Sir Ian McKellen has opened up about his family life in a new BBC interview, expressing his wish that he had been able to tell his father that was gay before he died.
In a conversation with Amol Rajan, the Lord of the Rings and X-Men actor recalled growing up in Wigan, where he and his family moved shortly before the outbreak of World War II.
In 1988, the now-82-year-old came out publicly in a BBC radio interview, going on to co-found LGBT+ rights charity Stonewall the following year.
During the new interview, Amol asked Sir Ian if he had ‘the conversations that you needed to have with your father Dennis before he died’, to which he responded: ‘No. I didn’t talk to him about being gay.’
‘Do you wish you had?’ the journalist asked, as Sir Ian responded: ‘Of course.’
He continued: ‘He’d been to see me in my first show in the West End, I’m always glad of that. And three weeks later in a car crash he’d died.