Actor: Ian McKellen

Ian McKellen was among the finest classical stage actors in Britain for thirty years before film took serious notice, and he was nearly sixty when Gods and Monsters brought his first Academy Award nomination.

He then played Gandalf and Magneto in the same years, which gave him an audience of hundreds of millions who had never seen him do Shakespeare.

He came out publicly in 1988 while campaigning against Section 28, at a point when doing so was a genuine professional risk, and has been a prominent activist since. His Richard III, relocated to a fascist 1930s Britain, is the best of the filmed Shakespeare.