Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CBE (born May 25, 1939) is an English stage and screen actor, the recipient of a Tony Award and two Oscar nominations. McKellen is best known to moviegoers in recent years for his roles as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and as Magneto in the X-Men trilogy. His work has spanned genres from serious Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He was made a CBE in 1979 and knighted in 1991 for his outstanding work and contributions to the theatre. McKellen is openly gay and is a prominent campaigner for LGBT rights.McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though spent most of his early life in Wigan and later attended Bolton School. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him. In an interview with The Advocate magazine (December 25, 2001), when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack, he said: "Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old."
McKellen's father, Denis Murray McKellen, a civil engineer, was a lay preacher, and both of his grandfathers were preachers as well. At the time of Ian's birth, his parents already had a five-year-old daughter Jean. His home environment was strongly Christian, but non-orthodox. "My upbringing was of low nonconformist Christians who felt that you led the Christian life in part by behaving in a Christian manner to everybody you met." When he was 12, his mother, Margery Lois McKellen (born Sutcliffe) died; his father died when he was 24. When he came out of the closet to his stepmother, Gladys McKellen, who was a Friend (Quaker): "Not only was she not fazed, but as a member of a society which declared its indifference to people's sexuality years back, I think she was just glad for my sake that I wasn't lying any more."
Ian McKellen attended Bolton School Boys Division of which he is still a supporter, attending regularly to talk to pupils. McKellen's acting career started at Bolton Little Theatre, of which he is now the Patron. An early fascination with theatre was encouraged by his parents, who took him on a family outing to Peter Pan at the Manchester Opera House when he was three. When he was nine, his main Christmas present was a wood and bakelite, fold-away Victorian Theatre from Pollocks Toy Theatres, with cardboard scenery and wires to push on the cut-outs of Cinderella and of Olivier's Hamlet. His sister took him to his first Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, by the amateurs of Wigan's Little Theatre, shortly followed by their Macbeth and Wigan High School for Girls' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with music by Mendelssohn and Bottom by Jean McKellen. (Until her recent death, Jean still acted, directed, and produced amateur theatre.)
He won a scholarship to St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, when he was 18, where he developed an attraction to Derek Jacobi. He has characterized it as "a passion that was undeclared and unrequited."He and his first serious partner, Brian Taylor, a history teacher from Bolton, began their relationship in 1964. It was a relationship that was to last for eight years, ending in 1972. They lived in London, where McKellen continued to pursue his career as an actor. For over a decade he has lived in a five-story Victorian conversion in Narrow Street, Limehouse, London. In 1978 he met his second partner, Sean Mathias, at the Edinburgh Festival. According to Mathias, the ten-year love affair was tempestuous, with conflicts over McKellen's success in acting versus Mathias' somewhat less-successful career.
20 years ago McKellen lost his appetite for meat, except for fish and became a pecto-vegetarian. (pescetarian).
