Ian Mckellen Quotes

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Ian Mckellen

Profession : Actor

Birth : May 25, 1939

Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.

Ian Mckellen

What I particularly like about Broadway is the camaraderie and the friendship of other people in other shows. Everybody knows you're opening and cares about you. There's a real village atmosphere.

Ian Mckellen

The conventional wisdom is that if you are gay, you cannot play the romantic straight lead in a movie.

Ian Mckellen

Even now, there are young actors who want careers as romantic leading men, and the best thing is not to reveal you're gay.

Ian Mckellen

The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.

Ian Mckellen

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.

Ian Mckellen

Eventually, before I die, I hope to have written about every part I've played.

Ian Mckellen

Capitalism offers you freedom, but far from giving people freedom, it enslaves them.

Ian Mckellen

Personally, coming out was one of the most important things I've ever done, lifting from my shoulders the millstone of lies that I hadn't even realized I was carrying.

Ian Mckellen

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play.

Ian Mckellen

There is a fantasy as old as the modern gay rights movement that if all our skins turned lavender overnight, the majority, confounded by our numbers and our diversity, and recognising a few of our faces, would at once let go of prejudice forevermore.

Ian Mckellen

Every anti-gay remark from the Church gives the thug a license to be cruel.

Ian Mckellen

I'm brilliant at cooking my stepmother's scrambled egg recipe. The secret is to put eggs, butter, milk, and seasoning together in the saucepan, and to keep stirring with a wooden spoon under a low heat until the preferred consistency is reached.

Ian Mckellen

Until I came out, my acting was all about disguise, and thereafter it became about telling the truth.

Ian Mckellen

People who are truly horrible are often the most interesting people in the room. You look at them and just say, 'Why?'

Ian Mckellen

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.

Ian Mckellen

Try and understand what part you have to play in the world in which you live. There's more to life than you know and it's all happening out there. Discover what part you can play and then go for it.

Ian Mckellen

You might be surprised by how interested young people are in older people.

Ian Mckellen

I increasingly see organized religion as actually my enemy. They treat me as their enemy. Not all Christians, of course. Not all Jews, not all Muslims.

Ian Mckellen

I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.

Ian Mckellen