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ORIGIN

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Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH, CBE (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He is the recipient of six Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a BIF Award, two Saturn Awards, four Drama Desk Awards, and two Critics' Choice Awards. He has also received two Oscar nominations, four BAFTA nominations and five Emmy Award nominations.

McKellen's career spans genres ranging from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. The BBC states his "performances have guaranteed him a place in the canon of English stage and film actors". A recipient of every major theatrical award in the UK, McKellen is regarded as a British cultural icon. He started his professional career in 1961 at the Belgrade Theatre as a member of their highly regarded repertory company. In 1965 McKellen made his first West End appearance. In 1969 he was invited to the Prospect Theatre Company to play the lead parts in Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II, and he firmly established himself as one of the country's foremost classical actors. In the 1970s McKellen became a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain. He achieved worldwide fame for his notable film roles, which include Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies and Magneto in the X-Men films, both of which introduced McKellen to a new generation.

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EARLY LIFE

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McKellen was born on 25 May 1939 in Burnley, Lancashire, the son of Margery Lois (née Sutcliffe) and Denis Murray McKellen, a civil engineer. He was their second child, with a sister, Jean, five years his senior. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, his family moved to Wigan. They lived there until Ian was twelve years old, before relocating to Bolton in 1951, after his father had been promoted. The experience of living through the war as a young child had a lasting impact on him, and he later said that "only after peace resumed ... did I realise that war wasn't normal." When an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of 11 September attacks, McKellen said: "Well, darling, you forget—I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old." Even though he only lived in Bolton for less than seven years, as opposed to the eleven years in Wigan beforehand, he refers to Bolton as his "Hometown".

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CAREER

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While filming the first X-Men film in 1999, McKellen was cast as the wizard Gandalf in Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (consisting of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003) ). He received honors from the Screen Actors Guild for Best ing Actor in a Motion Picture for his work in The Fellowship of the Ring, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best ing Actor for the same role. He provided the voice of Gandalf for several video game adaptations of the Lord of the Rings films, then reprised the role on screen in Jackson's film adaptation of The Hobbit, which was released in three parts from 2012 to 2014.

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PERSONAL LIFE

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McKellen and his first partner, Brian Taylor, a history teacher from Bolton, began their relationship in 1964. Their relationship lasted for eight years, ending in 1972. They lived in London, where McKellen continued to pursue his career as an actor. For over a decade, he has lived in a five-storey Victorian conversion in Narrow Street, Limehouse. In 1978 he met his second partner, Sean Mathias, at the Edinburgh Festival. This relationship lasted until 1988. According to Mathias, the ten-year love affair was tempestuous, with conflicts over McKellen's success in acting versus Mathias's somewhat less-successful career. Mathias later directed McKellen in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2009. The pair entered into a business partnership with Evgeny Lebedev, purchasing the lease on The Grapes public house in Narrow Street.

McKellen is an atheist. In the late 1980s, McKellen lost his appetite for meat except for fish, and has since followed a mainly pescetarian diet. In 2001, Ian McKellen received the Artist Citizen of the World Award ().

He has a tattoo of the Elvish number nine, written using J. R. R Tolkien's artificial script of Tengwar, on his shoulder in reference to his involvement in the Lord of the Rings and the fact that his character was one of the original nine companions of the Fellowship of the Ring. The other actors of "The Fellowship" (Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Sean Bean, Dominic Monaghan and Viggo Mortensen) have the same tattoo. John Rhys-Davies, whose character was also one of the original nine companions, arranged for his stunt double to get the tattoo instead.

He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006. In 2012, McKellen stated on his blog that "There is no cause for alarm. I am examined regularly and the cancer is contained. I've not needed any treatment."

He became an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church in early 2013 in order to preside over the marriage of his friend and X-Men co-star Patrick Stewart to his then fiancée Sunny Ozell.

McKellen was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Cambridge University on 18 June 2014. He was made a Freeman of the city of London on Thursday 30 October 2014. The ceremony took place at Guildhall in London. McKellen was nominated by London's Lord Mayor Fiona Woolf, who said he was chosen as he was an "exceptional actor" and "tireless campaigner for equality". He is also a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford.

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To learn more about the character, visit:

《 Ian McKeller (Magneto) Wiki 》

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