HOWZAT

He only gave up smoking last year, having lied to himself for ages about how many he was getting through. In a bleak throwaway he mutters that he probably left it far too late.

“These days,” he says, “I often work for just six months of the year, and I half wish that that had been the pattern of my life, because then things might have come in unexpectedly to fill the gaps.” Has this then been the price of workaholism? “Well, that sounds like a disease which you would be better off without.

But I am sure that doing more than is healthy for you probably means you are denying yourself other areas of life that could be more rewarding and fruitful.” Such as children, or partnership?

To the first, he replies that he always thought he would make a wretched parent, and has seen nothing to make him change his mind. “The only comfort I take,” he says, “is that looking around me I see that most other people who have children are wretched parents as well. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been put off. But at the time when I was the right age to be bringing up children, I was the child in my family, and probably behaving far too selfishly to have a child.”

He reflects on how incredible it once was that a gay man should even think about bringing up a child.

“When I was 27 it was illegal for me to make love.” To the second question, about partnership, he reminds me, slightly chidingly, that he has had two quite long relationships. The first, in the Sixties, was with a musician called Brian Taylor, who became the drummer with the Tom Robinson Band.

The second, in the Eighties, was a sometimes tempestuous passion with the director Sean Mathias, who remains a close friend. “So for much of my life I have lived with someone. It just happens that at the moment, quite a long moment, I don’t. But who knows?

Rather alarmingly, when I did this house up in 2000, I was thinking I’d be staying here for the rest of my life and so I’d better get it how I wanted it. And how I wanted it was for one person. If someone comes to stay, I find I’m dying for them to go!”

He throws his head back and lets out a big, gusty laugh. It’s genuinely amused, as if he has stumbled on the hilarity of his own selfishness and would like to share it with you. “The funny thing was, when I came back from New Zealand to live here for the first time after it was in its new shape, I did have a partner whom I was living with, and it soon became obvious that it wasn’t appropriate for us to live together.”

As for the new levels of fame generated by Gandalf, he seems almost as unimpressed by this as by his earning power. He recalls a friend in Hollywood warning him, just after he had landed Gandalf, that everything in his life would change. “I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Because you are going to be in a major Hollywood blockbuster,’ and I said, ‘What does that mean?’ and he said, ‘You will be identified for ever with this one part, and that will affect people’s behaviour towards you.’ I thought, well, it’ll be like doing Amadeus on Broadway [in 1980]. There I was, in Manhattan, in the most successful play of the season.

Everything about appearing in the show is elevated to a state of excitement that affects people who haven’t even seen the play. You become the focus of that success, and in that city success in show business is a precious thing – if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

What happened as a result of The Lord of the Rings was, he concedes, different again. He may not have been prepared for it, but then nor was he thrown. It makes sense, particularly if you accept his self-analysis as one of those essentially shy people who goes into acting precisely because it licenses you to shed your inhibitions. In fact, the way he describes his relationship with Gandalf is a little reminiscent of the duality of kingship as portrayed by Shakespeare in Richard II, one of the parts which announced the young McKellen’s talent back in the late Sixties.

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