Vanessa Thorpe at the Guardian offers a piece on Sir Ian McKellen portraying Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic character Sherlock Holmes as an older man in retirement.
There will be no deerstalker. There will be no pipe. In their place will be a straw hat and a walking stick. But with the appetite for Sherlock Holmes growing after the worldwide success of Benedict Cumberbatch’s television portrayal, Sir Ian McKellen is about to give fans of the great sleuth more of what they crave.
The 75-year-old actor’s new film, Mr Holmes, has its world premiere at the Berlin film festival on Sunday and offers a vision of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective living quietly in retirement in Sussex, keeping bees. Directed by Bill Condon, the film is about a crime, but also about age, unreliable memory and the power of the past.
Preparation for the part has allowed the award-winning Shakespearean actor to reflect on his own age. “Mr Holmes really is as much about being old as it is about the crime,” McKellen said this weekend. “I do relate to the ease with which Sherlock talks about death. That ease is something that has come to me and to a lot of my friends. Death is suddenly ever-present, although we all ignore it when we are young.
“For Sherlock, in this story, it is a race against time, and it is not quite like that for me. I don’t intend to retire. I will go on working on and off. I am happily going on with my life.”
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/feb/08/sherlock-film-mr-holmes-ian-mckellen
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