Where there's a will, there's a wizard

The professional reviews were already in, but the notice that seemed to strike Sir Ian McKellen most meaningfully came from a 10-year-old who had just seen him as King Lear.

"He said it was the best play he had ever seen in his entire life," the actor recalls, and chortles at the irony. McKellen reflects on the extraordinary global exposure that resulted from his recurring roles in two astoundingly lucrative movie franchises: the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Magneto, the twisted mutant of X-Men.

The boy might have been bribed to go to Shakespeare with the carrot of Gandalf, but why should McKellen care whether an audience finds him through iambic pentameter or movie, er, magnetism? He says he is gratified by his new-found visibility, his unlikely box office invincibility: Lines wrapped around the block in London's West End recently for his run in Waiting for Godot with Patrick Stewart. And he's pleased that there may be many more converts where that awestruck 10-year-old came from.

"People recognise me now, people who never go to the theatre," McKellen says. "That's been the loveliest thing for me, that people want to meet me. And Lord of the Rings is a very big part of it."

Not, of course, the whole part. The 70-year-old McKellen is one of the most gifted classical actors of his generation, one of a select few who has all but defined Shakespearean performance for our time. His Macbeth, his Richard III set contemporary standards for these timeless roles.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company honoured him with its annual Will Award, which he accepted at the company's gala benefit. And he recently took to the stage with A Knight in Harman Hall, a 90-minute solo show.

McKellen thought that while he was being feted, why not try to raise some extra cash for the company with a benefit performance? So he offered his services. Previous winners of the Will (as in Shakespeare) Award, including such stage luminaries as Dame Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Jeremy Irons, have not done anything quite like this. He's at a point in his life, he says, when he likes to take off half the year; such is his definition of recreation, though, that doing a one-man show counts as downtime.

He's also one of those actors — like Stewart — who has been able to maintain his highbrow stage presence while making regular forays into popular culture. His latest along those commercial lines starts up in mid-November, when he appears as the enigmatic No 2 in a remake of the mind-bending '60s British series The Prisoner, filmed in South Africa and Namibia with Jim Caviezel in the title role.

It was the film version of Richard III, he says, and on the heels of that, his Oscar-nominated performance as the lonely hearts film director James Whale in the 1998 Gods and Monsters, that propelled him to his appearances in blockbusters and, to this very comfortable juncture of his life.

But he also credits the uptick in his show business profile with the growth of his comfort level with himself, a peace of mind that developed after revealing that he was gay in 1988. "It all happened since I came out, ironically," McKellen says of the Hollywood phase of his professional life.

The belief among some in his field that opportunities automatically get narrower after such candor is to him mythology. "I'm living proof the opposite is true. You get more self-confidence. You don't have that bit of dishonesty," he says, adding that acting "is about disguise. But it's not about lying."