Ian Mckellen Quotes
-
When I went to lobby Nelson Mandela while the post-apartheid constitution was being drafted, I asked him to endorse making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexuality. I'd been warned that he might giggle if I mentioned homosexuality.
-
Journalists often ask me: "Aren't you sorry that after all the work you've done, you're best known as Magneto and Gandalf?" But that's what I've always wanted - not to be known as myself. I want to draw attention to the characters.
-
One school invited me down, as two pupils had come out, and the headmaster didn't know what to do about it. I said, 'How many students here are gay?' and he said, 'Just these two.' Clearly not. 'How many gay members of staff have you got?' He had no idea. And this was a concerned man.
-
The conventional wisdom is that if you are gay, you cannot play the romantic straight lead in a movie.
-
People on television have trouble with fame because audiences think they're their mates.
-
There's no sex in Middle Earth.
-
I got better as an actor, and still I'm getting better. That's only been possible because there's always been work.
-
There are still times in my life where I pull back from being totally honest, and I can't imagine a single straight person who would understand that.
-
I'm not quite as cool as I would like to be, really.
-
I used to comfort myself when I became an actor that it was a useful job, entertaining people. And it was important to do it as well as you possibly can.
-
If you're sounding right, you're probably walking right, and vice versa. If you get the footwork right - if you get even one line right in a rehearsal, the director will say, do you know when you said that, it was exactly the character. You were - really landed on it.
-
There are deaths in public places on the grounds that the victim is gay.
-
There are not many things in my life I can be absolutely proud of or certain I got right, but one of them is that I've got better as an actor. I've learnt how to do it. And I still have enough energy to do it.
-
Quakers are terrific.
-
'King Lear,' I've been seeing all my life. I mean, the great actors of my lifetime... to join their company, as it were, by playing a part that's challenged them, is one of the great joys of being an actor who does the classics.
-
I quite like it when I'm on the Tube and people offer me their seat. Sometimes I take it. The other day I was offered a seat by a pregnant lady. I thought, 'That's going a bit far.'
-
I increasingly see organized religion as actually my enemy. They treat me as their enemy. Not all Christians, of course. Not all Jews, not all Muslims.
-
If I have any audience, they can know that anything I am in, I would go see, with the expectation of being really satisfied.
-
The wonderful thing about modern medicine is that so many of these complaints that used to signify old age and decline can be coped with.
-
One thing Middle-earth is short on is the feminine.
-
The strength of British theatre should be that these actors in their middle years know what they're doing and are good at it. Not rich, not famous, but making a living.
-
I've got a waistline to develop.
-
Magneto wants to cope with the difficulties thrust upon him by society and by his own nature.
-
There are some tremendous actors in the U.K. who have been knighted, and I've spent much of my life admiring many of them, like Laurence Olivier. So it's very flattering to be in their company.