For the last couple of decades, Ian McKellen has been at the forefront of the gay rights struggle and more than virtually any other out actor has been incredibly vocal about effecting change – whether it was co-founding Stonewall, lending his talents to gay rights campaigns or indeed talking about it in interviews.
However Sir Ian didn’t actually come out until he was 49. At the time (it was 1988) he felt compelled to make a stand against Section 28, the since repealed homophobic UK legislation that banned ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools, and essentially banned any mention of it.
Now McKellen has been talking to Vanity Fair, saying he wishes he’d come out sooner. When asked if he wished he hadn’t left it so long, he says, “Yes. Because the minute I came out, I felt immediately better in every way. I felt relieved that I wasn’t lying. You know, when I was growing up in 1950s England, there were no gay clubs I knew about. There were no bars. Homosexuals were shamed publicly and imprisoned. You were on your own, looking over your shoulder all the time, hoping in the handshake of a stranger that he might be somebody gay.”
Indeed he says his sexuality played into his decision to try his hand at acting when he was a young man, “I’d heard you could meet queers. So it proved… I was never closeted with friends and colleagues in the professional theatre, but I wasn’t out to my closest blood relatives.”
As to the repercussions of coming out, he says, “There have been no negatives whatsoever.”
The interview also touches of whether he minds being known as Gandalf rather than being defined by his more highbrow stage roles, but he even manages to come up with a gravestone inscription he wouldn’t mind, ‘Here lies Gandalf. He came out’.
Just yesterday it was revealed that Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen will be back as Professor X and Magneto in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, playing opposite their younger counterparts, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Now comes the news, via 
For a while now people have been wondering if X-Men: Days Of Future Past would feature both the First Class mutants and some from the original X-Men trilogy, due to the fast the comic book story arc it’s based on features time travel.
The makers of The Hobbit seem to feel like they have a bit of a challenge before the first of the movies is released, which is that there’s an awful lot of new characters, mainly the dwarves, that need to be introduced. They’ve done a good job of making each one completely different from the others so they’ll be easily recognisable, but in marketing the movie they’re keen we get to know them before the film is released.
While a couple of months ago it was confirmed The Hobbit was changing from being two movies to three, we didn’t know when the third film would be released, or which of the films was getting a new title. Now we know, as Warner Bros has released a statement, saying that the final film will be titled The Hobbit: There and Back Again (which was previously what the second film was going to be called), and will be released worldwide on July 18th, 2014.