Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH CBE (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations.
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Ian Murray McKellen
Description: Actor, UK
Known For: 2013 – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – 2003 – The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Location: United Kingdom
Date Born: 25th May 1939
Location Born: Burnley, United Kingdom
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Sir Ian McKellen CBE, CH
An English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations.
His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known for film roles such as Gandalf in the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Magneto in the X-Men films, and as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code.
McKellen was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts, and was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality, in the 2008 New Year Honours. McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though he spent most of his early life in Wigan. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him.
In response to an interview question when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, he said: “Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old.” McKellen had taken film roles throughout his career — beginning in 1969 with his role of George Matthews in A Touch of Love, but it was not until the 1990s that he became more widely recognised in this medium, through several roles in blockbuster Hollywood films.
McKellen and his first serious partner, Brian Taylor, a history teacher from Bolton, began their relationship in 1964. It lasted 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.
In the late 1980s, McKellen lost his appetite for meat except for fish, and so mostly excludes it from his diet.
Early life
McKellen was born on 25 May 1939 in Burnley, Lancashire, the son of Margery Lois (née Sutcliffe) and Denis Murray McKellen, a civil engineer. He was their second child, with a sister, Jean, five years his senior. He was not to live in Burnley long; shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, his family moved to Wigan. They lived there through the war and his early childhood until they relocated to Bolton in 1951, after his father had been promoted. The experience of living through the war as a young child had some lasting impact on him, and he later claimed that “only after peace resumed … did I realise that war wasn’t normal.” In response to an interview question, when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of 11 September attacks, he said: “Well, darling, you forget—I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old.”
McKellen’s father was a civil engineer and lay preacher, and was of Scots-Irish and Scottish descent. Both of McKellen’s grandfathers were preachers, and his great-great-grandfather, James McKellen, was a “strict, evangelical Protestant minister” in Ballymena, County Antrim. 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 died; his father died when he was 24. Of his coming out of the closet to his stepmother, Gladys McKellen, who was a member of the Religious Society of Friends, he said, “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 anymore.”
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 the theatre was encouraged by his parents, who took him on a family outing to Peter Pan at the Opera House in Manchester 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 Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
His sister took him to his first Shakespeare play, 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, with the role of Bottom played by Jean McKellen, who continued to act, direct, and produce amateur theatre until her death.
When he was 18 years old, McKellen won a scholarship to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he read English literature.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia