Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Israel News

Sir Ian Knows What It?s Like

His years as a closeted gay man gave actor Ian McKellen an understanding, he says, of Jews who hid during the Holocaust.

Ian McKellen Image by Getty Images

?It was horrible living this secret life,? the two-time Oscar nominee says in the current issue of Details magazine. ?You could feel a little bit what it was like to be a Jew in central Europe during a certain period. It was horrible.?

The comments generated a few lines of condemnation on the Web site of the conservative Weekly Standard, which headlined one of its posts, ?Holocaust Comparisons the Left Is Happy To Countenance.? The piece alleged a double standard among liberals who have criticized opponents of President Obama?s health care plan by likening it to the Nazi genocide.

Whatever the accuracy of his analogy, McKellen may have been drawing on a career that has consistently featured both World War II-inspired roles and characters concealing their true identity. Perhaps best known to moviegoers as Gandalf from ?The Lord of the Rings? films, the actor starred 30 years ago in the London premiere of ?Bent,? a play about a gay German man who pretends to be Jewish after being sent to a concentration camp. McKellen later gained a mainstream following by starring in the X-Men movies as Magneto, a character warped by his status as a child survivor of the Holocaust.

Open about his sexuality for the past two decades, McKellen also says in Details that he and friends make a practice of tearing out Leviticus 18:22 ? the biblical passage that describes homosexuality as an ?abomination? ? when staying in hotels: ?I?m not proudly defacing the book, but it?s a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible.?

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version