Sir Ian McKellen hasn’t spent his entire acting career aching to play Shakespeare’s King Lear. “I thought it was beyond me,” the veteran English actor said, surprisingly. “It was never a part I wanted to play. I knew, from having seen other people play it up close, that it takes an awful lot out of you. “You can’t throw off a King Lear. You have to delve into it.” McKellen never too old to be young
Category: Hobbit Cast News
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
morten writes: I just saw the news that Christopher Lee is going to be at the LOTR in Concert in Copenhagen. I am looking forward to it – the people behind it are the Tolkien Ensemble, who has created some beautiful and moody music for LotR and the illustrations for the LotR created by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe the 2nd will be a part of the experience. Just thought I’d let you know since I haven’t heard a mention of it on theonering.net so far. Here is the link, in Danish (sorry!). Christopher Lee At LOTR in Concert in Copenhagen
If you couldn’t catch Sir Ian McKellen on stage as King Lear, then tune in this week when the PBS program, Great Performances, features the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production. After airing March 25th on TV, (check the site for show times in your area), the play, originally staged in Stratford-upon-Avon in the spring of 2007, will be available online.
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?”
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