Ian McKellen

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Ian McKellen

Ian Murray McKellen was born at 20.30 Greenwich Mean Time, on 25 May 1939, in the general hospital of Burnley, the northern English milltown where his father Denis Murray was a civil engineer. In his earliest years, Ian slept under the iron bomb-proof table in the dining-room.

An early fascination with theatre was encouraged by his parents, who took him on a family outing to "Peter Pan" at Manchester Opera House when he was 3. When he was 7, 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", and that is where it all started ...

Ian McKellen - Books, Videos & DVD's

Ian McKellan Film: "Lord of the Rings"

A marvellously sympathetic yet spectacularly cinematic treatment of the first part of Tolkien’s trilogy, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the film that finally showed how extraordinary digital effects could be used to support story and characters, not simply overwhelm them. Both long-time fantasy fans and newcomers alike were simultaneously amazed, astonished and left agog for parts two and three.
Jackson’s abiding love for the source material comes across in the wealth of incidental detail (the stone trolls from The Hobbit, Bilbo’s hand-drawn maps); and even when he deviates from the book he does so for sound dramatic reasons (the interminable Tom Bombadil interlude is deleted; Arwen not Glorfindel rescues Frodo at the ford). New Zealand stands in wonderfully for Middle-Earth and his cast are almost ideal, headed by Elijah Wood as a suitably naïve Frodo, though one with plenty of iron resolve, and Ian McKellen as an avuncular-yet-grimly determined Gandalf. The set-piece battle sequences have both an epic grandeur and a visceral, bloody immediacy: the Orcs, and Saruman’s Uruk-Hai in particular, are no mere cannon-fodder, but tough and terrifying adversaries. Tolkien’s legacy could hardly have been better served.

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