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It may seem unkind to mention it, but Burnley, Lancashire, is not exactly a crucible of talent. Its major claim to fame in recent years has been as a crucible of racial tension. The place erupted in ugly and angry clashes between skinheads and Asians in 2001 and the National Front has enough support to hold four of the 45 seats on the borough council.
The list of the town's famous citizens won't ring many bells down this end of the world but one name does stand out: in Burnley 68 years ago, one Ian Murray McKellen drew his first breath.
Filmgoers, particularly of the culturally myopic North American variety, may regard the actor as something of a newcomer. In the X-Men films, in which he plays Magneto, the crash-helmeted leader of the malevolent Brotherhood; in The Da Vinci Code, where his character, Sir Leigh Teabing, reveals the theory that Christ fathered a child; not to mention a fantasy trilogy made in Wellington, in which he played the white-maned wizard Gandalf; he has become something of a Big Star.
But even if they don't realise it in Peoria, Illinois, McKellen is far from being a newcomer. For a start he has about three dozen other film credits, even if only a few are lead roles as the Frankenstein director James Whale in 1998's wonderful Gods and Monsters is a standout. And Sir Ian, as he is correctly known, is the reigning monarch of the English theatre, the inheritor of the mantle of the 20th-century knights, Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson and Redgrave.
Now, at last, he has shouldered the burden all great Shakespearean male actors must finally take up as the title role in the greatest of the tragedies, King Lear.
The Royal Shakespeare Company production opened at Stratford-upon- Avon in early April for a season that closes today and for two months went unreviewed. Director Trevor Nunn asked the critics to stay away after one of the main actors was injured in an fall from a bicycle and the show went on with an understudy. The reviews finally appeared at the beginning of this month and, if the consensus was warm rather than wildly enthusiastic, most critics said McKellen's performance was a triumph.
The show, performed in repertory with Chekhov's The Seagull now goes on the road, via Singapore and Australia before coming to Wellington and Auckland in August.
McKellen's casting as Lear is a reminder that this latter-day movie star is a classical actor of noble pedigree. He made his name in the late 1960s with a performance as Richard II that Harold Hobson, the Sunday Times theatre critic, said was "touched by the ineffable presence of God" and prompted Gielgud to send him a telegram of congratulation. His Romeo (to Francesca Annisa's Juliet) and Macbeth (opposite a waspish Judi Dench) in the 1970s are the stuff of legend. A 1990 Richard III, directed by Richard Eyre, did a world tour and he reprised the role in Richard Loncraine's striking 1995 film version in which he played the scheming Duke of Gloucester as a fascist thug.
But always there is Lear. The veteran theatre critic for the Guardian, Michael Billington, remarked when the production was announced that an actor's decision about when to play the king is "a balancing act."
"You can't play it until you're old enough," he said. "But if you leave it too late, you won't have the power to get through it. I should think now is about right."
It's a dilemma McKellen acknowledged when he spoke to me by telephone from Stratford in the middle of the British season.
"Paul Scofield, who was a very celebrated King Lear, played it when he was 40 and Donald Wolfit [the actor/manager who inspired Albert Finney's character in the marvellous film 1983 film The Dresser] first played it at 42 and was still doing it in his 60s.
"Lear, we have to remember, is over 80 years old and if it the actor can't convince the audience of this, they're going to miss a lot of the story because it is certainly about an old man. But I don't think I am giving away any of the plot to say that the last thing he does just before he dies is to kill somebody. So he's not an old man in a wheelchair.
"So for the actor to be younger than the character is perfectly proper. But the main problem is the experience that it is useful to have before tackling a part that is written in the way it is. It's not that the words are difficult but that the poetry is so great. Fortunately, I have done quite a lot of Shakespeare."
The phrase is the kind of elegant understatement by which truly great actors signal their greatness. And it's another way of saying that this Lear has been a long time coming.
McKellen's earliest memory of theatre, a production of Peter Pan, is of being underwhelmed. "For one thing, it wasn't a real crocodile," he later recalled, "and I could see the wires". But as a teenager he would go each summer to his school's camp at Stratford-upon-Avon.
They stayed in a field on the river bank at Tiddington, half an hour by punt from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and he devoured evening performances by Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft and Gielgud.
"I never dreamed I would be allowed to work on the same stage," he says, "and that is why it is such a pleasure to be working with the RSC in the 30th anniversary year of their touring programme. It feels like coming home."
Despite his being a big star on stage and screen, McKellen is not a man who has lost touch with the fans who put him where he is. He posts regularly on his busy, not to say garish, website, www.mckellen.com, which he describes as the substitute for the autobiography he will never write. He writes long think pieces, and answers questions from young actors and even school pupils doing Shakespeare assignments.
And immediately after his Da Vinci Code performance, he fulfilled a lifelong ambition by taking a role in that most eccentric of English entertainments, the pantomime. As Widow Twankey in Aladdin at the Old Vic, variously got up in neon furs and an Abba-style jumpsuit, he impressed reviewers with his "infectious glee" as he "delivered saucy one-liners with lubricious relish."
In 2005, in 10 episodes of Coronation Street that didn't play here until this year, he chewed up a turn as conman and scribbler Mel Hutchwright. He remarked at the time that this proved he was of less than stellar stuff: "If I was a star," he said, "it would be impossible to go off and do Coronation Street. So I guess I am not a star."
It may seem like the modesty is false but there is something very winning about it. In interview, McKellen is quite devoid of airs and graces, a man concerned always to talk about "the work" rather than himself.
He plays to perfection the role of the professional, always praising the rest of the company ("The play has about a dozen main roles and it never works unless the Lear is surrounded by a great group of actors") and underlining the love of this country that he repeated whenever he was interviewed about The Lord of the Rings. ("I told them when I took the part, and this is no bullshit: 'If we are not going to New Zealand, I'm not playing King Lear'.")
McKellen's acting achievements alone might be seen as a generous repayment of the debt owed by those whom fortune disproportionately blesses with talent.
But another major strand of the actor's life has been as an activist. He has been a trenchant and outspoken critic of the British involvement in Iraq. He has lent his voice to protests about arts funding. And most vocally, he has been an advocate for gay rights.
It was a role he assumed quite suddenly and dramatically while being interviewed on BBC Radio 4 in 1988. During an on-air discussion of the Thatcher Government's proposal to ban local authorities from "promoting" gay lifestyles. McKellen grew tired of his cointerviewee's repeated references to gays as "them".
"Let's not talk in the abstract," he said. "Let's talk about me."
"I suppose," he says now, "that I had been working up to it for the previous 49 years. I had always been out to my friends and employers. But I had never talked to the press about it and I hadn't talked to certain members of my family about it." [He has often said that he regretted not telling his parents before they died].
"So I was in one sense still in the closet. But then the door swung open and I spoke out loud and it was the best thing I've ever done - except for my acting of course."
There is more than a trace of the zealot about McKellen's gay activism. Playwright Alan Bennett, whom McKellen famously challenged to say whether he was gay or not, told me in January that he wanted to "live in a world where [my] being gay is just taken for granted; that would be a civilised world" but McKellen is unsurprisingly less compromising: "Feeling that it's appropriate to disguise something so central to your nature means that you yourself are homophobic; that you don't like yourself."
On his website, he has posted a piece he wrote when entertainer Michael Barrymore came out in 1995: "The journey is not always as painful as you fear," it says, "[but it] will not be complete, until there is no one in the world, whom you know or whom you are to meet, to whom you would ever lie."
These days McKellen acknowledges much progress has been made. But it depends where you live of course.
"If you live in Iran you may not want to let people know that you are gay because you might be hanged. Just before we come to Australia and New Zealand I am going to be in Singapore, where it is illegal to be in a gay relationship, illegal, can you imagine it, to be in love. What am I going to say? I don't know but one has to be true to oneself.
"Constantly I try, when it's appropriate, to speak up. I don't wave a banner all around but there are times when you have to carry a banner."
I had hoped to get through a conversation with McKellen without raising the matter of that trilogy. It was not simply a bloody-minded sort of resolve, but rather born of the sense that he may be sick of The Lord of the Rings.
But the actor, who says he once wanted to be a journalist, shoots that down.
"Tell them down there," he bellows, as our conversation winds to an end, "that Gandalf is back and I can't wait. Peter Jackson's going to give us a party and it will be wonderful to see old friends and make some new ones."
He sounds, it must be said, like a man having the time of his life and not the figure I'd seen depicted in some profiles in the UK papers, slightly miffed that he had not had the film success of contemporaries such as Anthony Hopkins.
"Not at all," he says. "I suppose I always wondered why I wasn't asked to be in films but I think the answer to that is that I was always too busy in the theatre. I was busy playing Hamlet and Romeo and Macbeth and in lots of new plays. That's the throw of the dice. If I had died never having made a movie, I would died a very happy actor.
"But now in my late 60s I do seem to have the choice of doing films, theatre, radio, TV. The lot. I couldn't be happier.I love it all.
"And I hope the producers of Shortland Street will be in the audience when I get to Auckland, because that's one show that I've not yet been in."
* The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of King Lear is at the Westpac St James Theatre, Wellington, on August 11 and 12, and at the ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, August 18-25.
* The Seagull is at the Westpac St James Theatre, Wellington, August 13-14 and at the ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre from August 19-26.
- Canvas, NZHERALD
