Ian McKellen: A Biography

by Garry O'Connor

Overview

The definitive biography of Sir Ian McKellen from an acclaimed biographer

In 2001, Ian McKellen put on the robe and pointed hat of a wizard named Gandalf and won a place in the hearts of Tolkien fans worldwide. Though his role in the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings introduced him to a new audience, McKellen had a thriving career a lifetime before his visit to Middle Earth. He made his West End acting debut in 1964 in James Saunders’s A Scent of Flowers, but it was in 1980 that he took Broadway by storm when he played Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Tony-Award-winning play Amadeus.

He has starred in over four hundred plays and films and he is that rare character: a celebrity whose distinguished political and social service has transcended his international fame to reach beyond the stage and screen. The breadth of his career—professional, personal and political—has been truly staggering: Macbeth (opposite Judi Dench), Iago, King Lear, Chekhov’s Sorin in The Seagull and Becket’s tramp Estragon (opposite Patrick Stewart) in Waiting for Godot. Add to all this his tireless political activism in the cause of gay equality and you have a veritable phenomenon. Garry O’Connor’s Ian McKellen: A Biography probes the heart of the actor, recreating his greatest stage roles and exploring his personal life. Ian McKellen will show readers what makes a great actor tick. His life story has been a constantly developing drama and this biography is the next chapter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250223883
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

GARRY O'CONNOR is a biographer and novelist, noted for his publications on theatrical and literary figures. He has written acclaimed biographies of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield, Peggy Ashcroft, and Alec Guinness. O'Connor has written and presented programs for radio, including Campion's Ghost for Radio 4, adapted from his novel about John Donne.

Editorial Reviews

09/09/2019

Novelist and biographer O’Connor (The Vagabond Lover) explores the life and work of British actor Ian McKellen, a longtime friend, in this engaging but thin biography. Starting with McKellen’s Lancashire boyhood, where he lost his mother at age 12, O’Connor recounts McKellen’s early years through his Cambridge education, to his London stage debut in 1964, which was marred by tragedy when McKellen’s father died in a car crash on the drive home after seeing him perform. O’Connor then charts McKellen’s upward trajectory in theater—peaks included his 1976 Royal Shakespeare Company pairing with Judi Dench in Macbeth and Tony-winning role as Salieri in Amadeus’s 1980 Broadway premiere—and his reticence about revealing his sexuality before, in the late 1980s, he embraced LGBTQ advocacy in response to the AIDS crisis and homophobic British laws. O’Connor’s account—which closes with the stratospheric fame McKellen achieved in the X-Men and Lord of the Rings films—benefits from his insider access, but is hampered by an uncertain tone—sometimes conversational, sometimes formal—and occasionally faulty chronology (as when O’Connor seemingly has McKellen meeting “President Reagan” in 1992). A mostly entertaining introduction to the pre-Gandalf Ian McKellen, this book never quite manages its goal of showing “this complicated and complex man in all shades and colours.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-08-26
The life and career of the beloved actor.

O'Connor (The Vagabond Lover: A Father-Son Memoir, 2017, etc.) has known McKellen (b. 1939) since their student days at Cambridge in the 1950s, but when he asked his celebrated friend to help write this book, McKellen declined, saying "I've only got a few years left," and "I'd be wasting your time, my time, correcting and disputing things." The resulting book demonstrates how much McKellen has done with his years and plans to do with his remaining allotment. Born in Burnley, England, to a civil engineer father and "traditional Lancashire housewife," McKellen was devastated at age 12 when his mother died from breast cancer, a tragedy that "became a driver towards endless achievement and ambition." O'Connor chronicles the highs and lows of that ambition, from McKellen's work in Cambridge plays to his long career in the theater to his late-in-life success in films, most remuneratively his roles as Magneto in the X-Men series and as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings series. The author also charts the trajectory of McKellen's personal life, including his early realization that he was gay, his many years of keeping it hidden from everyone but close theater friends, and his decades as a vocal champion of gay rights. O'Connor inserts himself into the narrative more than he should: the conversations he has had with other theater people, the plays he has directed, and so on. He often digresses with tangential stories, such as the three pages of anecdotes about Laurence Olivier, whom McKellen idolizes. However, there's enough backstage insight to entertain McKellen fans. The book is packed with anecdotes, as when McKellen, after his Lord of the Rings success, takes guests to a restaurant, "rises to his feet, looks around benignly grinning at everyone, and addresses the company with the words, ‘Gandalf pays!' "

A chatty biography of one of the era's greatest actors.

Kirkus Reviews