Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor, one of the greatest living classical actors, known as the heir to Olivier, acclaimed for Macbeth, Richard II, and Gandalf.
On the island
Eight records
My earliest memory is trying to get to sleep in Wigan while my father below was hammering out Schopa. But this isn't Schopper, this is Vladimir Horowitz, who I heard play this little encore piece that he used to do to lucky audiences, and uh it will surprise people who've never heard it before.
Samuel Barber has a daggio for strings, and I expect on this desert island I'd like to indulge my melancholic mood occasionally, and this will certainly help.
String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130: II. Presto
are some Beethoven and part of one of the late quartets, which merit listening to over and over and over again, and so assuming that I'm going to be on your island, or my island, for some time, I'll never get tired of this.
I heard Ethel Merman sing this uh on the stage at uh the Palladium uh late in her career, but I wish I'd heard her sing it on Broadway in um Gypsy. It's the song Rose's turn at the climax of the story when she finally takes control of the whole musical.
Stormy WeatherFavourite
another diva, Lena Horne, and when I saw her on Broadway in The Lady in Her Music, she astonished me by singing her hit song Stormy Weather toward the end of the first half, and I thought, Well, that's crazy You you you you saved the best of the last.
slightly related to what we're talking about. Here's a political song, but it belongs to show business, as the introduction makes clear. Another wonderful performer, Nina Simone, singing Mississippi Godam.
I haven't ever listened to wittingly to anything that Harrison Bertussel wrote. I would love to uh therefore take quite a lot of his music, and we're going to take uh Harrison's clocks.
Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus & Stig Anderson
A track that I danced to more than any other, I think, because they played at my local uh gay um b bar uh in in the East End, uh The White Swan.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:02If you slog at acting, does that mean it's a different trade for the stage as for the cinema?
Now, I don't make much of a distinction actually. But I've had to learn how to do everything and and uh you have to learn how to m get your voice heard by in a large theatre.
Presenter asks
2:28Do you see yourself as a British stage actor, or are you a Hollywood star?
Uh well, uh it it seems to have turned out that way, yes. I'm suddenly famous, which is is is odd. Very odd. … you walk down the street and and strangers know who you are uh and that really hasn't happened to me before.
Presenter asks
10:30Did you tell your father [that you were gay]?
No, I didn't tell my father. There was no point of reference. I I couldn't have reassured uh my father that it was all right to be gay, because I I couldn't point to anybody I knew who was gay apart from Oscar Wilde, and he came to a rather sticky, unfortunate end, you know, and uh it was very, very difficult.
The keepsakes
The book
A dictionary of plants and trees and flowers
in the hope that I could identify what was around me.
Presenter asks
Did you perceive [your accent] as a deterrent to your possible success in the theatre?
Yeah, they were. And uh I think I was the last generation of people who thought that they ought to to to get rid of their accent, have it taken out. Though as you can hear I didn't really succeed. … I did my best to get rid of my accent. Uh that as much as anything. But then, you know, I I thought if you're ever going to play Hamlet you you've you've got to have a posh accent, but Albert Finney proved me wrong.
Presenter asks
20:54Why did you suddenly take the decision [to go public about your homosexuality]?
I'd just split with a boyfriend of long standing, and the facts of our relationship was that had I come out uh whilst we were living together, he would have been even more Ian McKellen's boyfriend than he already was, and so we we kept rather quiet publicly about uh that. But when we split up, uh I began to think for the first time in my life really seriously about it …
“I slogged away at it, I really did, and and had no intention of acting until I was well into um my my twenty undergraduate productions at Cambridge.”
“And so throughout my formative years, you know, whi whether other people were discovering uh sex, I was discovering the theatre at first hand, professional theatre”
“And so I had a secret. And that's one of the reasons I became an actor. Because I didn't like having the secret, I wanted to shout it. From the highest hill, in a way that I couldn't express them, I felt in real life. I had to save it for. Uh the theatre.”
“And when people then said You know, Ian, you're acting better than you used to. I said, well, of course, of course, because I'm now myself. I'm not hiding anything.”