ShareThisWith his commanding British voice and confident demeanor, Ian McKellen isn't intimidated easily, but he'll admit that playing King Lear was tough. It caused him to ponder his own mortality.
"It's very moving, to me, as I'm facing old age, to think it's not too late to do anything," McKellen, who tackles the iconic Shakespearean role for a PBS special airing March 25, told reporters here recently.
The lesson Lear taught him: "It's not too late to totally reverse your attitude to life as you've lived it so far and emerge a better person."
McKellen, best known to audiences for his role as the wizard Gandalf in the "Lord of the Rings" flicks and the mutant Magento in the "X-Men" movies, turns 70 this May. (He reprises the 7,000-year-old Gandalf in the upcoming movie spinoff "The Hobbit.")
Lear is not McKellen's first Shakespearean experience. He's also done "Macbeth," "Richard III" and "Othello." Lear, though, was a different challenge altogether.
The final days of his recently deceased stepmother reminds McKellen of the emotional journey Lear goes on. Trying to understand the character was daunting for McKellen. In some ways, his stepmother acted as a template for understanding the character.
"My stepmother, aged a hundred, had died just before we started rehearsing. And I'd seen her decline and sense that life was meaningless," he says. "She very movingly and honestly told me shortly before she died that, having been a lifelong Quaker, that she no longer believed in God.
"That was her revelation. But she never turned away from the love that she needed from other people and she happily gave to them. And that became the rock in her life, and that made her what she was for the last couple of years.
"And I think Lear goes on a similar journey."
McKellen had to get fully engaged in Lear to do the part justice. "You can't get involved in all that unless you're ready to do it wholeheartedly," McKellen says, "so it's a hard task."
McKellen says he wasn't sure at first if he wanted to do Lear.
"It takes an awful lot out of you. Unless you're certain that the production is going to be helpful and you can help it, then you're probably wasting your time, as well as the audience's," he says.
"What have I learned? Well, I've learned that you'll never get to the bottom of these parts."
(E-mail Terry Morrow of The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tenn. at morrow2(at)knews.com.)
