As one of Britain’s most versatile, as well as most celebrated actors, Ian McKellen has kept an unexpectedly low profile in the cinema. Recently, however, matters have changed.
Priest of Love, in which he plays DH Lawrence, is at present being revived to mark the author’s centenary; this week sees the opening of the movie version of Plenty, with McKellen in a crucial cameo role; and the London Film Festival has already screened Zina; a British independent movie with McKellen as the psychiatrist who ministered to Trotsky’s daughter.
McKellen says: “I’m more excited now when a film script comes through the letter box than when I’m asked about a play, because cinema is still to me uncharted territory. When I was growing up in south Lancashire, my parents just preferred theatre to cinema, and in a way it was a case of my catching their taste. There are still huge gaps in my knowledge of films – I wouldn’t know Sydney Greenstreet if his ghost was to walk in now.
“Anyway, when I became a professional actor, I measured my success in the theatre; films would have been a kind of interruption. Of course, people just a little older than me, like Albert Finney and Alan Bates, have been able to work successfully in both. But I really missed out on that.”
There were periodic film appearances, however, among them Alfred The Great, in which McKellen played one of the villains, “‘Roger the bandit.” There was also the prospect of playing the lead in Ned Kelly. “I learned to ride properly, worked out in the gym for three months, then I picked up the paper and saw Mick Jagger had been cast. Frankly, I ran back to the theatre.”
Films essentially faded out until in 1982 he starred in Priest of Love. He believes Christopher Miles, the director, cast him on the basis of a physical resemblance to Lawrence, “and maybe he’d heard me read Sons and Lovers on Woman’s Hour. The minute he saw I had blue eyes, like Lawrence, he offered it to me on the spot, and I wasn’t inclined to refuse – the lure of Mexico plus Ava Gardner was pretty overwhelming.”
What the experience taught him was “applying concentration in the right way, pacing yourself, not wasting energy on when you’re only being seen in long shot.”
Next came The Keep, a Hollywood-backed horror fantasy, a somewhat fraught experience. “It’s only been released here on video, but I rented a copy from my local shop a few weeks ago and it still looks highly imaginative. But I had a five-hour make-up, which is terribly boring, and there were 12 days when I went through the make-up and then wasn’t used.” He played a Romanian and made the trip to Bucharest to prepare his accent. To no avail, however; when shooting started, the director inexplicably decreed that he should essay a Chicago accent.
Of Plenty, he says: “My part was only three days, Sundays when we could shoot at the Foreign Office, which meant that there was none of that terrible hanging around. But neither was there any sense of rush. Fred Schepisi is a very precise director – he creates a mood of confidence that isn’t just bogus. And Meryl Streep was a model of what a leading lady should be when a ‘guest’ comes to call. She’s very funny, very chatty, we got on terribly well.”
He considers this his best film experience. But with a reminiscent laugh, he adds: “You know, the most crucial film I ever made was my first, in 1985. It was called The Bells Of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling, a world war one adventure, starring Gregory Peck, about airmen escaping from Germany – I played an English subaltern. It was just a series of mishaps, but the biggest mistake, since they needed summer weather, was to start filming in Switzerland in August, because quite soon it began to snow.
“After six weeks, blessedly, it was abandoned, and we all went home. But I was paid the full money, about £4,000 – remember, I’d been making £8 a week in repertory – and because of that for 10 years I didn’t worry about money. And that was a crucial factor in my career. I didn’t have to do jobs for money – which meant that I got more and more involved in the theatre.”
