At the Top of His Form

Sir Ian McKellen is asking for silence.

He has commanded the Broadhurst Theatre stage for the last 21/2 hours with a corrosive yet richly detailed portrayal in August Strindberg’s “Dance of Death,” and so the cheering matinee audience quite naturally does his bidding. This is an unusual day, he begins, because his co-star, Helen Mirren, has an infection in her larynx and couldn’t be here. “This is the first performance that she’s ever missed in her life,” he says.

He gives a brief account of Mirren’s back-and-forth with doctors and assures everyone how sorry she is. But sometimes bad luck can bring a blessing, he adds: “An ill wind has blown, but it has blown to us Suzanna Hay.”

He beckons Hay, Mirren’s understudy, who has indeed come through admirably. She steps forward and embraces him, and the applause begins anew. As the curtain falls, she appears overcome.

McKellen is 62 now, and the years are visible on his face. A little tummy has formed on his lanky frame, and the thick shock of hair is of no particular color. But both onstage and off, his engine is running strong.

McKellen’s four decades on the stage in classical and modern drama have brought him the kind of recognition that goes only to the true masters. The press back home in England routinely refers to him as the British theater’s finest contemporary actor, or even the Greatest Living Actor. He would also want early mention to be made of his role as a gay activist.

In the last decade he’s been popping up ever more notably in the movies, scoring particular success in “Richard III,” the 1995 film he also wrote and executive-produced; “Gods and Monsters,” which brought him a 1998 Oscar nomination; and last year’s “X-Men,” the sequel to which goes before the cameras next year.

Last week the largest commercial venture of his career reached the screen--”The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first installment of an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved trilogy. The three films were shot at once during a two-year period in New Zealand at a reported cost of $270 million. Whether the world is ready, new “Ring” movies will be coming its way for the next two Decembers.

There’s a certain majesty to this career, then, however out of place it seems in the Broadhurst’s anciently seedy backstage area. The matinee completed, McKellen has repaired to his dressing room, blessed a few worshipers and showered. To greet a visitor, he wears a striped shirt, black shoes, white socks and a rather silly-looking pair of leather pants. After making his greetings, he offers a seat and settles down on his beige dressing-table chair.

The room is small, mostly white and utterly utilitarian, flavored only by the lightbulbs rimming the mirror and a Hirschfeld caricature on the wall.

McKellen is sipping a banana-strawberry concoction and about to reach for his first Dunhill of the hour. He smiles expectantly, a pixie glint in his eye.

Immediately the phone rings.

“Hello?” he says. “Hel-lo, darling. I just wanted not to bother you, but on the contrary to reassure you, all was well. And Suzanna did very well indeed and didn’t miss a line. And at the end I just said that you had never missed a performance in your life, and the whole audience sighed. And I said you wouldn’t have done now if the doctor hadn’t warned you that you would damage your health.” Pause. “Yes, she was fine. Well, now, no more talking, and you’re going to see the doctors tomorrow.” Pause. “No talking. We’re all all right, and thinking of you and sending love. Bye-bye.”

He hangs up and shakes his head. “It’s a miserable thing when you have to be off.”

Which is something a movie actor doesn’t have to worry about. In “Lord of the Rings,” McKellen is Gandalf, the wise and kindly wizard who helps the young hobbit Frodo Baggins, played by Elijah Wood.

Frodo has come into possession of the One Ring, “an instrument of absolute power” that could enable the dark Lord Sauron to enslave all the people of Middle-earth, and he needs to dispose of it without letting it fall into anyone else’s hands. “The Lord of the Rings” was one of the best-selling books of the last century, and filmmakers know the millions of Tolkien devotees will not tolerate liberty-taking with the story.

McKellen is eager to hear any reaction to the movie--did it start too slowly? did this or that segment work for you?--but otherwise affects near resignation about it. He’s done his best and knows it’s all in other people’s hands now.

McKellen came to “Dance of Death” at the behest of director Sean Mathias, who says he’d always thought Edgar, a savagely unhappy husband locked in a horror marriage circa 1900, would be a good role for him.

Mathias is something of a McKellen authority, having directed him in “Bent” (1990) and “Uncle Vanya” (1992), among other projects, and having been his partner through nearly all of the ‘80s.

The actor has been known to see his characters in terms of real-life public figures, patterning his Macbeth (in a legendary 1976 production opposite Judi Dench) after John F. Kennedy and his Coriolanus (1984) after John McEnroe.

“It’s not truly ‘based on,’ it’s just reassuring yourself,” he says. “It’s not that ... with Coriolanus that I started walking around like McEnroe or trying to look like him or speak like him. It’s just a reassurance that there can be someone at the top of his game--like Coriolanus, who’s the great, great warrior but who has something in his spirit which despises the praise as much as the criticism that he might get from the crowd, and he loses his temper

Mastering Each Character

Edgar in “Dance of Death” is a captain in the Swedish army whose relationship with his wife, Alice (Mirren), is explored to surprising effect through the evening.

By the final curtain, it’s apparent that their anger and obsession form, or disguise, a powerful bond--not only can’t these two get away from each other, they don’t want to. So who’s the basis for Edgar?

“With Edgar I didn’t need to do any of that,” McKellen says. “He’s a man in a relationship of long standing which has survived its ups and downs.... They’re working through some of the negativity of the relationship by playing a baroque game. I think we, all of us, remember those moments in our own relationships when we felt we’d reached the end of the road. And then after the basic need that the characters have for each other ... some good emerges and the past can be X-ed out. So no, Edgar came from inside.”

But not, at least consciously, from inside his partnership with Mathias, which ended in 1990. McKellen paints their collaboration in the most productive of colors. “It rather alarms other people because, you know, he cuts straight through, says, ‘Stop it!’ or something.... To say it to anybody else might appear to be a bit rude. But we’ve gotten so we’ve got a shorthand, and he knows what my failings are, and I may say I know what his are. And our strengths as well, so....” He trails off.

“He’s always been my best critic because he’s always honest.... It isn’t what you might think--’Oh, they’ve got to get through a lot of personal stuff before they can get down to being professional.’ It isn’t like that at all.”

He isn’t through with this subject. “Our relationship has changed,” he allows. And then, very quietly: “I suppose he’s my best friend and one of my best working partners.”

Mathias also speaks of a shorthand between them. McKellen’s great strength, he says, comes from “his sort of political awareness of the entire piece and his role in it.... He believes in the good of the piece as well as his own good. That, I think, is inbred from a background in British theater that is passing, unfortunately.”

And those failings? Mathias contends that “it’s really the same thing--the weaknesses are the paradoxical side of our nature.... He has a tendency to indulge and to be mannered and to be showy. An actor can play to the qualities that the audience is seeking.... But that’s common in actors. I don’t think it’s pertinent to McKellen.” He adds, “I only lost my temper with him once on this job.”

The issue of their past and present is “a really complicated question,” Mathias says. “I’m a person who likes to stay friends with people I’ve had relationships with. Ian and I ... have been lovers, we’ve been not-friends, we’ve been friends. I love working with him now. It’s a real privilege.”

McKellen has said he went into the theater to meet gay men, and though there was clearly more at work than biological imperative, his point is well-taken.

To put it another way, he knew that for many reasons the stage was where he would belong.

“I feel absolutely at home on the stage,” he allows. “Nothing can go wrong.”

Through the years, McKellen has compiled an Olympian gallery of portrayals in such works as “King Lear,” “Amadeus,” “Ivanov” and “Romeo and Juliet.” He has also toured extensively in the one-man shows “Acting Shakespeare” and the slyly titled “A Knight Out.” (The career is explored on his Web site www.mckellen.com.)

Theater is one of the ephemeral arts. A play lives only when it is produced, and a performance, once it’s over, is gone. Thanks to film, of course, some future enthusiast may brighten at the mention of McKellen’s name because he played Magneto in “X-Men”--or, just maybe, Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings.” But that, the actor insists, is of no concern to him.

“I’m not looking for immortality,” he says. But he’s onto something: “There’s something so precious to me about theater--which is why I wanted to make that little comment at the end of the show. I just wanted the audience to feel, well, they didn’t see Helen Mirren, but they were at something which was unique and was theirs and, you know, we shared it together....

“The theater is alive. One of the glorious things about the theater is that it cannot be preserved. You can’t look at it again. It’s happened. It’s for the nonce, you know? It’s live. It’s not dead. Cinema’s dead. Not actually happening.... You can laugh, you can cry, you can shout at the screen and the movie will carry on. But an audience in the theater, whether it knows it or not, is affecting the performance. But that’s the stream of life at its best, isn’t it?”