Sir Ian McKellen

Photo from Wiki.

In the August 27, 2007 issue of The New Yorker is a delightful profile of Sir Ian McKellen, one of England's great classical actors, written by John Lahr.

Although McKellen has played characters in "King Lear," only recently has he played the part of Lear himself. In September, he will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in playing Lear. Hmmm....How can I manage to see him? I'd love it. Lear is perhaps my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, because the playwright gets the family dynamics exactly right, especially when power and money are thrown into the mix. When Lear asks his daughters to expound on how they love him, you just know that he's going to come to a bad end.

Of McKellen's performance of Lear, Lahr says:

Later, enraged by Cordelia's refusal to match her sisters' encomiums, he held up the coronet that was to have been Cordelia's crown, turning it on its side so that it formed a large zero, then shouted through it to Cordelia, "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again."

Only the abstract of the profile is online, so I'm going to have to some typing.

Most recently McKellen played Gandalf the Grey, the wizard in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring". He's played many of the great Shakespearean roles, but he says Lear is the one of the most difficult he's done. Along with acting the classics, he's appeared low-brow movies and even taken on "The Simpsons" and "Saturday Night Live".

McKellan's family were freethinkers, but, as Lahr says:

...he never discussed his homosexuality at home. "You didn't lie in our house," he said. "That was hard for me because, in not talking about myself, I was lying. Is it any wonder that under that sort of pressure, day in day out, eventually you give in and say, 'All right, yes, I'm queer"? It's quite a small step from saying 'I am unusual' to saying 'I shouldn't be the way I am.' You invent your own homophobia. You hate yourself. And, oh, it hurts. I am still hurt by it.
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When he did come out publicly, he did so dramatically. In January, 1988, on a BBC radio show about the infamous Clause 28 - legislation that aimed to prohibit local authorities from publishing material condoning homosexuality or from referring to it in state schools as an acceptible life style - McKellen took part in a discussion with the right-wing columnist Peregrine Worsthorne, who kept referring to gays as "them." "Let's not talk in the abstract," McKellen said finally. "Let's not talk about them. Let's talk about me.

McKellen met with politicians to lobby against Clause 28, including Conservative Michael Howard, a fervid anti-gay spokesman. He got nowhere with Howard on Clause 28, but Howard asked for an autograph for his children. McKellen agreed, writing, "F**k off! I'm gay." Clause 28 passed, but was later repealed by New Labor.

McKellen was a key player in the formation of Stonewall, an organization to promote equal justice for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Not all gay activists were pleased with his prominence:

The filmmaker Derek Jarman, calling McKellen "Sir Thespian Knight", mocked his late arrival to the cause and Stonewall's intention to negotiate with what Jarman perceived as the enemy.

The profile is long, as those in The New Yorker are prone to be, and I meant to write more about the acting part of his life, but I can't copy the whole thing, can I? Here's how the post turned out. So be it.

Here are a few more morsels to chew on:

Stuck in the corner of the mirror in his dressing room at the theater, is a piece of paper with these words, "O Romeo, Romeo! Where the F**k Art Thou, Romeo?"

Early in the profile, Lahr quotes McKellen on the Queen's voyage on the Thames to celebrate the Millennium:

"One of the entertainments for the evening was going to be watching the Queen going upriver to the Millenium Dome," he recalled. "A really unattractive boat came chugging up the river. She was on City Cruises! If she hadn't been wearing lime green, one wouldn't have noticed. We wanted proper people rowing her up....I wanted her to do the job superbly."
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He recalled rushing out of the R.S.C's Aldwych Theatre to watch the Queen's Silver Jubilee parade in 1977: "No cars parked, no buses, no traffic. You're suddenly aware that the whole place is a set. You hear birds. Around the bend comes this car, unlike any other car I've ever seen. It's got glass all around. This car's going at ten miles an hour. Everything is unusual. Inside it, these two dolls clearly made up. I found myself waving. And what was I waving at? The two richest people in the country, actually. That's why it won't do when she comes up the Thames on City Cruises. Far too democratic."

McKellen's friend Armistead Maupin, tells the story of McKellen's devotion to his stepmother, Gladys, in her old age. Although, as a teen-ager, relations between McKellen and his step-mother were difficult, they became close in later years. She became senile, and McKellen visited her often, but Gladys was convinced that the only reason he visited was because he was having an affair with her maid. Finally, exasperated by his failure to convince her otherwise, he said, "Gladys, for heaven's sake, I'm gay." She said, "So they say."