Sir Ian McKellen received rave reviews for his performance in the title role of “King Lear,” but he’s quick to give credit where credit is due.
The playwright.
“Lear — it’s all there. It’s all pretty obvious what’s going on,” he said. “Although a psychiatrist reviewed the production and praised me for having clearly done my research into the particularity of Lear’s mental problem. I’ve done nothing of the sort. I’ve done no research whatsoever. I just played the part as it seemed to me the words wanted me to. And the brilliance was not mine, but Shakespeare’s. Read McKellen as ‘King Lear’ to the masses
In a trailer on the edge of a film set beneath an underpass in downtown Cape Town, Ian McKellen, 69, is musing about fame and death, and what the papers will say when he goes. “ ’GANDALF DIES,’ I expect,” he says. The thought tickles him. Not the dying part. The part about being a classical actor and having billions of fans, most of whom are 12. “When you spend as long as I have doing beautiful work which is only seen by a few thousand people, to be involved in popular entertainment without lessening one’s standards … that’s fairly appealing,” he says. “You become part of the culture.” It’s not that McKellen ever shied away from fame. On the contrary, he sought it out “to publicise myself to people who might employ me.” You might say he overachieved. “Now it’s … well, it’s gone well beyond that.” Ian McKellen: The Player
Ian McKellen has been thought of as one of the world’s great actors for more than half his life. But in the last decade, he has also transformed himself from a strict stage thespian – highly rated, seen by very few – into a big screen star.
He combines high art and mass appeal once more next year when filming beings on The Hobbit, a fourth movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, in which he will again appear as the great wizard Gandalf.
McKellen claims no great strategy for combining critical and commercial success. “How am I expected to make sense of a career which has basically been about me enjoying myself and hoping people would come to see me too?”
For the rest of the article click on the link. Time
Sir Ian McKellenSurprisingly for actors born within two years of each other in the neighbouring counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the 2000 blockbuster X-Men was only Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s second professional collaboration. Prior to that, they had shared a brief scene or two in the premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour in 1977, but had otherwise pursued independent careers, albeit with a startlingly similar mix of high-brow and popular. Where one played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, the other played Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings. Where Stewart’s CV includes Prospero, Macbeth and Claudius, McKellen’s boasts King Lear, Richard III and Iago. And where Stewart is a sex-mad egotist writing a dire film script, McKellen is a pretentious thesp who treats every banal idea as if it were a profound revelation – that is, according to their brilliant self-parodies in Ricky Gervais’s Extras (“The rather appalling thing about that,” says McKellen with typical modesty, “is how close to me that parody is.”) Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart interview: Tramping the boards
Our very own MrCere, Larry Curtis, was a guest on last Sunday’s broadcast of ‘Fictional Frontiers with Sohaib,’ on WNJC 1360 AM, Philadelphia at 11AM ET. As always, it was broadcast live via the internet via the WNJC website. A full transcript of the radio segment can be found below (thanks to Deleece Cook!). TheOneRing.net is featured every other week on Fictional Frontiers. Continue reading “Fictional Frontiers Radio Transcript”
Sir Ian McKellen received rave reviews for his performance in the title role of “King Lear,” but he’s quick to give credit where credit is due.
In a trailer on the edge of a film set beneath an underpass in downtown Cape Town, Ian McKellen, 69, is musing about fame and death, and what the papers will say when he goes. “ ’GANDALF DIES,’ I expect,” he says. The thought tickles him. Not the dying part. The part about being a classical actor and having billions of fans, most of whom are 12. “When you spend as long as I have doing beautiful work which is only seen by a few thousand people, to be involved in popular entertainment without lessening one’s standards … that’s fairly appealing,” he says. “You become part of the culture.” It’s not that McKellen ever shied away from fame. On the contrary, he sought it out “to publicise myself to people who might employ me.” You might say he overachieved. “Now it’s … well, it’s gone well beyond that.” 
Ian McKellen has been thought of as one of the world’s great actors for more than half his life. But in the last decade, he has also transformed himself from a strict stage thespian – highly rated, seen by very few – into a big screen star.
