Ian McKellen is to celebrate his 80th birthday next year by raising funds for theatres, with a new solo show which will play on 80 stages across the U.K, including two nights at the Liverpool Playhouse on the 17th and 18th May.
It all begins in January 2019 with a Tour of London from the National Theatre to the Theatre Royal Stratford East, as well as performances in the West End and Outer London. Then, across the country, he will visit theatres large and small with which he has personal connections, including amateur groups he knew as a child and notable playhouses he has played in as a professional actor over the last half-century.
Accessibly priced tickets will be available everywhere. All profits will benefit specific causes at each theatre.
His intimate show is a mixture of anecdote and acting, including Tolkien, Shakespeare, others…and you the audience.
Ian McKellen said, “I’m celebrating my 80th birthday by touring a new solo show to theatres I know well and a few that I don’t. The show starts with Gandalf and will probably end with an invitation to act with me on stage. In-between there will be anecdotes and acting. I open at my local arts centre in January and end up by August in Orkney.
Live theatre has always been thrilling to me, as an actor and in the audience. Growing up in Lancashire, I was grateful to those companies who toured beyond London and I’ve always enjoyed repaying that debt by touring up and down the country myself, with the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Prospect Theatre, the Actors’ Company, as well as with commercial productions. Sean Mathias, the director and I have worked together for stage and screen, many happy times.
In my early days, I worked at the Liverpool Playhouse as a director and actor. As a boy I saw productions here, as my step-mother had done before me. She remembered Michael Redgrave and Robert Donat in the repertory company and relished productions which toured beyond London to the North West, as I am now doing with my new solo show round the country.”
Ian McKellen first acted at school and with amateur groups in the north of England, here he was born and brought up. He attended Cambridge University and, since 1961, has worked non-stop in the British theatre. He has been leading man and produced plays, modern and classic, for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain and in the West End of London.
In Shakespeare he has triumphed as Richard II, Macbeth (with Judi Dench), Coriolanus, Iago, Richard III (also on film) and most recently as King Lear. He was in the first of Martin Sherman’s sensational Bent and premieres of plays by Arnold Wesker, Peter Shaffer, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn and Mark Ravenhill. Of late he has been Widow Twankey in the Old Vic’s Aladdin pantomime and toured Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land with Patrick Stewart. As Salieri in Amadeus he won every available award on Broadway. For over a decade, he toured his one-man show, Acting Shakespeare.
Ian McKellen is recognised worldwide as Magneto in the X-Men films and Gandalf in Tolkien’s Middle Earth films. He won his first Oscar nomination as Best Actor, as the gay film director James Whale, in Bill Condon’s 1998 classic Gods and Monsters. Since he has starred in The Da Vinci Code, Mr Holmes, Beauty and the Beast, with CATS yet to come.
His television work stretches from Rasputin to Coronation Street, from Extras with Ricky Gervais to Vicious with Derek Jacobi. On the first ever Film On Four, McKellen was in Stephen Frears’ Walter and last year played “The Dresser” with Anthony Hopkins.
Sir Ian McKellen has been an innovator on the Internet, with one of the earliest official sites for an actor, www.mcKellen.com, launched on September 1, 1997. In 1999 he began publishing a series of journal entries that evolved into one of the earliest non-technical blogs. His followings on social media connect more than 10 million fans.
In 1991, Sir Ian was knighted for services to theatre in UK. He was co-founder of Stonewall U.K., which lobbies for legal and social equality for gay people. In 2008, the Queen appointed him Companion of Honour (CH), for his services to Drama and to Equality.