The great veteran British actor and passionate LGBTQ activist Sir Ian McKellen has yet to write an autobiography about his very full and successful life, but maybe he won’t have to now after this intimate and affectionate documentary of his life. For the film, made by Joe Stephenson, McKellen evidently sat in a comfortable big armchair and didn’t stop talking for three days.
The story is therefore very much McKellen’s own take on his life and career and starts from his early childhood where he was born into a middle-class family in Bolton in the North of England just four months before the outbreak of World War 2. Stephenson recreates some of McKellen’s youth with Milo Parker playing the part, and then being replaced by Scott Chambers when they re-live McKellen’s unorthodox and very theatrical time when he went to Cambridge University .
His stint at Cambridge provided a perfect foundation for his future career in the theater as he got to act in some 23 plays in three years alongside the likes of Trevor Nunn, Derek Jacobi and Margaret Drabble and was also directed by Peter Hall and John Barton.
McKellen quickly established his formidable reputation as a theatrical actor working with Laurence Oliver at the Royal National Theater, and with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was however with the Prospect Theatre Company, that McKellen made his breakthrough performances of Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II at the Edinburgh festival in 1969, the latter causing a storm of protest over the enactment of the homosexual Edward’s lurid death.
McKellen says in the documentary that one of the luckiest things about his life was that the movies didn’t discover him until in later in life after he had truly established his credentials on the stage. Success in big commercial blockbusters such as The Lord of The Rings and X-Men obviously brought him to the notice of a global audience and financial security too. When he talks about these films he does so with a mixture of both pride and gratitude. However the one movie that he singles out for special attention is playing the gay film director James Whale in Gods and Monsters for which he received an Oscar nomination “its success has given me as much pleasure as anything else in my life”.
Although he was never in the closet to his fellow actors MacKellen didn’t come out publicly until he was in his 40s He did so to express his abhorrence at Margaret Thatcher’s notorious Clause 28 which sought to turn back the clock on LGBTQ rights in the UK.
Since that time he has become a very vocal and passionate advocate for the LGBTQ community and getting behind many of the major …… and minor issues that we have confronted, In fact a considerable portion of the second part of the documentary is taking up with how this has all become such a crucial part of his life.
He chose not to really deal with the men he has loved and lost in his life which from the viewer’s point of view was a wasted opportunity. However what MacKellen did insist of talking about was that now at aged 79 he was getting increasingly obsessed with death. So much so that he actually outlined a very detailed plan for how own Memorial Service, almost provoking the idea that this documentary was in fact an obituary,
MacKellen is a disarmingly charming man and despite all the honors that have been piled on him, and all the Awards that he has won, he still comes over as one of us, A man of the people, who has had (so far) a full and exciting life acting his heart out but by playing the part of himself when he is off the stage too.
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Labels: 2018, biography, documentary
