Ian McKellen on playing an ageing Sherlock in Mr Holmes
“When I was a young man, people would ask how I remembered my lines, and I’d think ‘That’s the easy part!’ Well, these days it’s one of the problems. I do find myself thinking ‘How am I going to remember it?’”
But if Cumberbatch’s Holmes is at the height of his genius, McKellen’s is reaching the end of his. Finally, that brilliant mind is starting to fade, his memory dwindling. “We all have intimations, don’t we, however old we are? But there are times in a life when the memory really does get worse and the mind doesn’t work as it should. And if you were to get to the stage where you couldn’t remember anything at all, well, that would be very distressing. Fortunately, I’m not there yet.”
“Lines get more difficult to learn,” he goes on. “When I was a young man, people would ask how I remembered my lines, and I’d think ‘That’s the easy part!’ Well, these days it’s one of the problems. I do find myself thinking ‘How am I going to remember it?’”
He recently filmed an adaptation of the play The Dresser for the BBC; learning his dialogue, he says, took six months. He spent eight getting ready for No Man’s Land, the Harold Pinter play he starred in on Broadway in 2013. “That was just memorising the lines, and that was working on it every day. But it’s not yet that bad for me. I can do it. But for some of my friends… well, if you can’t remember lines, you can’t really act.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL-TAqJBxqE
“But if it’s Shakespeare, God bless him, he’ll have written them with a rhythm, and possibly a rhyme, and those things make it easier.” I mention music has been found to be a help for people with memory problems. “Ah! Makes sense.” Then he sighs. “Age. As Bette Davis said, it’s not for sissies. My version is that age should come with a health warning. All your life you bump into old people. First it’s your grandparents, and then your parents turn into old people. But you never think you’re going to be one of them. And I’ve just turned 76.” He shakes his head, apparently stunned: “What?”
I ask when he first started to feel old. “Well, when someone you’ve known forever dies, you can take that quite personally.” He looks directly at me. “It’ll happen. You wait.”
Always a physical actor, McKellen makes his Sherlock gnarled and stumbling. Does it feel like a premonition, working out the movements of a man 17 years older than you?
But McKellen says he won’t end up quite like that because he isn’t Holmes. For one thing he won’t retire to the country. His home has long been Limehouse in east London, and there he plans to stay. “I belong in the city. I wouldn’t like to not be able to see the theatre or just drop in on friends. Wouldn’t suit me. I’d have to find the nearest cow and have a chat. Friendly and inquisitive, cows."
