Sir Ian McKellen

A Lancashire Childhood

Ian Murray McKellen was born on the 25th of May 1939 in Burnley, Lancashire. His father Denis was a civil engineer and his mother Margery a housewife. When Ian was just four months old, the family moved to Wigan, arriving just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He grew up on a terraced street in the shadow of the town's mills and mining heritage.

It was in Wigan that the theatre found him. His parents took him to pantomimes and plays at the local theatres, and something clicked. He later said that seeing Peter Pan as a small child was the moment he knew. He wanted to be on a stage.

When he turned twelve, the family moved again, this time to Bolton. He attended Bolton School, a direct-grant grammar school where he thrived academically and threw himself into drama productions. The school sits less than ten miles from central Manchester, and it was here that McKellen began to understand the craft that would define his life. By the time he left for Cambridge, he was already formidable.

The Stage

McKellen went up to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, in 1958 to read English. He acted in over twenty productions during his three years there, and by the time he graduated he had already decided that the stage was his life. He made his professional debut at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in 1961.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary stage careers in British theatre history. McKellen became a leading figure at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, taking on the roles that define a classical actor: Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Coriolanus, King Lear, Hamlet. His 1976 RSC season, playing both Romeo and Leontes, confirmed what the theatre world already knew: he was one of the finest actors of his generation.

His one-man Shakespeare show toured the world. He performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester multiple times across his career, bringing the greatest roles in the English language back to the county where he grew up. The Exchange, with its theatre-in-the-round hanging inside the old cotton trading hall, suited his style perfectly: intimate, intense, impossible to look away from.

Coming Out

On a January evening in 1988, Ian McKellen was being interviewed on BBC Radio 3. The discussion turned to Section 28, the Thatcher government's proposed legislation that would ban local authorities from "promoting" homosexuality. McKellen, who had been a private man for decades, said what he had never said publicly before: he was gay.

He was 48 years old. He was one of the most respected actors in the country. And in that moment, he put his entire career on the line.

The response was not what he feared. Fellow actors rallied around him. The public, by and large, didn't care about his sexuality; they cared about his talent. But McKellen himself was transformed. He threw himself into campaigning against Section 28 with the same intensity he brought to Shakespeare. He lobbied politicians. He spoke at rallies. He met with Prime Ministers.

In 1989, he co-founded Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ rights charity that would become one of the most influential equality organisations in Europe. When Section 28 was finally repealed in 2003, McKellen had been fighting it for fifteen years. He later said that coming out was the best thing he ever did, that it freed him as an actor and as a person.

Gandalf, Magneto, and the World Stage

For decades, Ian McKellen was one of those actors that everyone in the theatre world revered but the general public might not quite place. That changed in 2000, when Bryan Singer cast him as Magneto in the first X-Men film. Suddenly, millions of people who had never seen a Shakespeare play knew his face.

Then came Gandalf. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, filmed across three years in New Zealand, turned McKellen into one of the most recognisable actors on the planet. He was 60 when he first put on the grey hat and picked up the staff. His portrayal of the wizard, wise and weary and occasionally terrifying, is now inseparable from the character. He was nominated for an Academy Award for The Fellowship of the Ring.

McKellen brought a weight to these blockbuster roles that lesser actors would have fumbled. He played Magneto as a Holocaust survivor with genuine pain behind the villainy. He played Gandalf as a man carrying the weight of ages. Both performances are grounded in decades of classical training, a lifetime of understanding how to hold an audience, and the kind of authority that only comes from being the real thing.

He returned to both franchises: The Hobbit trilogy between 2012 and 2014, and multiple X-Men sequels. He was in his seventies and still commanding every scene he appeared in.

Still Lancashire

For all the global fame, McKellen has never forgotten where he came from. He has returned to perform in Manchester and across the North West throughout his career. He has championed regional theatre and spoken repeatedly about the importance of arts funding outside London. When asked where home is, he doesn't talk about Hollywood or the West End. He talks about Lancashire.

He was knighted in 1991 and appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2008. He has won six Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, and a Golden Globe. He has been nominated for two Academy Awards. The list of honours and awards fills pages, but the thing that matters most is simpler than any of that.

Ian McKellen showed millions of people that you can be gay, you can be from a northern mill town, you can be a classical actor who trained at a time when most of the country was still pretending that homosexuality didn't exist, and you can be one of the greatest performers who ever lived. All at the same time.

He was raised in Wigan. He went to school in Bolton. He performed at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. He changed the world from a BBC radio studio with a single honest sentence. And then he went to New Zealand and became a wizard.

That's a Lancashire story if ever there was one.