From Gandalf to Godot it's all great: Ian McKellen

(MENAFN- Arab Times) LONDON Dec 3 (Agencies): Veteran stage and film actor Ian McKellen says children want to say hello to him in the street because he plays the wizard Gandalf in the 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Hobbit' movies but he knows they know he's not the real thing.

'They know you're not really Gandalf but I know Gandalf so they want to meet me' McKellen 75 and looking every bit the wizard he is on screen in 'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies' told Reuters on Tuesday after the world premiere.

'It's rather like going to see Santa Claus in the shop even though you know it's not the real Santa Claus or at least I did; didn't you' he said with a mock quizzical glance. McKellen has played Gandalf in all six of the movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's tales for young adults. So he has carried the series which has now reached its finale perhaps as much as any other person apart from director Peter Jackson.

McKellen is also the mutant Magneto in the X-Men movies part of a spectacular late-blooming Hollywood career that only really began at about age 50 after decades of doing Shakespeare and what is sometimes called 'legitimate theatre'.

To him the words are different but the techniques are the same. 'I think with Shakespeare you can be required to do absolutely anything at the turn of a sixpence suddenly you go into a battle suddenly you utter something passionate.

'So if you're suddenly doing what otherwise might seem rather ridiculous things in Middle Earth you think 'Well let's do it and trust the storyteller'...' he said. 'It's the same with Magneto really yeah raise that car destroy that bridge yes lead that battle. It's all possible.'

High

While riding high on the lucrative X-Men and Middle Earth franchises the first Hobbit movie took in more than $1 billion McKellen also has been polishing his stage image. He was in a well-received production of Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' in which he played Estragon to his great mate Patrick Stewart's Vladimir most recently in New York City.

McKellen said he had no intention of reviving the famous Beckett play again after some 450 performances.

But he said he and Stewart with whom the openly gay McKellen has a well-publicised 'bromance' are thinking of bringing Harold Pinter's 'No Man's Land' which they played in rotation with Godot in New York to London.

As for the 'bromance' it produced a flurry of charming 'selfies' posted on the Internet of Stewart and McKellen at various famous New York City locations.

'That's a wonderful joke in this country especially a Yorkshireman (Stewart) and a Lancastrian (McKellen) to get on since we've been fighting since the Middle Ages' McKellen said.

He shows no signs of slowing down. He is embarking on a second season of his elderly gay-couple television comedy 'Vicious' and will be playing in a remake of the play and movie 'The Dresser' about an ageing actor and his wardrobe assistant.

And what will his legacy be after a fantastic run in stage and film 'I always said that when I die it will say here lies Gandalf he came out.'

Also:

LONDON: New films based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien are only possible with the permission of the author's estate 'Hobbit' director Peter Jackson said on Tuesday.

The New Zealand director was speaking in London a day after the premiere of 'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies' the final instalment in a trilogy that followed Jackson's successful 'Lord of the Rings' series.

'The Tolkien estate owns the writings of Professor Tolkien. 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' were sold by Professor Tolkien in the late sixties the film rights' Jackson said at a press conference.

'They are the only two works of his that have ever been sold... So without the cooperation of the Tolkien Estate there can't be any more films.' Any deal could be uncertain as the novelist's son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien was critical of the 'commercialisation' of his father's work in a 2012 interview with French newspaper Le Monde.

'Tolkien has become a monster devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time' Christopher Tolkien was reported to say.

'The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work and what it has become has overwhelmed me. The commercialisation has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.

'There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.'