemas in Wigan were flea pits. But in Bolton there were three professional theatres. And one had a repertory company, which did a different play every week. Another one did opera, ballet, big pantomime, and the Grand Theatre, my favourite, was variety with a different bill each week.”
His mother’s death from breast cancer when he was 12 profoundly influenced his life – making him anxious about affection. “It’s still there,” he says of his loss. “If I’ve had a break up in a relationship I feel it. I think that’s because of the loss of my mother. I used to have a dream that she wasn’t really dead at all. And they were wonderful dreams, meeting her again. My father married again quite quickly, I think partly to give me a mother figure, and Gladys arrived, my stepmother. She lived till she was 100. My father died far too young. And then my sister died before she was 70. “
Describing his upbringing as Christian, he adds: “We were nice to each other. We were nice to other people. And generosity was in the air. We weren’t very rich, but we never wanted for anything.” Encouraged to fulfil his acting ambitions at his “wonderful” school in Bolton, Sir Ian has since won a Tony, six Olivier awards, a Golden Globe and nominations for five BAFTAs plus two Oscar nods for Gods and Monsters in 2001 and for Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001.
His film credits are rich and varied, incorporating everything from X-Men to Cats, Mr Holmes, The Da Vinci Code and starring alongside Robert Downey Jnr in his 1996 movie Restoration. He recalls Robert’s well-publicised drug problems, saying: “I don’t know what drugs he was on, but he was on an awful lot of them and yet functioning perfectly well and acting brilliantly.” He adds, with relief: “He got out of it. And now, of course, he’s a hugely successful film star”.
Undoubtedly Sir Ian’s proudest moment came in 1991, when he was knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II. Sir Ian, who co-founded the gay rights charity Stonewall in 1989, says: “I’ll always be proud that I got my knighthood after I’d come out. Derek Jarman, who had been out long before me and saw me as a latecomer to the cause, thought I really shouldn’t accept a knighthood from Margaret Thatcher. But others advised me differently and said, ‘No, get the knighthood and then use it.’ It is true that if you’re on a campaign and you want to reach people, to have a title, I’m afraid, helps.”
Despite his campaigning, Sir Ian says he struggled with his sexuality in his early years, and had recurring dreams about “murdering himself.” Fortunately, his fears evaporated when he came out publicly on BBC Radio 3 in January 1988. He says: “The person I’d killed or thought I’d killed was myself. I worked out. And I deserved punishment for that. But now I’m out and Ian McKellen is alive. There’s no need for that dream. Why wasn’t I out before, you might think? Well, I didn’t feel there was any need to be. I was living openly with men.
“Everybody knew I was gay. I never hid it from anybody, except that bit of coming out that most people don’t have to bother with, which is talking to the press about being gay.” He chose radio to declare his sexuality, thinking “a lot of people would listen.” He adds: “I said, ‘Well, I think I call myself a homosexual.’”
Out, proud and looking forward to the future, work remains at the forefront of Sir Ian’s life. Alongside his Rings comeback, he is involved in a film adaptation of his former West End play Frank and Percy, charting an unexpected relationship between a widowed schoolteacher and an elder statesman. It will also star Sir Stephen Fry, Dame Joanna Lumley, Baby Reindeer star Jessica Gunning, Alan Cumming and Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa.
Letting slip about the project, Sir Ian says: “Nobody else knows this. We have green-lit a film written by Martin Sherman, who is the author of many other wonderful gay plays. It’s about two old geezers, one me and Roger Allam, in the play that we did at Windsor a year ago. It is about two old guys, walking dogs who meet and fall in love. It’s a wonderful, very English comedy. It’s going to be directed by my ex, Sean Mathias, who directed the play, and that’ll be a lovely reunion for me.”
Happy with life professionally and personally, Sir Ian is enjoying the irreverence that comes with old age, He says: “When I was young, I had a desperate need to prove, a desperate need for validation. And as I grow older, that matters less and less and less.”
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