Quotes of the Day

SIR IAN MCKELLEN is sitting backstage at London's Lyric Theatre, a prestigious venue that overlooks the Windmill strip club in sex-driven Soho. Far from being perturbed by the district, or even the cockroach trap on his dressing-room floor, the star of The Lord of the Rings and The X-Men — two of Hollywood's biggest franchises — is gleeful about returning to the West End after 13 years to perform in Strindberg's The Dance of Death, which opens March 4. "I'm so excited about working in this street," he says. "The strip club is next door to a primary school! And there's a bomb site that hasn't been cleared up since the 1940s. It's a fun, vivid world."

MCKELLEN'S most vivid role may be the powerful and sagacious magician Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, but he looks remarkably human as he reclines in an armchair dressed in rubber slippers, leather trousers and blue T shirt. After years as one of Britain's most distinguished stage actors, McKellen's turns as Gandalf and The X-Men's twisted Magneto have helped those films rake in a staggering combined gross of nearly $2 billion. He has twice been nominated for an Oscar, for Gandalf and the James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters. Though the 63-year-old insists he remains just a humble hired hand, he admits to delight at his newfound box-office clout. It's particularly helpful for a Strindberg play about a destructive marriage, hardly a surefire draw. "If I've introduced the Gandalf audience to Strindberg," he says, "that's thrilling."

YET GANDALF HAS GIVEN McKellen a kind of magic that is stronger than fortune or fame. The current crop of fantasy films has become a full-employment plan for the best older British stage actors, but when McKellen plays Gandalf, the mysteries of life and death seem concealed beneath the lines of that marvelously craggy face. And, as an actor who is very careful to choose only high-quality scripts, he realized he'd been offered one of the parts of a lifetime. "Gandalf goes on such a huge journey. The rustic magician is brought back to life, and he's suddenly more vigorous, single-minded. It's very Shakespearean; many of his characters go on spiritual journeys. I was worried that losing [Gandalf's] charm and his naughtiness when he returns from the dead might diminish his popularity, but he's stayed so popular I've been asked to go back and shoot some more scenes for the third film." If fans can't get enough of the old wizard, neither can McKellen, who refuses to accept that the part ends with the trilogy's final installment. He has a grand idea for the prequel: "I want to play Gandalf again, in The Hobbit. I've asked Peter Jackson if he'll produce the prequel as a huge, yearlong television series. All those different strands to the story seem perfect for TV, and we'd do every scene of it. It could be marvelous."

THE HOLLYWOOD draw hasn't robbed McKellen of his passion for the stage. "You deliver a story in the present tense. Cinema is essentially dead. The actors may well be dead. In the theater you feel everyone's excitement and that feeds your performance." But in the theatre there are no flaming, computer-generated Balrog monsters to fight. McKellen laughs. "Special effects only mean you often act in front of a blue screen and imagine the scenery. It's exactly the same as Macbeth, where you say 'Is this a dagger which I see before me?' There is no dagger. And I never saw the Balrog, I was shouting at a yellow tennis ball!" He jokingly experiments with the line Shakespeare might write today, "Is this a Balrog I see before me?"

HE IS PROUD of his film record, and strongly believes in The X-Men's social agenda. "It's about what you do if you're different. How do you make society better? Do you try to destroy it, or change it? And, aptly for today, there is the question of when is it right to fight?" McKellen, a veteran gay-rights activist, has his own wars still to wage. He's furious that Prime Minister Tony Blair has not delivered on his promise to repeal Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which prohibits state schools from teaching that homosexuality is not offensive, in his first Parliament. "As a public figure I have a responsibility to be open, to bring comfort to people in societies where it is actually dangerous to be publicly gay," he says.

MCKELLEN THE FILM STAR will be on our screens again in April with X-Men 2, and in December for Gandalf's last Ring. He's working on plans to film Shakespeare's gay merchant Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. And then? He emits a broad, Gandalf-like chuckle. Outside the theater a queue of young fans await his autograph. They don't look like they've seen Strindberg before.

• JAMES INVERNE
• A rejuvenated Ian McKellen flies from The Rings to the London stage