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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRoNiCLE OCTOBER 30, 1998
EVENINGS OUT
Out in Old-and New-Hollywood with Ian McKellen
by Mark J. Huisman
He has played characters from Romeo to Hitler. A co-founder of the British gay civil rights group Stonewall and a tireless AIDS activist and fundraiser, he first donned drag in grammar school to play a girl who cheats her way to a beauty contest victory.
He shocked Britain in 1988 by coming out in the middle of a BBC interview in which he blasted Clause 28, an infamous Thatcher-era law which forbade the "promotion of homosexuality” and quashed everything from municipal civil rights legislation to AIDS education efforts. (The law was recently repealed.).
He was rewarded, not with vilification, but by being made Knight Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II at her annual New Year's celebration in 1991. And now, more than ever, lan McKellen is a star. Critics are raving about his two most recent film performances, which may finally bring him the stardom long enjoyed by fellow Britons like Anthony Hopkins, Albert Finney and Judi Dench.
In Bryan Singer's Apt Pupil, which opened nationwide on October 23, McKellen plays Kurt Dussander, a former Nazi commandant discovered to be living next door to a boy played by Brad Renfro.
In Bill Condon's Gods & Monsters (opening around the country in mid-November), McKellen is James Whale, legendary Hollywood director of films like Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, and an openly gay public figure long before that became fashionable. But McKellen shrugs when asked if he defines himself similarly.
"Is there such a thing as a gay actor? I'm an actor who is gay. I'm a gay man who is an actor. Take your pick. Should I say I won't play Macbeth or Prospero or Richard III?
JOHN BAER, TRI STAR
Ian McKellen as Kurt Dussander, a Nazi war criminal quietly living the suburban life in Apt Pupil.
No. I bring to the work the world the way I see it, which is through gay eyes. But I don't want, either in my life or my work, to cut myself off from heterosexuality. It's a fascinating phenomenon."
Like the evil depicted in Apt Pupil or James Whale's eccentricity?
"I don't think evil exists," says McKellen. "What connects lago and Macbeth and Hitler and Dussander is their ability to do dreadful things. But they're all as frail and as human as everybody else. And when you have a backdrop of normality, like the California suburbs in Apt Pupil, disturbing be-
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havior becomes even more disturbing."
Of his role in the upcoming Gods & Monsters, McKellen said his life and Whale's is similar in many ways, from being an actor in London to dealing with being gay in Hollywood. One difference is that Whale killed himself in his backyard swimming pool. But having played a man who dies of AIDS (in HBO's version of the Randy Shilts book And the Band Played On), McKellen cautions against viewing Whale's story as a modern-day parable.
"The question is, really, is life worth living if you can no longer do the things you love: being very social, reading, writing, making art? That seems a close enough parallel to AIDS, whether we call it a terminal disease today or not I don't know. But Whale had plenty of money and could afford medical care. The rest of society wasn't attacking him. The situation about AIDSwhether you have access to medications, whether you're getting the proper medication, whether you can afford them-is really a very different one."
Seizing on another topic, McKellen keenly gives some direction to younger actors seeking the same kind of professional and personal freedom he has attained over the years.
"I think Anne Heche's coming out is absolutely remarkable for the film industry in this country. It demonstrates the maturity of the audience to companies like Disney and Universal, that people will just go to her films and accept her in whatever she chooses to do. I just hope this trickles down to younger actors who might still be tempted to listen to the self-interested advice of managers, publicists and agents.”
"Don't believe them!" he shouts, with a majestic backflip of the hand. "There's no career worth having in which you spend your whole life lying about yourself." McKellen knows this beyond a doubt.
The first gay role he played was the acerbic Max, in the original production of Martin Sherman's concentration camp play Bent. But that was 1979 and McKellen was still in the wardrobe." Ten years later, however, a valiantly out Sir Ian reprised the role as a benefit for Stonewall. And the first role he played after coming out was that of John Profumo, a ruined government minister, in the film Scandal.
"To put the lie to the cliché that nobody would believe a gay person playing such a part," McKellen laughs, “I played a raging heterosexual."
As public figures go, McKellen has been immensely forthcoming about his personal life, when the time is right. He lived with his first lover, a schoolteacher named Brian Taylor, for eight years in a Kensington apartment not far from a certain palace.
After scoring his Amadeus Tony. McKellen bought a home in London's Docklands district (a tony neighborhood
full of waterfront dwellings), where he lived with Sean Mathias from 1980 through 1988 and still resides.
McKellen strives to work with Mathias (who also directed the film version of Bent in 1997) despite their break-up.
"Sean and I lived together very contendedly for nine years,” McKellen says, "And, along with Trevor Nunn and Tyrone Guthrie, he's one of the most helpful direc-
'I don't want, either in my life or my work, to cut myself off from heterosexuality. It's a fascinating phenomenon.'
tors with whom I've ever worked. So it was very important to us both that the friendship survive."
McKellen now has a lover about whom he won't talk: "When it involves other people who are not public figures, it's a much different game."
McKellen's public life began in a repertory theater in Coventry, England in 1961 with a production of A Man for All Seasons. Slowly working his way around England and through the theater classics, his double performance of Richard II and Edward II at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969 set the press afire. He would never lack for work again. McKellen's first major theater award was not the Tony but a Drama Desk Award, received in 1974 for repertory performances of King Lear and Chekov's A Wood Demon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
McKellen is currently doing a trio of plays in Leeds, England, returning to the repertory theaters where he received his training. (He did not attend drama school, like many of his peers, because he "lacked confidence in myself as an actor.") The first of the three is Chekov's The Seagull, which is to be followed by Noel Coward's Present Laughter and Shakespeare's The Tempest.
McKellen has not performed Coward's plays very often, despite the fact he has the distinction of being mentioned in the man's diary: "I also saw The Promise, a nearly good play perfectly acted by Judi Dench, Ian McShane and Ian McKellen," Coward wrote on March 19, 1967. “It really is fascinating to see the young do it as well as that. I came away from the theater bubbling with pleasure."
For his part, McKellen swears the pleasure of having royal honors has not changed his life nearly as much as coming out. "My coming out was a journey that most gay people don't have to do, because I have to talk to the press, which most gay people don't have to do. But to be fair, you're not out until there's no one in the world you wouldn't tell. And that includes a director, the Pope and everyone else." Including the Queen?
"My credit cards still say Ian McKellen," he quips. "And a knighthood doesn't so much change one's status as much as confirm it. It says 'Ian McKellen has given valiant service to the performing arts ... and is, therefore, a civil servant working for the nation and we, the nation, will honor that.' The nice thing about a knighthood is that is honors a wide number of people. Anybody can get it: a politician, a teacher or a painter."
McKellen's glee is apparent at finally getting the substantive film parts for which he has longed. "The plan was always to play the most unusual parts and the most challenging parts possible, to get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of it. Just having a choice and working with the best possible people is the most important to me. But now I'm getting good film scripts. That hasn't happened before, and I'm truly enjoying it."
McKellen grins for a moment, briefly bowing his head, raising it with another Cheshire grin. "Only actors get the Oscar." ✓
Mark J. Huisman is a Chronicle contributing writer living in New York City