Sir Ian McKellen: Where there's a Will, there's a wizard

Peter Marks / Washington Post

Washington -- The professional reviews were already in, but the notice that seemed to strike Sir Ian McKellen most meaningfully came from a 10-year-old who had just seen him as King Lear.

"He said it was the best play he had ever seen in his entire life," the actor recalls, and chortles at the irony. McKellen is sitting on a terrace overlooking a sunny garden at the British Embassy, one cream-colored pant leg folded over the other, as he reflects on the extraordinary global exposure that resulted from his recurring roles in two astoundingly lucrative movie franchises: the wizard Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings" and Magneto, the twisted mutant of "X-Men."

The boy might have been bribed to go to Shakespeare with the carrot of Gandalf, but why should McKellen care whether an audience finds him through iambic pentameter or movie, er, magnetism? He says he is gratified by his new-found visibility, his unlikely box office invincibility: Lines wrapped around the block in London's West End recently for his run in the absurdist "Waiting for Godot" with Patrick Stewart. And he's pleased that there may be many more converts where that awestruck 10-year-old came from.

"People recognize me now, people who never go to the theater," McKellen says. "That's been the loveliest thing for me, that people want to meet me. And 'Lord of the Rings' is a very big part of it."

Not, of course, the whole part. The 70-year-old McKellen is one of the most gifted classical actors of his generation, one of a select few who has all but defined Shakespearean performance for our time. His Macbeth, his Richard III -- the latter enshrined in a 1995 movie version that he adapted and produced -- set contemporary standards for these timeless roles.

That is the reason he is staying in a corner suite at the embassy and affably discussing the state of his career: The Shakespeare Theatre Company honored him with its annual Will Award, which he picked up at the company's gala benefit Sunday night. Previous winners of the Will (as in Shakespeare) Award include stage luminaries such as Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Jeremy Irons.

McKellen is also one of those actors -- like Stewart -- who has been able to maintain his highbrow stage presence while making regular forays into popular culture. His latest along those commercial lines starts up in mid-November on basic cable's AMC channel, when he appears as the enigmatic No. 2 in a remake of the mind-bending '60s British series, "The Prisoner," filmed in South Africa and Namibia with Jim Caviezel in the title role.

It was the film of "Richard III," he says, and on the heels of that, his Oscar-nominated performance as the lonely hearts film director James Whale in the 1998 "Gods and Monsters," that propelled him to his appearances in blockbusters and, to this very comfortable juncture of his life; one of his projects next year is to buy the house next to the one he's lived in for decades in the once shabby and now chichi Docklands section of London.

But he also credits the uptick in his show business profile with the growth of his comfort level with himself, a peace of mind that developed after revealing that he was gay in 1988 during a BBC radio program examining the Thatcher government's policies toward homosexuality. "It all happened since I came out, ironically," McKellen says of the Hollywood phase of his professional life.

The belief among some in his field that opportunities automatically get narrower after such candor is to him mythology. "I'm living proof the opposite is true. You get more self-confidence. You don't have that bit of dishonesty," he says, adding that acting "is about disguise. But it's not about lying."