Ian McKellen

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ian McKellen was nine years old when his main Christmas present arrived: a fold-away wood and bakelite Victorian theatre from Pollocks Toy Theatres, complete with cardboard scenery and wire-pushed cut-outs of Cinderella and of Laurence Olivier performing Hamlet. That gift, given to a child in Bolton in the late 1940s, may have been the most consequential toy ever unwrapped on a Lancashire street. The boy who played with it would go on to win a Tony Award, six Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe, and nominations for two Academy Awards. He would be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He would play Gandalf and Magneto for a combined stretch of more than two decades. And in 1988, he would come out as gay on live radio in a moment that would reshape British public life.

  How does a preacher's son from Burnley become a British cultural icon? What drove a classical stage actor to spend his fifties and sixties conquering Hollywood? And how did the same man who took Shakespeare to Edinburgh's festival stages end up co-founding one of the most influential LGBT rights organisations in the world? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Burnley to Cambridge

  ›

  Denis Murray McKellen, Ian's father, was a civil engineer, a lay preacher, and a man of Protestant Irish and Scottish descent. The household in which Ian grew up was Christian but non-orthodox, shaped by what McKellen later described as "low nonconformist Christians who felt that you led the Christian life in part by behaving in a Christian manner to everybody you met." That ethic of engaged decency would surface repeatedly across his life, from the stage to Parliament's lobbying corridors.

  When Ian was four months old, his family moved from Burnley to Wigan, just before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. The wartime years left a mark he never entirely shed. Asked about his calm reaction to the attacks of the 11th of September 2001, McKellen replied: "Well, darling, you forget - I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old." His mother died of breast cancer when he was twelve. His father died when he was twenty-five. Grief arrived early and often in his family.

  The theatre arrived early too. His parents took him to Peter Pan at the Manchester Opera House when he was three. His sister Jean, five years his senior, took him to Twelfth Night at Wigan Little Theatre and then to Macbeth and to A Midsummer Night's Dream - the role of Bottom played by Jean McKellen herself, who acted, directed and produced amateur theatre until her death.

  At eighteen, McKellen won a scholarship to St Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature. Over three years at Cambridge, he appeared in twenty-three plays with the Marlowe Society. By March 1959 he was performing Justice Shallow in Henry IV alongside fellow students Trevor Nunn and Derek Jacobi. He had already been directed by Peter Hall, John Barton, and Dadie Rylands - names that would dominate British theatre for the next half century and who would shape the arc of McKellen's own career.

• 3. The Classical Stage

  ›

  McKellen's first professional appearance came in 1961 at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, playing Roper in A Man for All Seasons. After four years in regional repertory, he made his West End debut in A Scent of Flowers, described at the time as a "notable success." His Broadway debut followed in The Promise in 1965, the same year he joined Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company at the Old Vic.

  The breakthrough that defined his early reputation came at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969, when he performed the lead roles in Shakespeare's Richard II and Christopher Marlowe's Edward II for the Prospect Theatre Company. The Edward II production, directed by Toby Robertson, caused what contemporaries described as a storm of protest over its staging of the homosexual king's death.

  Through the 1970s, McKellen became a fixture of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, accumulating leading Shakespearean roles at a pace few actors matched. From 1973 to 1974, he toured the United Kingdom and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in productions of The Way of the World, The Wood Demon, and King Lear. In 1976, he played the title role in Macbeth at Stratford opposite Judi Dench, and Iago in Othello, in productions directed by Trevor Nunn - both of which were later adapted into television films by the same director.

  His five Olivier Award wins for stage work tell part of the story: Pillars of the Community in 1977, The Alchemist in 1978, Bent in 1979, Wild Honey in 1984, and Richard III in 1991. But the win that came with a transatlantic price tag may have mattered most. In 1979, he played Antonio Salieri in the Broadway transfer of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, a National Theatre production that had originally starred Paul Scofield. The transfer co-starred Tim Curry as Mozart and Jane Seymour as Constanze. New York Times critic Frank Rich described McKellen's portrayal of Salieri's descent into madness as delivered "in dark notes of almost bone-rattling terror." For that performance, McKellen received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1981.

• 4. Hollywood's Late Arrival

  ›

  McKellen had been taking film roles since 1969, when he appeared in three separate films including A Touch of Love and Alfred the Great. His first leading film role came in 1980, playing the writer D. H. Lawrence in Priest of Love. But it was not until the 1990s that cinema took him seriously as a leading presence.

  The catalyst was a project McKellen largely built himself. For the 1995 film Richard III, he wrote the screenplay, served as executive producer, and played the title role. The film, directed by Richard Loncraine, reimagined Shakespeare's play in a 1930s fascist Britain. When filming ran over budget, McKellen returned his fifty-thousand-pound fee to complete the shoot. Washington Post critic Hal Hinson called his performance a "lethally flamboyant incarnation." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars, writing that McKellen "brings to Shakespeare's most tortured villain a malevolence we are moved to pity." The Academy Award and BAFTA nominations followed; he won the European Film Award for Best Actor.

  Three years later came Gods and Monsters, the Bill Condon-directed period drama in which McKellen played the director James Whale. The Academy Award nomination for Best Actor he received was ultimately won by Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful. But the role established a working relationship with Condon that would produce three more collaborations over the following two decades.

  In 1998, McKellen played Tsar Nicholas II in the HBO film Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, receiving a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor in a series, miniseries, or television film.

  The roles that made him a worldwide presence arrived almost simultaneously in 1999. Bryan Singer cast him as the supervillain Magneto in X-Men, which would lead to appearances across the franchise through 2014 and, according to sources, again in 2026. At the same time, while filming on the first X-Men picture, Peter Jackson cast him as the wizard Gandalf in his trilogy adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which would release between 2001 and 2003. McKellen won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for The Fellowship of the Ring, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the same film. He then reprised Gandalf across all three Hobbit films between 2012 and 2014.

• 5. Coming Out and Stonewall

  ›

  McKellen had let his sexual orientation be known to colleagues in theatre early in his career. What changed in 1988 was a piece of legislation. The British Parliament was then considering Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which proposed prohibiting local authorities from promoting homosexuality as "a kind of pretended family relationship." McKellen chose to come out publicly in response, while appearing on the BBC Radio programme Third Ear, hosted by the conservative journalist Peregrine Worsthorne. He has since said he was influenced in that decision by his friends, among them the author Armistead Maupin.

  The personal dimension of that moment had a specific texture. McKellen's stepmother Gladys was a Quaker. After he came out to her, he recalled her response: "Not only was she not fazed, but as a member of a society which declared its indifference to people's sexuality years back, I think she was just glad for my sake that I wasn't lying any more."

  From that public act came Stonewall, the LGBT rights lobby group McKellen co-founded in the United Kingdom, named after the Stonewall riots. He went on to serve as patron of Pride London, Oxford Pride, LGBT History Month, GayGlos, LGBT Foundation, and FFLAG.

  His activism extended to direct confrontation with political opponents. In 1988, he visited Michael Howard, then Environment Secretary, to lobby against Section 28. Howard declined to change his position but requested an autograph for his children. McKellen agreed and wrote, "Fuck off, I'm gay." In 2003, McKellen recounted this episode publicly on Have I Got News For You.

  He took his advocacy internationally too, causing a notable incident in Singapore when he asked a morning-show interviewer on live television to recommend him a gay bar. The programme ended immediately. In the 1990s, he toured a one-man show called A Knights Out about coming out as a gay man. A Los Angeles Times critic praised him as "a natural storyteller, an admirable human being and a hands-on activist." The Freedom of the City of London was awarded to him on the 30th of October 2014, with the City's Lord Mayor citing him as both an exceptional actor and a tireless campaigner for equality.

• 6. The Private Life

  ›

  McKellen's first partner was Brian Taylor, a history teacher from Bolton, with whom his relationship began in 1964 and lasted eight years, the two of them living in Earls Terrace, Kensington. In 1978, at the Edinburgh Festival, he met the director Sean Mathias. That relationship, which Mathias later described as tempestuous in part because of tensions between McKellen's theatrical success and his own less established career, lasted until 1988. The two remained close enough that Mathias directed McKellen in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2009, and the pair entered into a business partnership with Evgeny Lebedev to purchase the lease of The Grapes public house in Narrow Street. As of 2005, McKellen had been living in Narrow Street, Limehouse, for more than twenty-five years.

  He is an atheist. In the late 1980s, he lost his appetite for most meat and has followed a mainly pescetarian diet since. On his shoulder he carries a tattoo of the Elvish number nine, written in J. R. R. Tolkien's constructed script of Tengwar, marking his role as one of the nine companions of the Fellowship of the Ring. Most of the other actors who played Fellowship members share the same tattoo; John Rhys-Davies did not get one, though his stunt double Brett Beattie did.

  In 2006, McKellen was diagnosed with prostate cancer. By 2012, he wrote on his blog that the cancer was contained and that he had not needed any treatment. In early 2013, he registered as a marriage officiant so that he could preside over the wedding of his friend and X-Men co-star Patrick Stewart to the singer Sunny Ozell.

  His great-great-grandfather Robert J. Lowes, a detail McKellen has drawn attention to, was an activist whose campaign for a Saturday half-holiday in Manchester contributed to what became the modern five-day work week - making Lowes, in the family's own framing, a grandfather of the modern weekend.

• 7. A Career Still Running

  ›

  In April 2024, McKellen played John Falstaff in Player Kings, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, at the Noel Coward Theatre in London's West End, opposite Richard Coyle and Toheeb Jimoh. The production received rave reviews. On the 17th of June, during a fight scene, McKellen fell off the front of the stage and called for assistance. The performance was cancelled and, on medical advice, he withdrew from the remaining West End dates and the scheduled tour to Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich, and Newcastle upon Tyne.

  The 2025 Christmas pantomime at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington included a video cameo of McKellen as the dog Toto in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz-lington. He is set to reprise Magneto in Avengers: Doomsday in 2026, and is attached to return as Gandalf in the Andy Serkis-directed The Hunt for Gollum in 2027.

  At his eightieth birthday in 2019, McKellen performed a one-man show at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End titled Ian McKellen on Stage: With Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others and YOU. The show toured the UK and Ireland, with proceeds going to local venues and charities. That production earned him his sixth Olivier Award, collected in 2020. More than six decades after the Christmas gift of a bakelite toy theatre in Bolton, McKellen was still performing - and still drawing audiences into worlds built entirely from story and voice.