Ian McKellen
Gentle Giant of the English Theatre 

Bringing Magic to The Stage 
By Michael Billington

Telegraph Sunday Magazine
14 February 1982 

Suggested as the natural successor to Olivier, Ian McKellen seems reluctant to acknowledge his real position in the theatre. 

Ian McKellen flinches slightly when you call him a star. The sharp humorous eyes look away. The strong Bolton-tinged voice takes on a harder edge. "Compared to some actors of my generation", he says, "I'm not in those terms very successful: think Alan Bates or John Hurt or Derek Jacobi. I've got the capacity to get work in the English theatre. But I don't have international status". 

It's an odd disclaimer coming from this 42-year-old actor who has scaled one theatrical peak after another. He conquered Edinburgh and London in the late sixties with famed double of Richard II and Edward II. His Royal Shakespeare Company Macbeth in 1976 was the finest since Olivier's. The Sunday Telegraph called it "a great and haunting performance". He has lately returned, badly winded, from a Tony-winning year on Broadway as Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. And his recent portrayal of D. H. Lawrence in Christopher Miles' new film. Priest of Love, looks set to win him more laurels when it opens in London this week. 

McKellen is a great actor: "no player of similar age", says critic Harold Hobson, "has such lustre, such interior excitement, such spiritual grace". But there is in him a hint of northern puritanism, or perhaps just plain commonsense, which makes him eschew the vulgarities of stardom. In New York he was embarrassed at being chauffered to work in a limousine. 

You can also see his disdain of ostentation in his new three-storey house in London's East End, which he shares with a friend. Sean Mathias. Backing on to the river at Limehouse, with a fine view of both pleasure steamers and a power station, it is elegant, spare, stripped-wood Victorian. The only real flourishes are a lightning-blue front door and a terracotta bust of Shakespeare which squats on his riverside balcony looking wistfully towards the site of the Globe Theatre. 

Off stage McKellen is analytical, modest, companionable: he will talk by the hour about theatre without once mentioning himself. But put him near a spotlight and you get that authentic hint of danger which George Cukor said was the sign of a great actor. He also has a chameleon-like ability to change aspect. He can use his large, muscular frame to become a gawky hobbledehoy; equally he can seem all lightness and grace. His Richard II started like a glassy-eyed deity on castors. His Macbeth, on the other hand, was sleek-eyed and slick-haired. Trevor Nunn, who has directed him many times at the RSC, says: "Ian is restless, curious, daring. He loves living dangerously". 

But how does he achieve his effects? His D. H. Lawrence in the film Priest of Love, with his cropped hair, sandy triangular beard and burning eyes, persuades you that you are looking at the real man. Was this the result of intense study?

"I feel half guilty that I didn't do much research", says McKellen. "and half indignant anyone should think it was necessary. I did plough through the rather stodgy book on which the film was based, and underlined a few things about Lawrence's appearance - all to do with how he sounded, how his eyes shone, how he walked. There was a phrase about him bounding into a room and I imagined he had a lot of surplus energy and a lot of things gnawing away at his innards. Because the film also deals with the illness that dogged him in the last years, I gave him a curved tubercular chest and made the centre of the man his lungs. But it wasn't enough to look like him. I also had to feel like him". 

Priest of Love left McKellen with an enormous appetite for making movies. "And one", he adds with needless pessimism, "which will clearly never be satiated". 

That remark springs out of the uncharacteristic fatigue which seized him when he got back from Broadway just before Christmas after a year of eight performances a week. He said he did not even have much interest in working and simply wanted to sleep all the time. Indeed, in his post-Amadeus tiredness, he sounded quite surprised to be reminded how much Shaffer's play and his performance had affected the Broadway audience. When, for instance, Salieri plotted one more dastardly move against Mozart, a woman cried out "Oh, no", to which McKellen replied with a wickedly malicious "Oh, yes". 

"New York's a wonderful town if you've got money and you're in a hit show. But being in a play in New York is actually rather like being in the village pantomime. Everybody knows it's on, who's in it and what they've done before. Half of them are hoping it's going to be a disaster and it usually is. Where a puritan like me gets worried is in wondering, after a certain time, what it's all for, who the audience is and where they've come from". 

The McKellen paradox is that his puritanism co-exists with a voluptuous delight in acting. The great moment in his Salieri came when he made the transition from crabbed age to glittering youth. In one single, sweeping movement he shed his old man's cloak, back to audience, and turned round - arms triumphantly aloft - to appear as a handsome, tall dark-wigged young man. That was the real McKellen: an actor unafraid of the big romantic gesture. But to find out where this comes from one has to dig back into McKellen's roots as a theatre-mad lad in the forties' north of England. 

His first theatrical memory is of seeing Peter Pan at the age of four: he was disappointed that the wires were so visible. The family moved to Wigan from Burnley where he was born, and then on to Bolton where his father was borough surveyor in charge of everything from sewerage to street lighting. 

There McKellen devoured weekly rep. and variety theatre: people like Jimmy James, Jimmy Wheeler, Suzette Tarri, Jewel and Warriss were part of his daily bread. He also haunted the backstage area. "I learned from these people that most performing is hard work and rehearsed technique: they were no more special than the audience off stage, but could come on and be magic". 

McKellen was never taught to act. He learned through watching and doing. Going up to Cambridge in 1958, hazily imagining he would be a teacher, he soon found himself sucked into the vortex of university theatre (along with Peter Cook, David Frost, Trevor Nunn and Corin Redgrave). But he did not realise he was destined to be an actor until one precise moment. "It was outside the stage door of the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, in 1959 when Richard Cottrell, whom I worked with later, congratulated me on a notice I'd had from Alan Dent in the News Chronicle for my Justice Shallow in Henry IV Part II. Richard said that would be very useful in getting my first job. Until then I hadn't thought I was good enough to be an actor. But at that exact moment I suddenly realised it was where I was heading". 

Even the young McKellen had the throat-grabbing quality of the spellbinder. Playing Aufidius to John Neville's Coriolanus in the opening production at the new Nottingham Playhouse in 1963, he leapt upon the body of the dead hero with a swooping cry of guilt and love. 

"Tyrone Guthrie, the director, had to drag that out of me. I can see him now at the dress rehearsal bouncing down the stalls stairs, clapping his hands and saying "If you're not going to do this properly and persuade the audience these people are superhuman, then we've been wasting our time. We're not going to think you're silly. You're looking more silly not doing it". 

"The other thing Guthrie taught me was that if you can speak 12 lines of blank verse in one breath, the audience will find it thrilling without knowing why. That production of Coriolanus was my acting school. It taught me that you had to measure up to what you were doing and convey to the audience that what they were seeing was something extraordinary". 

That passion for the extraordinary has remained McKellen's guiding principle, though it was some time before he displayed it again in the classics. In the London of the sixties he did a string of new plays. But popular awareness of his classic power came only in 1969 when he combined Shakespeare's Richard II with Marlowe's Edward II, first at the Edinburgh Festival and then in London. 

"The ineffable presence of God Himself enters into Mr McKellen's Richard", trumpeted Harold Hobson. And to this day audiences can remember how he unveiled the human being behind a figure steeped in ceremony. When he reached the key line, "I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends"', he made the last two words a cry of anguish full of pain and desolation. Coming to London with the two shows, however, he certainly did not lack friends. "I remember one heady evening in my dressing room at the Piccadilly when I introduced Noel Coward to Rudolf Nureyev. I suppose I'd arrived". 

Since then McKellen has devoted much of his energy to setting up new projects rather than to straight self-advancement. "He has a pioneering instinct", says Trevor Nunn, "a capacity for enthusing people, and enjoys the workaholic nature of administration. I think he likes organising and being on the telephone". Certainly he was the prime mover and driving force behind the Actors' Company, which was created in 1974 to give actors a controlling say in the choice of play, casting and director: an idea which bore fruit in several fine productions. "I only left", says McKellen, "because I got fed up playing small parts. I was also one of a minority that wanted the company to expand. If that happened, I'd have stayed". 

Instead, he joined the RSC in 1975 to play an exhausting string of lead roles including Dr Faustus, the Marquis of Keith, Face in The Alchemist, Romeo, Leontes and his celebrated Macbeth. Although he felt that joining the RSC was like "coming home", what gave him as much pleasure as any- thing was not the star roles but setting up a small-scale touring company. For six months in 1978 this RSC commando unit, organised from scratch by McKellen, took productions of The Three Sisters and Twelfth Night round 26 towns, playing in all kinds of weathers, in all kinds of halls to all kinds of audiences. "It was", says McKellen, "the most enjoyable thing I've ever done". 

But after Amadeus and Priest of Love where does he go next? Judi Dench, who recently did a reading with him at the Lyric, Hammersmith, says: "After you've done something fulfilling, it's always difficult to know what to do afterwards. I would work with him any time: he's a very intelligent man, very exploratory and there's always a terrific sense of fun about". 

For the moment McKellen's only professional commitment is to make a film for television, Walter, based on two books by novelist David Cook. He still, in fact, is in the process of unwinding after America: decorating his new house, cooking, seeing friends, catching up. 

Temporarily his hunger for work is in abeyance. But a whole range of parts awaits his urgent attention (Coriolanus, Iago, Hotspur, the Master Builder, Uncle Vanya). Over the next decade, he seems sure to confirm his position as the natural heir to the Olivier throne. Wince at the term though he may, the Burnley boy will go on being a star.