Age: 87
male
Sir Ian Murray McKellen (born 25 May 1939) is an British and American actor. He has played roles on the screen and stage in genres ranging from Shakespearean dramas and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is regarded as a British cultural icon and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991. He has received numerous accolades, including a Tony Award, six Olivier Awards, and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards and five Emmy Awards. McKellen made his stage debut in 1961 at the Belgrade Theatre as a member of its repertory company, and in 1965 made his first West End appearance. In 1969, he was invited to join the Prospect Theatre Company to play the lead parts in Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II. In the 1970s, McKellen became a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain. He has earned five Olivier Awards for his roles in Pillars of the Community (1977), The Alchemist (1978), Bent (1979), Wild Honey (1984), and Richard III (1995). McKellen made his Broadway debut in The Promise (1965). He received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1980). He was further nominated for Ian McKellen: Acting Shakespeare (1984). He returned to Broadway in Wild Honey(1986), Dance of Death (1990), No Man's Land (2013), and Waiting for Godot (2013), the latter two being a joint production with Patrick Stewart. McKellen achieved worldwide fame for his film roles, including the titular King in Richard III(1995), James Whale in Gods and Monsters (1998), Magneto in the X-Men films, Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) and The Hobbit (2012–2014) trilogies. Other notable film roles include A Touch of Love (1969), Plenty (1985), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Restoration (1995), Flushed Away (2006), Mr. Holmes (2015), and The Good Liar (2019). McKellen came out as gay in 1988, and has since championed LGBT social movements worldwide. He was awarded the Freedom of the City of London in October 2014. McKellen is a cofounder of Stonewall, an LGBT rights lobby group in the United Kingdom, named after the Stonewall riots. He is also patron of LGBT History Month, Pride London, Oxford Pride, GayGlos, LGBT Foundation and FFLAG. Description above from the Wikipedia article Ian McKellen, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Ian McKellen
Epemitreus
for Epemitreus in Conan: The Hyborian Age (TV-Series)
Suggested by rickzeo
The kingdoms of the Hyborian Age have reached a decadent pinnacle. In the great nations of the West , a new "Doctrine of Serenity" has taken hold. Led by a class of refined scholars and "benevolent" viziers, society has come to view the primal impulses of man—his capacity for protective violence, his rugged independence, and his competitive fire—as "atavistic tremors" that threaten the social harmony. Strength is treated as a defect; passion is treated as a sickness. Amidst this quiet, perfumed stagnation arrives Conan of Cimmeria. To the "enlightened" nobility, he is a walking blasphemy—a man who smells of sweat and leather in a world of silk and incense. He does not speak in riddles, he does not perform for the court, and he reacts to injustice with a heavy hand. He is the "Inconvenient Man," an unrefined mirror reflecting the cowardice of a society that has traded its agency for comfort. But the "Doctrine of Serenity" is not a human evolution; it is a siege strategy. The viziers are the Serpent Men of Valusia, ancient reptilian infiltrators who have traded their swords for the "Illusion of the Serpent." They understand that a man who has lost his "will to strive" is a man who cannot defend his home. By systematically shaming the warrior spirit and pathologizing the individual, the Serpent Men are "taming" humanity into a docile herd, stripping away their natural defenses before the final strike. The tragedy lies in the people themselves. Conditioned to fear their own shadows, the citizens actively hunt the "barbarians" among them, believing that by extinguishing the last embers of human fire, they will finally be safe. Only when the Serpent Men shed their human masks do the deluded realize their error. In a world of "harmonious" slaves, the unrefined Cimmerian alone remains capable of holding a blade, proving that the savage virtues society tried to "cure" were the only things keeping the darkness at bay.
