Word: mckellen
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...trailer on the edge of a film set beneath an underpass in downtown Cape Town, Ian McKellen, 69, is musing about fame and death, and what the papers will say when he goes. " 'GANDALF DIES,' I expect," he says. The thought tickles him. Not the dying part. The part about being a classical actor and having billions of fans, most of whom are 12. "When you spend as long as I have doing beautiful work which is only seen by a few thousand people, to be involved in popular entertainment without lessening one's standards ... that's fairly appealing...
...McKellen has been thought of as one of the world's great actors for more than half his life. But in the last decade, he has also transformed himself from a strict stage thespian - highly rated, seen by very few - into a big screen star. This year, he can be seen on the stage around Britain as Estragon in Waiting for Godot, and on television in the U.S. and Britain opposite Jim Caviezel as the villainous No. 2 in a remake (partly shot in South Africa) of the 1960s British cult series, The Prisoner. He combines high art and mass...
...McKellen was a leading light in this group. Leaving Cambridge University in 1961 with no formal training in drama, he dove into British regional theater - and stayed for decades. "I took jobs other people would not," he says. "I wanted to find out how to act. I learned on the job." By the 1970s, McKellen and many of his contemporaries were often to be found in one place: at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the bard was born. There, in 1976, on a bare stage in a tin hut called The Other Place that could...
Fame, fortune and Hollywood should have followed. But little changed for McKellen. "I am an RSC sort of actor," he says of his decision to stay in Stratford. "There is nothing more sinister or enlightening than that." Besides, the RSC was in its golden age. The concentration of talent intensified with the arrival at Stratford of a new generation of actors including Kenneth Branagh, Jeremy Irons, Charles Dance and Sean Bean. By then, the veterans had developed an informal set of rules for themselves: Take the craft seriously (Dench: "deadly"). Don't take yourself seriously (Stewart: "That's death...
...Answer: Sir Ian McKellen...