Ian Mckellen Quotes

I belonged to Stratford Children's Theater when I was a boy growing up in Manchester. Even then, I was always doing character parts.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

I saw things at an early age because my mom was a theater actress. I did a play with her when I was 10 years old.

The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.

I gained a great deal from the period during which I worked in theater and I value those things a great deal.

My memories from my childhood are centered on my father's medical conditions alongside my constant desire to understand the principles of the nature around me.

I've always said that theater was where I began, so everything I do now has a bit of my theater background in it. It was my training.

Little things happen to us during the course of our lives when we were children that stay with us.

As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.

I feel like I was born an actor. I did not pursue acting until I was a bit older. But I got a taste of it at an earlier age in the UK.

I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground.

I always sang when I was little and my father, who was a great influence on me, also had a wonderful voice. He and my mother really encouraged me to sing and play the piano. They were always very supportive.

My first job was on Broadway. Then I went into the Navy. When I came out of the Navy, I went back to Broadway and a friend of mine, Lauren Bacall, was in Hollywood filming with Humphrey Bogart. She told one of her producers I was great in my play, and he saw it and cast me in 'The Strange Love of Martha Ivers'.

Michael Sanchez and I grew up in New Jersey, not far from here, playing soccer together. When I was in high school, I worked to start an organization to help senior citizens, which I learned a great deal from.

When I was a kid, my daily routine was playing make-believe, and I kind of created these stories throughout the day. And when it came time to go to preschool, my English wasn't really so great because my mother wanted me to learn Ukrainian, so she signed me up for these children's theater groups.

I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I started in community theater at 7 years old. I loved being on stage and performing. At the time, I didn't correlate that the stuff I was doing on stage was the same thing that I was watching in my favorite films.

People don't realize that I started in musical theater. That's where my roots are.

I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.

If I rewind back to that period, I was 8 in 1977 when 'Star Wars' was in theaters. I saved up money, or my parents got me the 'Art of Star Wars' book.

I'm just a stage actor from Chicago.

My mother is an actress, and she used to drag me from theater to theater and reading to reading.

I grew up with a single mother, and although we didn't have a lot of money, she cared a great deal about what we ate. We were the original health-food family. We shopped at what were called health-food stores before Whole Foods - everything came from bins.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I love the immediacy of an audience being there and reacting. I'm spoiled, having grown up in theater.