Ian McKellen

Ian Murray McKellen was born on May 25, 1939, in Burnley, Lancashire, a few months before Britain entered the Second World War ^[1]. His father, Denis McKellen, worked as a civil engineer, and the family belonged to a Nonconformist Protestant tradition with lay preachers among McKellen's forebears. The household soon moved to Wigan, where the young McKellen spent his wartime childhood, and later to Bolton, the town he has most often described as home ^[2].

His mother, Margery, died of breast cancer when he was twelve, a loss he has spoken about publicly in later life ^[3]. At Bolton School, a grammar school with a strong dramatic tradition, McKellen acted in student productions and attended performances by touring companies at local theatres. Trips to see plays in Stratford-upon-Avon deepened an early fascination with Shakespeare that would shape almost everything that followed ^[2].

In 1958 he won a scholarship to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he read English literature. Cambridge in those years was a remarkable nursery for British theatre: McKellen appeared in more than twenty undergraduate productions, sharing stages and audiences with contemporaries such as Derek Jacobi and future director Trevor Nunn ^[1]. He chose not to attend drama school, moving directly from university into the professional theatre.

McKellen made his professional debut in 1961 at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, in a production of A Man for All Seasons, and spent the following seasons learning his craft in regional repertory companies ^[1]. This apprenticeship, playing dozens of roles in quick succession, gave him the technical range that critics later remarked on. By 1964 he had reached the London stage, and in 1965 he joined Laurence Olivier's National Theatre company at the Old Vic ^[2].

His breakthrough came in 1969, when he played the title roles in Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II for the Prospect Theatre Company, performances that toured Britain and transferred to the West End ^[4]. Playing the two doomed kings in repertoire, sometimes on the same day, McKellen drew notices that placed him among the leading classical actors of his generation. The Edward II in particular attracted attention for its frank treatment of the king's love for Piers Gaveston, a subject rarely handled so directly on British stages at the time ^[4].

Through the 1970s he consolidated that standing. He co-founded the Actors' Company in 1972, an ensemble run on democratic lines in which every member received equal billing and pay, and then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company ^[2]. His Macbeth opposite Judi Dench, directed by Trevor Nunn in 1976 in the small studio space at Stratford, became one of the most celebrated Shakespeare productions of the era and was later preserved on television ^[4]. In 1979 he won his first Olivier Award, and in 1981 he took Broadway by storm as Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, winning the Tony Award for Best Actor ^[5].

Anyone asking who was Ian McKellen before Hollywood found him would get a simple answer from theatre historians: the foremost Shakespearean of his generation alongside a handful of peers. His stage catalogue includes Hamlet, Romeo, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Iago, King Lear and Prospero, a run of major roles matched by very few actors ^[2]. His one-man show Acting Shakespeare, which he performed around the world during the 1980s, earned him a Tony nomination and introduced his classical work to audiences far beyond Britain ^[5].

A landmark of his screen career arrived in 1995 with Richard III, a film he co-wrote and starred in, resetting Shakespeare's history play in an imagined fascist Britain of the 1930s ^[6]. Three years later he played the film director James Whale in Gods and Monsters, a performance that brought his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor ^[6]. Around the same time his portrayal of a Nazi war criminal in hiding in Apt Pupil (1998) showed a growing appetite among filmmakers for his screen presence.

Then came the two franchises that made his face familiar to hundreds of millions. In 2000 he first appeared as Magneto, the Holocaust survivor turned mutant revolutionary, in X-Men, a role he reprised in several sequels ^[1]. From 2001 to 2003 he played the wizard Gandalf in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Fellowship of the Ring, and he returned to the character for The Hobbit films between 2012 and 2014 ^[6]. Among Ian McKellen achievements, this double act is unusual: a classical actor in his sixties becoming the anchor of two of the most commercially successful film series ever made. He has collected, across his career, a Tony Award, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, along with two Oscar nominations ^[5].

McKellen is gay, and the story of his coming out is inseparable from British political history. In January 1988, during a BBC radio debate about Section 28, a proposed law banning local authorities from 'promoting' homosexuality, he stated publicly that he was gay, at the age of 49 ^[3]. He has often said that the decision, made in anger at the legislation, improved both his life and, he believes, his acting.

The following year he co-founded Stonewall, the lobbying group named after the 1969 New York riots, which became the United Kingdom's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights organisation ^[7]. He has campaigned since then for equal age of consent, the repeal of Section 28, and marriage equality, and he regularly visits schools in Britain to speak against homophobic bullying ^[7]. When he was knighted in 1991, some activists criticised him for accepting an honour from a government whose record on gay rights he opposed; McKellen answered that the knighthood recognised his acting but gave the campaign a louder voice ^[3].

His long relationships included one with Brian Taylor, a history teacher, from 1964 to 1972, and another with the theatre director Sean Mathias during the late 1970s and 1980s; McKellen and Mathias remained close collaborators afterwards, working together on stage productions and in business as co-owners, for a period, of The Grapes, a riverside pub in Limehouse, east London ^[3]. McKellen has lived for decades in a house overlooking the Thames in east London. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006, and has said the condition was managed without surgery ^[3].

Rather than easing into retirement, McKellen kept up a schedule in his seventies and eighties that younger actors might envy. In 2013 he appeared on Broadway in a celebrated double bill of Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land opposite his friend Patrick Stewart, a pairing the two repeated in London ^[5]. On television he starred with Derek Jacobi in the ITV sitcom Vicious (2013 to 2016), playing one half of an ageing gay couple, and he had earlier reached a huge streaming and broadcast audience as the villainous Number Two in the 1980s serial drama and in guest roles across British television ^[1].

His film work continued to mix scale and intimacy. He played the aged detective in Mr. Holmes (2015), imagining Sherlock Holmes at 93 struggling with memory, and voiced Cogsworth in Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017) ^[6]. In 2017 the documentary McKellen: Playing the Part surveyed his life using decades of archive footage and his own narration.

To mark his eightieth birthday he toured a one-man show, Ian McKellen on Stage, to eighty theatres across Britain in 2019, donating proceeds to theatre charities ^[5]. In 2021 he returned to Hamlet, a role he had first played in 1971, in an age-blind production at the Theatre Royal Windsor. In June 2024, while performing in Player Kings, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays in which he played Falstaff, he fell from the stage of a West End theatre during a fight scene; he was hospitalised briefly, withdrew from the run to recover, and later spoke about returning to work ^[8].

Any Ian McKellen biography has to reckon with two intertwined legacies, one theatrical and one civic. In the theatre, his career traces the whole arc of post-war British classical acting: the repertory apprenticeship, the National under Olivier, the RSC in its studio-theatre golden age, and the export of that tradition to Broadway and to film ^[2]. Directors and critics have singled out his ability to make dense verse sound like spontaneous thought, a skill honed over hundreds of performances and displayed to students in his televised masterclasses ^[4].

On screen, Gandalf and Magneto ensured that his voice and features became part of popular culture worldwide, and both roles carried more than genre weight. He has noted the resonance of playing Magneto, a survivor of persecution who refuses to trust his persecutors, as an openly gay man who spent half his life under laws that criminalised his identity ^[7]. Basic Ian McKellen facts, the birthdate in Burnley in 1939, the 1988 coming out, the knighthood in 1991 and the Companion of Honour in 2008, are studied now as markers in the history of gay public life in Britain as much as entries in a theatrical CV ^[1].

Stonewall's campaigning helped secure an equal age of consent in 2000, the repeal of Section 28 in 2003, and civil partnership and marriage legislation in the years that followed, changes McKellen lobbied for in person, including meetings with government ministers ^[7]. Generations of actors cite him as an influence, and his openness gave cover to performers who followed him out of the closet. He remains, in his ninth decade, a working actor: an unusual case of a national institution who never stopped taking the stage.