"I wasn’t fit for anything else!” Ian McKellen has said about his decision in 1961 to become an actor. It's more likely that he was born to act. A life in the theater seemed ordained for the man that many call “the Laurence Olivier of his generation” and “the best Macbeth of the past century.” 

Born Ian Murray McKellen, May 25, 1939, in Burnley, Lancashire, England, the future movie star was re-located by his parents to Wigan, a coal-mining town, just before World War II began.

His father, Denis, a civil engineer by trade, was a pianist by choice. Of his father’s musicianship, Ian remarked in his 1994 one-man show, A Knight Out, “My childhood was wrapped in a blanket of melodies by Chopin, Liszt and Tchaikowsky as Dad tried not to get his huge fingers stuck between the keys of our upright piano. I inherited the hands but not the musicianship.”

Although Ian's mother died when he was in his teens, she and his father encouraged his early fascination with theatre, taking the three-year-old to see a production of Peter Pan at Manchester Opera House. Of the experience, Ian remarked in A Knight Out, “I wasn’t over-impressed. For one thing, it wasn’t a real crocodile and I could see the wires.” Nonetheless, McKellen was hooked on theater.

If anyone doubted it would be an actor’s life for Ian, the doubt was put to rest when he embraced the primary Christmas gift of his seventh year: a wood and Bakelite fold-away Victorian Theatre from Pollocks Toy Theatres. It featured cardboard scenery and wires to push on the cutouts of Cinderella and of Olivier’s Hamlet. Ian was probably the only seven-year-old at Dicconson Street Wesleyan Primary School with his own miniature theatre.

At every school he attended, young Ian acted. He performed in so many productions that his grades often suffered. At Bolton School, under the direction of Frank Greene, the senior English master, he made the first of very few appearances in drag, as a Bolton Mill-girl who cheats her way to the finals of a beauty contest in the Leonard Roe pastiche The Beauty Contest.

Last year, at London’s Old Vic, the knight once again played a dame, Widow Twankey, in the pantomime production of Aladdin. Of the drag role, he told the Daily Telegraph, “Playing the dame is not about being a convincing woman. She may be a motherly figure--that’s why the children in the audience adore her--but she’s also a man.”

Later, slyly, he added, “This is dangerous, dangerous stuff, isn’t it? Just when the children in the audience are trying to sort out the notion of gender, along comes a man in a frock to kick it all sideways and say, ‘Anything goes!’”

In 1961, the future Sir Ian graduated Cambridge University a Bachelor of Arts. Foregoing drama school, he made his professional acting debut in the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry’s production of A Man for All Seasons. Since then, he’s worked constantly, appearing in scores of theatrical productions, and nearly forty motion pictures spanning five decades. 

In this country, he’s best known for his role of the wizard Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films, and as Salieri, his Tony Award winning role in Broadway’s Amadeus (1980). Gay movie audiences embraced his Oscar and Golden Globe nominated turn as gay director James Whale in 1998’s much publicized Gods and Monsters, for which he eventually won eleven acting awards. 

Another Ian Mckellen gay favorite is the movie version of the theatrical smash Bent (1997), about gay men in a Nazi death camp, directed by Ian’s former lover Sean Mathias.

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