Interview: Ian McKellen

Have you always wanted to play Sherlock Holmes?
I never thought I’d play him. Sometimes these things just happen. I never thought I’d play Hitler, but someone once asked me to and it was a jolly good script!

The list of screen Holmeses past and present reads like a who’s who of acting greats. Do you have a particular favourite?
Well, Jeremy Brett proved that it was possible to play Sherlock Holmes as a living, believable human being. Eccentric, certainly, but a man with an inner life. As our story was going to be more about what the man was like rather than the puzzle he solves, it was Jeremy I thought of.

There’s a boy in the film who would be roughly the same age as you were in the mid-1940s… Did that add an emotional edge for you?
It did! I remember VE Day, and all the flags going up. I remember the park across from our house in Blackburn, the image of the King and Queen in fireworks. I suppose an ageing Sherlock Holmes and a young Ian McKellen could have been contemporaries.

How does it feel to play such an aged character? 
I am old. I’ve been a pensioner for over ten years. So I have intimations of incapacity. As an actor, I can call on that. I’m younger than Holmes in the film, and I feel younger. But it’s not that difficult to know what I’ve got to look forward to.

There’s a perception that you sprang from nowhere in the mid-’90s, but you’d been a fixture of stage and screen for years. Did you ever get resentful?
I got some very good reviews back in 1969, when I was doing Richard II in the West End, and I used to get narked that people thought I’d come from nowhere, because I’d been acting for seven years. That was in 1969! But I’m awfully glad that my early theatre work wasn’t recorded. I suspect it wouldn’t do any longer.

Do you think it’s helped your state of mind that you only became famous fairly late in life?

My generation was brought up to think there was a ‘prime of life’. When your relationships were settled, your finances were in order, you knew what it was to be you. Well, in my prime of life I became famous. It was surprising, but it’s been very enjoyable. I get recognised, but not that often, and it’s usually to say thank you. That’s nice for any actor.

Maybe it’s because your most famous roles feature novelty headgear: people don’t recognise you when you’re not wearing it.
Perhaps you’re right! I was once coming back from Manchester on a train, it was absolutely packed and I found myself sitting next to two members of the Coronation Street cast. Everyone walking along to the loo was doing double-takes – instant recognition. Me? Nothing. When we got to Euston the crowds parted to let them through. And just as we got to the stairs, someone shouted out '’Ello, Peter!' He thought I was Peter O’Toole.

You seem to be setting a new standard for ageing gracefully. Any advice for the rest of us?
Keep working, keep moving, keep exercising, keep thinking, keep enjoying yourself. Maybe you’ll hold off the inevitable. You won’t, of course. I don’t think that I’m immortal, like I did when I was younger: 'Die? Me?' Yes, darling, we’re all going to die.