Word: mckellen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...forms part of the basement wall of a new office building; pedestrians peek in through sidewalk windows. Allowing the Rose, the only Elizabethan theater ever discovered, to disappear once again sounds like the stuff of a Shakespearean tragedy. "Replicas of Elizabethan theaters are being built everywhere," observes actor Ian McKellen, "but this is the real thing, and you don't throw away the real thing...
...fashion. He pampers his girls and introduces them to his randy friends because he likes being liked. His sin is in assuming, like nearly everyone who jestered near the thrones of power in Britain and America, that the games could be pubic without ever going public. Enter Profumo (Ian McKellen), who in his high-domed hairdo looks like a samurai of probity. Jack is an indiscretion waiting to happen. He has so little furtive pleasure to gain, and so much reputation to put at risk, that his dalliance has the lurid fatalism of a soap opera. Then Christine snitches...
Scandal, whose producers had to snip a few naughty bits from the Novotny orgy to avoid an X rating in the U.S., is wonderfully performed by Hurt (pained irony), McKellen (droll reserve) and, as Rice-Davies, Peter Fonda's daughter Bridget (comic acuity). The film names names and gets the tone right. ! This is a morally exhausted society, where every woman is a whore and every man a pimp or a trick until proved otherwise. It has no hero or heroine, only a victim: Stephen Ward, who loved trashy women and was betrayed by distinguished...
...most part avoiding blind reverence, McKellen can't suppress a few instances of sickly sweet piety. As he takes one of his final departures from the stage, McKellen evidently can't resist the temptation to cast a wistful glance toward "Shakespeare's grave," the floorboards at the back of the stage which McKellen lovingly dusts at the beginning of the evening...
...self-depracatory moments, however, are quite successful. At one point he quotes the opening line of a less-than-flattering review. "The best part of Ian McKellen's Hamlet," the actor relates, "is his curtain call...