Ian McKellen, the actor who keeps walking back onto the stage

Ian McKellen

Photo: Raph_PH / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 25, 1939 Burnley, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Awards	Tony Award · Laurence Olivier · Golden Globe · SAG Award · European Film · Knight Bachelor · Companion of Honour

Most actors who had played a wizard for Peter Jackson and a mutant for Marvel would be allowed to stop. Ian McKellen keeps choosing the harder room. This month he opens in Lear, a reworking of Shakespeare’s tragedy in the first season of the rebuilt Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, where the cheapest seat costs ten pounds. When he played the king at Chichester, he said it was likely to be his last big Shakespearean part. He is playing it again anyway.

That contradiction runs through the whole career. To most of the planet McKellen is a grey beard and a staff, or a helmet and a grudge against humanity. To the British theatre he is a grammar-school boy from Lancashire who learned Shakespeare from amateur companies in Wigan and Bolton, became a mainstay of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and reached Hollywood only when most of his contemporaries were slowing down. The fame arrived late and from an unexpected direction, and he has spent it ever since on the stage.

Burnley is where he was born, on 25 May 1939, but Wigan is where he grew up: the family moved there when he was four months old, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, and on to Bolton in 1951 after his father was promoted. His sister Jean took him to his first Shakespeare, a Twelfth Night staged by the Wigan Little Theatre amateurs. He acted at Bolton School and at Bolton Little Theatre, then won a scholarship to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, to read English. In three years with the Marlowe Society he appeared in 23 plays.

His professional debut came at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in 1961, and by 1965 he was in Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic. The breakthrough arrived in 1969 with the Prospect Theatre Company, playing Shakespeare’s Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II. Through the 1970s he anchored the Royal Shakespeare Company; his Macbeth at Stratford in 1976, opposite Judi Dench and directed by Trevor Nunn, was later adapted for television. On Broadway he played Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and won the Tony Award for best actor in a play.

The decisive turn of the 1980s happened off stage. In 1988, on the BBC radio programme Third Ear, hosted by the conservative journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, he came out publicly as gay while Parliament was debating Section 28, the measure that barred local authorities from promoting homosexuality. The following year he co-founded Stonewall, the LGBT rights lobby group. In 1991 he was knighted for services to the performing arts, and in 2008 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality. His two long relationships, with the history teacher Brian Taylor and later with the director Sean Mathias, both belong to those decades; Mathias has remained one of his most frequent directors.

Cinema took him seriously only in his fifties. He co-wrote and starred in Richard III, moving Shakespeare’s tyrant into a fascist 1930s Britain, and won the European Film Award for best actor. Bryan Singer directed him in Apt Pupil, and Bill Condon cast him as James Whale, the gay director of Frankenstein, in Gods and Monsters, which brought an Academy Award nomination for best actor. Within three years he was Magneto in Singer’s X-Men and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, a second Oscar nomination, this time for supporting actor. He returned to Gandalf in The Hobbit trilogy and to Magneto across the X-Men series until 2014.

The usual account of those years says a great classical actor took the franchise money and spent it on the theatre. The record is less tidy. Gandalf and Magneto are among his most exact screen performances, while several of his later choices landed badly. Tom Hooper’s Cats, in which he played Gus the Theatre Cat, was widely panned and lost money. The ITV sitcom Vicious, in which he and Derek Jacobi played a couple together for fifty years, was developed under the title Vicious Old Queens and leaned on broad camp for its laughs. His age-blind Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor in 2021, half a century after he first toured the part, was a provocation by design. The common thread is a refusal to be curated: he would rather risk a misfire than settle into being a national monument.

That instinct was tested in June 2024. Playing Falstaff in Player Kings at the Noël Coward Theatre, he fell off the front of the stage during a fight scene; the performance was abandoned, and he withdrew from the rest of the West End run and the tour on medical advice. At 85 it would have been an obvious place to stop. He went back to work instead. In Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, released in cinemas in 2026, he plays Julian Sklar, a reclusive painter whose unfinished canvases a younger artist, played by Michaela Coel, is hired to complete, and reviewers singled out his performance. In October Frank and Percy, Mathias’s film of Ben Weatherill’s play about two elderly dog walkers on Hampstead Heath whose friendship turns into something more, premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, with Roger Allam repeating his stage role opposite him.

The autumn has also brought a loss. Patrick Stewart, his partner on stage in Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land and a friend whose wedding McKellen officiated, died in October at 86, and McKellen’s tribute described a man who wore his heart on his sleeve.

The months ahead belong to both of his careers at once. In November he appears as Jacob Marley opposite Johnny Depp‘s Scrooge in Ti West’s Ebenezer, and Lear opens at the Yard on 17 November for a run until 2 January. In December he returns as Magneto in Avengers: Doomsday, his first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, alongside Stewart’s Professor X. Andy Serkis‘s The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, due in December 2027, brings back Gandalf next to Elijah Wood‘s Frodo.

The wizard will be back in cinemas soon enough. The more telling date is the one in Hackney Wick, where an actor who could fill any West End house has chosen a new theatre, tickets from ten pounds and a part he had already said goodbye to.

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Tags: actors, Avengers: Doomsday, Patrick Stewart, X-Men, Ian McKellen, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

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