IAN MCKELLEN
THE BIOGRAPHY
Sir Ian Mckellen’s long-time friend from Cambridge University, Garry O’connor, stepped in to write the biography that the theatrical knight once started and then gave up (in spite of a deal worth £1 million). Mckellen had said it had been too ‘painful’ for him to write. The actor did not collaborate with O’connor, but nor did he prevent the book. Yet, according to Richard Brooks in the
Guardian, ‘this is no hagiography’ and Mckellen is clearly ‘the consummate professional “wedded” both to acting but also to gay causes’. For Philip Fisher in the British
Theatre Guide, the book has a tendency to feel chatty aided by the author’s keenness to delve into controversy. A complicated and complex man emerges. For Benedict Nightingale, in the
Times, Mckellen came across as private, ‘somewhat shy, yet warm and generous’. He observed that O’connor had tried to get at something that has ‘remained unresolved in him’, but that the ‘frustration at failing to pin down this elusive man is evident throughout a well-researched, eminently readable book’.
Perhaps the key to the Mckellen enigma is the homosexuality he long kept hidden. Mckellen later became a leading light of Section 28 and gay causes; ‘So much so,’ Nightingale observed, that Mckellen was ‘so exhausted with his public role that he would almost like to return to the closet’, but couldn’t because [in Mckellen’s words] ‘it was absolutely jam-packed with other actors’. Nightingale would have liked to have ‘heard more from O’connor on the way Mckellen prepares and creates a role, but this would have once again left the biographer perplexed. There’s always something mysterious about great actors — and, yes, Mckellen is great.’