STAGE : Sir Ian’s Crusade : McKellen, hailed for his portrayal of Richard III, discusses his craft and his views as ‘the first openly gay man to be knighted’

Sir Ian McKellen is Shakespeare’s demonic “Richard III.”

In a portrayal recalling everything from Jack Nicholson’s Joker to Peter O’Toole’s “Lion in Winter,” the actor possesses the stage at the Curran Theatre even when he’s not speaking. McKellen’s Richard struts, mugs, charms, repels and kills with equal passion and credibility--at one point even successfully wooing the widow of the man he just killed.

As the Royal National Theatre production tours the United States--it is due at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Tuesday for two weeks--nearly every reviewer has described McKellen’s performance as “chilling.” But offstage, whether chatting with theater patrons or meeting with a reporter, he is so low-key and softspoken he appears almost shy.

Never mind that McKellen is considered his generation’s successor to Laurence Olivier in the classic theater. Forget the Tony he won on Broadway as Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus.” Forget too his record five Olivier Awards--Britain’s Tony--including one for this performance.

Playing himself seems more difficult for him. He shifts uncomfortably, doesn’t look at his interviewer, fiddles with the buttons on his shirt. Yet the 53-year-old Englishman turns down few interviews or appearances because superseding any personal discomfort is his need to promote both the National Theatre and, equally important, gay rights.

He found his heart in San Francisco, he says here more than once. It was San Francisco-based novelist Armistead Maupin and Maupin’s companion, Terry Anderson, who in fall, 1987, seriously urged McKellen to come out of the closet. It was Maupin he called a few months later after acknowledging his homosexuality during a BBC radio debate over anti-gay legislation, and the message he left on Maupin’s answering machine was a simple one: “I’m out and about and I’ve never been happier.”

Then came his knighthood, awarded in 1990 during the run of “Richard III,” and he has since been unstoppable in maximizing his public forum. Three minutes into an eight-minute “Tonight Show” appearance, he called himself “the first openly gay man to be knighted,” and even a fund-raising appearance he made here for the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival and the National Theatre included a reference to gay rights. He was the main speaker at a press conference in Denver to protest anti-gay legislation in Colorado, and he received a human rights award during the show’s Washington, D.C., run.

His passions win over his reticence in such situations, but media interest is clearly augmented by McKellen’s strong performance in a powerful, extraordinarily relevant play. The National’s 14 performances here mark the end of a two-year international tour, and reviewers around the world have analogized what one called McKellen’s “soldier-Satan” to everyone from Nicolae Ceausescu and Ferdinand Marcos to David Duke.

McKellen doesn’t choose such roles casually. He appeared as Dracula in a recent Pet Shop Boys music video, the Cambridge-educated performer told “Tonight’s” Jay Leno, “because people think I’m a rather stuffy actor,” and he similarly took on disgraced British defense minister John Profumo as his first film role after coming out. He didn’t know that much about Profumo, he says, but he did know the man he played in the film “Scandal” was a “raging heterosexual.”

For now, the actor is consumed by these final performances of the long-running “Richard III.” Calendar talked with McKellen about the play and the player:

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Question: In other performances, you’ve often connected with Shakespeare’s “larger heroes” by thinking about modern figures who remind you of them in some way, such as John McEnroe for Coriolanus or John F. Kennedy for Macbeth. Did you do that with Richard III?

A: No. I didn’t need to. Once we’d seen him basically as a professional soldier who had gone into civilian politics, it became very easy for me to understand.

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Q: Where did this idea of a professional soldier, particularly a 20th-Century soldier, come from?

A: I don’t know if any of us remember the exact point at which the production became obvious, (but) talking it through scene by scene, we were using modern references and images to explicate the story and it became almost inevitable. . . . I think setting it in a modern time encourages the audience to see the play as living history rather than just as a pageant or a representation of something that happened a long time ago in another country. The political types, attitudes and ambitions are still recognizable.

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Q: Richard Eyre, director of this production (and of the National Theatre) has drawn parallels between “Richard III” and tyranny in the 20th Century, and your Richard has been compared to everyone from Marcos to Ceausescu. Do you see it that way?

A: This play is about politics, and the audience makes the connection between its own local political situation and the circumstances of the play. Every single reviewer in San Francisco mentioned the Republican convention (which was occurring at that time). In Washington, a number of the reviewers mentioned Ross Perot. When we played in Bucharest, all the questions were related to Ceausescu. When we opened the production, it was assumed we were slipping in deliberate references to Saddam Hussein.

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Q: Then you don’t see this as a fascist portrayal of Richard III?

A: Well, yes and no. We use some of the imagery of fascism, but it’s a make-believe fascism. . . . You get the distant past, the recent past and the present all mixed up together, and I think that is the nature of Shakespeare’s history plays. Shakespeare wasn’t writing history. He used history to create plays and drama.

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Q: One of the key elements in your portrayal of Richard is his ability to charm and manipulate women. How have audiences and critics reconciled this with your high profile as a gay activist?

A: The modish thing to say about me is that “Ian McKellen can’t convincingly play a love scene with a woman,” (but) I think sexuality doesn’t have a gender. On the whole, men and women, whatever their own sexual orientation, are likely to find the same person sexually attractive. Elvis Presley was sexy. Full stop. Where does that come from? It came from him. Who did he sleep with in private? I have no idea. I don’t give a damn.

In my own experience, as someone who enjoys going to the theater and the movies, the sexuality of the performer is very much tied in with the character he or she is playing and my fantasy about the actor. And that seems to be true when people come and see me act. Most of my fan mail comes from women.

I think the mature attitude toward homosexuals in show business is for the employer to say, “Is this person being convincing in his part?” What (actors) do in private--or what they say about what they do in private--is and always ought to be absolutely irrelevant. . . . If one could learn that, the whole business would become a matter of fascination but irrelevant when it comes to somebody’s ability to act, teach, run a government or anything else.

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Q: Your own stage roles indicate that sexual preferences can be irrelevant in one’s work. Did your coming out have professional repercussions for you?

A: No. I think I’ve carried on much as I would have done anyway. If I’m missing out on parts because I’m gay and had them in the past, I wouldn’t always know about it. But then, my career is well-established.

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Q: What about actors whose careers are not so well-established?

A: The big problem for an American actor wanting to have a career, not particularly on stage but on screen, whether it’s television or cinema, is the confusion people have about the relationship between the performance and the actor. (But) that shows a very naive notion of what acting is. Do I have to be a proven murderer in order to play Richard III? Do I have to be a proven heterosexual to play the scene with Lady Anne? No, of course not.

But then there is something more sinister than that, with regards to American show business. It is that anyone appearing in a prime-time miniseries is actually at the behest of the sponsors of the broadcast and their assumptions of what they want to be connected with in the public’s mind. (Advertisers) want confirmation that we are all the same, because we then will all buy their products, and don’t want their audience to be reminded that some quite large minority of society doesn’t conform.

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Q: You’ve spoken before of the ironies for gay actors in terms of social conformity.

A: Acting at its best is of course about disguise and not being yourself, about pretending to be somebody else. But if that pretense is going to work, the character has to be absolutely rooted in the imagination and experience of the actor.

So for a closeted gay to be an actor is a rather congenial situation. He can disguise the fact he is gay, which is what society is encouraging him to do, but at the same time he can have an emotional release, using the absolute honesty of his own feelings within the performance. And he can do it in public. At the same time the public is saying, “Don’t tell me about yourself, I don’t want to know,” the gay actor goes out and tells society everything and yet disguises it.

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Q: How has your own coming out affected your acting?

A: Your life, your work, develops as you develop as a person. So it’s inevitable that something as crucial as coming out and the freedom you then have in every area of your life is going to affect your work. I’d be loath to go into more detail than that.

I just feel more confidence as a person, and confidence is a very crucial element in performing. I think I’m more in touch with my emotions than I have been. That’s not a direct result of coming out, but it’s been part of very positive feelings I have about my middle age, and I don’t see how that could have come about if I hadn’t come out. So, yes, I feel I have changed as a person, and I think I’m taking advantage of that.

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Q: Can you measure the importance of being knighted in terms of your impact on issues like this? Did that change your forum or outreach?

A: If someone is knighted--and people are knighted right across the social spectrum--there is a little bit of added credibility to your actions and opinions. That doesn’t mean to say that people think you’re right, but there are a few extra opportunities for you to say what you think and perhaps to say it in the ear of someone who is in a position to act on what you say. So I have been able on occasion to talk to very senior politicians (including Prime Minister John Major) about gay issues.

Other very distinguished gays have been given titles of one sort or another, but they were always publicly in the closet. I was out. And the commonplace that if you are openly gay you are somehow going to restrict your ability to do your job in the way you want to do it is given the lie by this honor--in my particular case. I’m still well aware that in other areas of British society--in education, medicine, the legal professions and indeed politics--to be openly gay is simply not allowed. So in looking for change in society’s attitudes, one grasps at all sorts of straws, and I think perhaps my knighthood is one of them.

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Q: You have become very visible in terms of gay activism in Britain. Is there a difference between gay activism there and here?

A: In this country, when you’re talking about gay activism, people assume you’re talking about AIDS. In Britain, because of the National Health Service, the issue of funding for AIDS is less crucial than it is here (so) when you are talking gay issues, it’s thought to be quite separate.

Perhaps for that reason, it’s less easy to get people outside the gay population (challenging) what we consider to be considerable injustices in the legal system. Therefore, people prominent in public life being out, I think, is a very important part of awakening people’s understanding.

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Q: Do you see yourself as a role model?

A: I don’t much like that notion of role model--one can’t set oneself up as that. But people do write to me and thank me for being out and say it helped them in their particular situation. People in America write to me saying the same thing.

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Q: Do you think your feeling of being different influences your portrayal of Richard III, a man who is different because of his physical deformities?

A: Who can tell? I don’t know. I didn’t have to think of my own situation to understand what he was feeling. Having said that, it’s probably not true. I don’t know. I didn’t ever say consciously to myself, “I’m like Richard” or “Richard’s like me.”

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Q: Has your interpretation of the character changed during these two years of playing it?

A: It doesn’t feel like an interpretation.

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Q: Your feeling then?

A: It isn’t even that, because both those imply I’m somehow outside Richard and looking at him. It’s rather that he and I in the course of the performance are united in some way. The details of the performance and indeed the production change nightly in emphasis. How could it be otherwise? The point of doing a play night after night is not to repeat but to re-create, and what’s being re-created is the general sweep of the man’s journey.

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Q: You’ve said you’d never been much interested in “Richard III” before taking it on in this production. How do you feel now?

A: I think what has changed over the two years is that I’ve had increasing admiration for the play. Although this is not mature Shakespeare--it is a young man’s play--you can see him taking such risks as a young dramatist.

Shakespeare’s decision to put a dream on the stage is absolutely remarkable. Four hundred years before Jung, Shakespeare appreciated that dreams had a significance. (He) puts that dream onstage, and then has Richard follow it up with self-analysis to the audience as to what the dream signifies to him--which is basically that he has a conscience and knows he had been doing terrible things. Macbeth, from the outset of his play, has doubts, fears and a conscience, and the fascination of that play, which has similar themes, is seeing how Macbeth deals with his conscience. Richard doesn’t seem to have a conscience until very late in the play.

At times, the play seems to be rather sketchily written, and you wish Richard had a conscience earlier, but then the audience is drawn into the situation (to) become complicit early on. He confesses things to them and treats the nefarious goings-on rather lightly until the middle of the play when the audience thinks it’s gone too far. By then it’s almost too late to separate themselves.

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Q: You’ve often complained of being ignored by the film community. Was one of your goals on this tour to initiate more film offers?

A: My motive for wanting to be in America with “Richard III” was that I know there is a large audience for Shakespeare in the United States that I have played to in the past. I think the National Theatre ought to tour the world, and this was a wonderful opportunity to do it. The spinoff, if it turns out to be, that I get other work in the United States is very much a bonus. Of course, if you are being talked about in the media, then that’s a wonderful way to alert casting directors and directors that you are in the market.

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Q: Have they been alerted?

A: I’ve been sent about six scripts in the last couple of months.

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Q: So what next for you?

A: Basically, I would like to look positively at film work over the next couple of years rather than the norm for me, which is to go from stage production to stage production. I would like very much to record this production, so probably next year we’ll be putting “Richard III” on the screen somehow or other. And I want to do the same with “Uncle Vanya,” which I also played at the National Theatre.

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Q: And those six scripts?

A: I’ll probably do a couple of (them). I can’t talk about them yet (because nothing is set). But they would just be dipping my toe in the hopefully warm waters of the film industry.