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I think if I were asked to do as many as fifty takes, I would assume the director had no idea what he wanted, and was just hoping, eventually, to see it.

Ian Mckellen

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Ian Mckellen
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: May 25
Actor
Film Actor
Preface Author
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Theatrical Director
Voice Actor
County of York
Sir Ian Murray McKellen
Ian Murray McKellen
Would
Director
Think
Directors
Thinking
Asked
Takes
Hoping
Idea
Assume
Ideas
Fifty
Wanted
Eventually
Many
Assuming

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I am going around British secondary schools, as a gay man talking about my life, and encouraging schools to get rid of homophobic bullying and to care for their gay members of staff and their gay students.
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I was brought up in industrial south Lancashire, down the cobbled road from where LS Lowry (1887-1976) lived and painted.
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In the old-fashioned sitcoms, to be gay was, in itself, funny, and you laughed at the characters rather than with them.
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If you've got Mystique as your girlfriend the fun you could have in bed - I've just imagined X-Men 3 might open with me in bed with Patrick Stewart.
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The performance is created by the director. The actor is the material. And I think that has to be true.
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I've had enough of being a gay icon! I've had enough of all this hard work, because, since I came out, I keep getting all these parts, and my career's taken off. I want a quiet life. I'm going back into the closet. But I can't get back into the closet, because it's absolutely jam-packed full of other actors.
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It's only fair that stable gay relationships of long standing should have the same rights and responsibilities as married couples. I know the image of gay marriage is to some people horrific and ludicrous.
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All other areas of my life, I'm hopeless. I can't even be certain how to boil an egg.
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I think it's one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It's another thing to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It's not that they [my significant others] don't want to be identified as gay, but that they don't want to be identified as ... with me.
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I think I'm a bit gruffer than I used to be, and I'm certainly older.
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[There's] nothing special about an actor's imagination, except that he uses it a lot.
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Most of the time when you do a job, a play or a film, you're wondering, Will there be an audience?
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We are very lucky to be men because women have a terrible time getting older parts. It's much more difficult.
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Why live outside the US? Do you want health care or safe food products or democracy or something? They're all overrated. Stay for the excellent cable TV.
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2D looks so flat. Well, it is, of course, it's flat. But 3D isn't. And for an adventure story that takes you into a long-distant, fictional world, it's ideal, I think.
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Every anti-gay remark from the Church gives the thug a license to be cruel.
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My memory of 3D movies is Fernando Lamas in a swashbuckling movie. And I suppose it had been the fifties, in which swords came out at you, bullets came out at you, things were thrown into the auditorium, apparently. All that sort of cheap, Oh, look at us, we've got 3D isn't in the film.
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On the day after 9/11, I walking through the smoke and the smells of New York. There were knots of policemen everywhere. As I went past one officer, he called out: Hi, Magneto. That's an indication of X-Men's extraordinary reach.
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If you're sounding right, you're probably walking right, and vice versa. If you get the footwork right - if you get even one line right in a rehearsal, the director will say, do you know when you said that, it was exactly the character. You were - really landed on it.
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It is so painful watching yourself act, particularly because you can't do anything about it, it's all done and dusted.
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