Word: sir
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...rape of a girl by the "Little People," Goblin Market. In painting the action was milder, but fairies were shown appearing in dreams to maidens whose sleep, as the phials by the bedside make clear, was induced by opiates. Then there were the magic mushrooms, which famously appear in Sir John Tenniel's illustration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--the stoned-out caterpillar sitting on one, puffing at his hookah--and more obscurely in Thomas Heatherley's Fairy Seated on a Mushroom, circa...
...hear one or two of you wondering, "Sir Ian who?" That's because you don't get around much--not, anyway, to London or Leeds or Los Angeles or other theater venues where McKellen has illuminated the stage for nearly four decades, torched it with his wily intelligence, seduced it with the precision of his plummy voice. He has dwelt inside Hamlet, Romeo, Coriolanus, Richard II and Richard III (in his version, a purring, reptilian gangster), caressed the mood of wistful doom in Chekhov, played Captain Hook and Inspector Hound and, in Bent, a gay man in a Nazi camp...
...belong on a stage," the actor says. "I feel totally at home. But at a studio, surrounded by other experts who all have their contributions to make, I used to feel a terrible pressure as the person in front of the camera." And it didn't absolutely help that Sir Ian is gay--Britain's first openly homosexual knight...
...risk, no regrets, for in his new films, Sir Ian demonstrates how a lifetime of stage wizardry can be poured into a screen character. In Apt Pupil he is, in director Bryan Singer's phrase, "an old, alcoholic, sitcom-watching Nazi" hiding in California anonymity 40 years after the war and amused to perform a facsimile of his old mischief on a curious teenager (Brad Renfro). As Whale in Bill Condon's film, McKellen is sunset charm incarnate, a gay man melting inside his decaying body for the gross, cheerful fellow (Brendan Fraser) who works in the garden...
...colleagues. "I mean, hell, going to work with a damn knight!" says Renfro, 16. "I didn't know what to expect. But he's a genuine guy, easygoing, totally cool." Fraser, 29, who calls McKellen "the best-kept secret in the film world," was surprised at Sir Ian's bounding vim. "He eats everything he wants and has the energy of a 20-year-old." McKellen was robust enough to endure eight hours as a corpse in a pool, wearing a rubber wetsuit under a heavy tweed outfit. "He was the most remarkable dead body I've ever seen," says...