Having fun: Sir Ian McKellen as Widow Twankey at the Old Vic
Panto's grandest Dame
By Nick Curtis, Evening Standard
9 December 2005
So, I say to Sir Ian McKellen, you're 66 now. You've got the classical theatre career and the knighthood. You've become a late-flowering but energetic blockbuster action hero - you've got your Lord of the Rings tattoo, and you're just back from filming the third X-Men movie.
You've campaigned for gay rights, and civil partnerships for same-sex couples have just been enshrined in law. You've been in Coronation Street, which was a long-held ambition. And last year you played Widow Twankey in Aladdin at the Old Vic, which was another. So why on earth are you doing it again?
"Because I enjoyed myself so much!" booms McKellen. "It was everything I hoped it would be. I'm dreadfully sentimental about the theatre, and believe that it's good for me and good for anyone who gets involved, on-stage or in the audience. Pantomime sums up that spirit and magnifies it so much that you just feel you are in a situation where love abounds."
He launches into a detailed and convincing theory about Dames being direct descendants of Shakespeare's cross-dressing actors, and of panto as a cathartic experience recalling pre-Christian celebrations of misrule and chaos. But basically, he loves Aladdin because it's a good old family knees-up, and because, after years of roles that required received pronunciation, he was able to plant his Twankey firmly in his native Lancashire.
Ian Murray McKellen was born in 1939 in Burnley and brought up in Wigan, where his father Denis worked as a civil engineer. His Dame is not based on his mother, Lois (who died of breast cancer when he was 12), or on his stepmother, Gladys (who is still alive at 99), because they were "petite, very feminine women".
Initially, he looked for inspiration to the "hard-working, sexy, juicy" mill women who terrified him as a boy. But in performance, he was surprised to realise that his Twankey had quite a lot in common with his sister. Jean McKellen was five years older than her brother, took him to see his first Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, and remained a keen amateur actor and director until her recent death.
"My Twankey wanted to go into showbusiness, then got sidetracked, as many people do, by marriage and having children," McKellen explains. "Jean introduced me to the theatre. She was the actor before I was, in school. She died the year before we did the pantomime - we think it was a stroke, but she fell down some steps at night and banged her head and never regained consciousness - so she couldn't see the show."
He gives one of those familiar, bittersweet smiles. "I don't think she would have approved. She had a clear idea of the kind of actor I was and it didn't include pantomime or Coronation Street. I didn't consciously base my performance on Jean, but there is one photograph outside the Old Vic of me cosying up to [co-star] Roger Allam, shaking my leg, and I look exactly like her. I looked at it the other day with moist eyes and I thought, Jean is still with us, through Twankey."
After Twankey, he will appear next year in a new Mark Ravenhill play, The Cut, at the Donmar. Then, in 2007, will come the part known as the actor's Everest. McKellen quotes - and does a rather good impression of - Ralph Richardson: "I seem to have got my foot caught in a Lear," he says.
When the RSC asked him to play the part in their cycle of Shakespeare's entire canon, he asked his friend from his Cambridge University days, Trevor Nunn, to direct. Now he's casting around for another play - "maybe a Chekhov, in which I wouldn't have a major part" - to pair with the tragedy for a year-long tour, and begging the notoriously timeprofligate Nunn to keep the Lear under three hours.
"For the audience's sake as much as mine," he insists, "but theatre is really a young man's game. I find the most demanding thing about acting is committing to an emotional state which isn't my own: it's draining, night after night."
This admission of weariness is a surprise: the one thing McKellen has never convincingly acted is his age. "You can't get to 66 and have a sibling who is not much older die, and not be aware of your own mortality," he says. "I can't any longer take good health for granted."
At around the time of his sister's death, McKellen went for a chest X-ray which revealed some shadows on his lungs, prompting him finally to give up smoking and take up Pilates, even though it was later discovered that the shadows were his nipples. Then, just before starting in Aladdin, cancerous cells were found in his prostate.
"You can do three things: leave it and monitor it; have it cut out, or have radiotherapy," he says. "I went for the radiotherapy option, but I said, 'Look, I do have to do this pantomime first.' When I went back at the end of the run, the cancer had gone." He smiles: "Dr Theatre!"
Not only his health, but also his romantic situation, makes McKellen think of the future. Although he has had two long-term relationships - with teacher Brian Taylor when he was 25, and with Aladdin's director Sean Matthias in his forties - he currently lives alone in his Thames-side house.
Would he like to be civilly partnered? "Yes, yes," he says, "I just wish they had legalised gay marriage instead, but I don't put out of the question the idea that I won't take advantage of it in the future. And if I were a generation younger, I might consider what I never have done, which is having a family." Really? But you always said you would make a wretched parent. "Yes, but I think that was me comforting myself, accepting the situation that I wouldn't be allowed, legally, to have a child."
Is he lonely? "There are advantages to living by myself," he says. "I can do what I want when I want. But to know there is someone waiting for you through thick and thin is appealing. The older you get, the more you wonder if you really want to be living on your own. I talk to friends of mine, most of them gay, who are on their own, and they are all a bit worried. We wonder whether we shouldn't all decide to live together in some sort of commune. I think I would enjoy that."
And with that prospect cheering him against the vicissitudes of age, he heads back to the community which has always embraced him, the theatre.
