My career has rested on the patronage of a few directors. Primo inter pares is Trevor Nunn, the fellow-undergraduate with whom I acted at Cambridge. When he succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he invited me to Stratford to play Leontes to Judi Dench's Hermione/Perdita double which I still regret not having been free to accept. When, in 1976, he suggested I play Macbeth with Judi, as well as Romeo with Francesca Annis (the most beautiful woman I have ever worked with) the offer was irresistible. Ironically, Leontes was also part of the deal although not, alas, with Judi. So I found myself fulfilling a childhood fantasy of working at Stratford-upon-Avon and, as it turned out, during one of the RSC's golden eras.

Ian McKellen, 1976
Photo by Nobby Clark

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon

Bill at The Other Place, 1976

Francesca Annis and Ian McKellen
Photo by Nobby Clark, 1976

I had first been there when I cycled south from Lancashire for the Bolton School camp in Tiddington, a village along the Avon from the theatre, whence we punted each evening for the plays. Early morning we queued for cheap tickets, often standing at the back of the stalls for half-a-crown (12p). This was before Peter Hall transformed a summer festival theatre into an all-year-round operation with a permanent company on some long term contracts and with the Aldwych Theatre in London as its West End home. By 1976 (the first year that there had been air-conditioning in the auditorium, although not backstage) Trevor Nunn was firmly in control. He divided his time between Warwickshire and London but I had no complaints of being neglected.

I lodged in a couple of rooms on the upper floor of what looked like a haunted house just along the river from the church where Shakespeare was baptised and buried. I clambered daily over the wall surrounding Holy Trinity and through the graveyard to the Bancroft Gardens, where, 16 years before, I had acted in the open air as a student.

Every day of that season was a romance: and my lover was the theatre. — Ian McKellen, July 2003

Bancroft Gardens, Stratford
Photo by Ian Britton courtesy of FreeFoto.com

Left: Francesca Annis (Juliet) and Ian McKellen (Romeo) sitting with the cast of 1976 RSC "Much Ado About Nothing," left to right: Robin Ellis (Don Pedro), Richard Durden (Claudio), Cherie Lunghi (Hero), Ivan Beavis (Leonato), Judi Dench (Beatrice), Donald Sinden (Benedick)