Ian McKellen
Ian McKellen is an actor, born 1939.
Sir Ian McKellen has worked across Shakespearean drama, modern theatre, popular fantasy and science fiction, and is regarded as a British cultural icon. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991. His accolades include a Tony Award, six Laurence Olivier Awards and a Golden Globe, with nominations for two Academy Awards, five BAFTAs and five Emmy Awards.
What he brought to blockbuster fantasy is theatre discipline, and it is the reason those films are watchable. Gandalf works because McKellen plays exposition as though it costs the speaker something: the lines about rings and ages and ancient wars are delivered by a man who is tired of knowing them, so the audience takes the information as grief rather than homework. Magneto is the same instrument turned cold, a man arguing a position he has earned. Both parts could have been costume work and neither is.
The films drawn from his stage career are where the actual acting sits. Richard III (1995) transposes the play to a fascist Britain and hands the soliloquies straight down the lens, which is as close as film gets to watching him on stage. Gods and Monsters is a quiet, sad, unsentimental portrait of a director at the end of his life. Apt Pupil weaponises his decency. Roy Courtnay in The Good Liar is a con played by an actor who knows exactly how much the audience wants to trust him, and Mr. Holmes gives him a very old Sherlock Holmes whose memory is failing, which is a much better idea for a film than it sounds. He is also entirely willing to be silly, from the Toad in Flushed Away and Death in Last Action Hero to playing himself in Extras.
Movies (61)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
- Avengers: Doomsday (2026)
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
- Beauty and the Beast (2017)
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
- X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
- Flushed Away (2006)
- Stardust (2007)
- The Da Vinci Code (2006)
- The Golden Compass (2007)
- Cats (2019)
- The Christophers (2025)
- Last Action Hero (1993)
- The Shadow (1994)
- Mr. Holmes (2015)
- Asylum (2005)
- Apt Pupil (1998)
- The Good Liar (2019)
- Scandal (1989)
- Animal Crackers (2018)
- The Keep (1983)
- Six Degrees of Separation (1993)
- Restoration (1995)
- Richard III (1995)
- The Critic (2024)
- The Magic Roundabout (2005)
- Swept from the Sea (1998)
TV (11)
Where to start with Ian McKellen
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the obvious front door and still the right one. It is the film in the trilogy where Gandalf carries the most weight, and his handling of pure plot exposition is a small masterwork of making information feel like emotion.
For the stage actor, go to Richard III. Nothing else on his filmography gets you closer to what he is like in a theatre, and the 1930s fascist staging is genuinely thrilling.
Gods and Monsters is the best of his small films and the most human thing he has done on screen. Mr. Holmes and The Good Liar are two late-period leads worth your time, Apt Pupil is the nastiest, X-Men: Days of Future Past is the strongest Magneto outing, and Extras is a six-minute joke at his own expense that is funnier than it has any right to be.
Tolkien
Six films as Gandalf across thirteen years. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is where the performance lives; the Hobbit films ask far less of him, and he has been candid about how joyless the green-screen shooting was.
The Shakespeare and the stage work on film
McKellen was a great stage actor for thirty years before the films, and Richard III is the best record of it: his own adaptation, reset in a fascist 1930s Britain, and genuinely frightening. Gods and Monsters is the finest screen performance he has given.
The blockbusters and the late roles
Magneto arrived two years after Gandalf and made him a fixture of two franchises at once. Mr. Holmes is the quiet late film worth finding, an aged Sherlock losing the one faculty the whole character depends on.