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Even now, there are young actors who want careers as romantic leading men, and the best thing is not to reveal you're gay.
Ian Mckellen -
Who does understand life?
Ian Mckellen
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'The Lego Movie?' I've never heard of it.
Ian Mckellen -
I used to think 'King Lear' was an analysis of insanity, but I don't really think it is. When Lear is supposed to be at his most insane, he is actually understanding the world for the first time.
Ian Mckellen -
I have heard of people dying from prostate cancer, and they are the unlucky ones, the people who didn't know they had got it, and it went on the rampage.
Ian Mckellen -
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.
Ian Mckellen -
Magneto wants to cope with the difficulties thrust upon him by society and by his own nature.
Ian Mckellen -
You always think that 70 is the end of the road: 'Somebody died when they were 73; good life'. You're closer to death, and you better make sure you don't waste too much of your time doing things you don't want to do. No point in saying things you don't believe in.
Ian Mckellen
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What's upsetting about an autobiography is that the final chapter is always missing. I mean, you want the death, don't you?
Ian Mckellen -
There are deaths in public places on the grounds that the victim is gay.
Ian Mckellen -
'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.
Ian Mckellen -
Tolkien is as good as Dickens at sketching a scene.
Ian Mckellen -
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.
Ian Mckellen -
I headed out to have a breather at the stage door, dressed in my tramp costume. I had my bowler hat between my feet and there were passers-by, and one of them turned back and said, 'Do you need help, brother?' And $1 fell into my hat!
Ian Mckellen
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I love working in New York.
Ian Mckellen -
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.
Ian Mckellen -
I've always had very catholic tastes.
Ian Mckellen -
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.
Ian Mckellen -
The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.
Ian Mckellen -
Gandalf is ever-present in my life. I like it.
Ian Mckellen
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I always walk up the escalator on the Tube, and I live in a house with a lot of stairs, and that's good exercise, but you need more than that.
Ian Mckellen -
Imagine trying to be a gay actor, a gay anything in modern Russia? Where to be positively oneself, to be affectionate in public with someone you love of the same gender, or to talk of that love in the hearing of anyone under 18, will put you prison?
Ian Mckellen -
'Macbeth' was a very lucky play for me.
Ian Mckellen -
Every time you work is a challenge. There's a constant worry about it, and it's a side of acting I don't like.
Ian Mckellen