IT IS a depressing fact that most of the best comic anecdotes turn out to be false. European movie fans last year enjoyed smugly chortling at the story that Alan Bennett's play The Madness Of George III had been renamed The Madness Of King George for its Hollywood version, because of fears that Joe Six Pack would think it was a sequel to The Madness of George and its successor The Madness of George II.
Yet here comes Richard Loncraine's and Ian McKellen's new American movie version of Richard III with its Shakespearean title intact.
Why did no one worry that the queues at the Cineplex would think they'd missed out on the first two hits in the series? Because that story about the Bennett film isn't true," says Sir Ian McKellen, flicking Marlboro ash from his brown leather trousers on the top floor of the Soho House club. "It's to do with the names by which people are known. In America, the guy who lost the colonies is known only as King George. They would have thought George III was some other king. I actually wanted to call this film just Richard but they made me keep the numerals, because it is as Richard III that he is famous."
The posters for the movie, though, might easily lead night out browsers to think that this is a film about some other Richard, a modern serial killer or arsonist. Against a picture of the city of London in flames is the sales line "I can smile and murder while smile." The line is authentic Shakespeare, but has the contemporary commercial advantage of sounding pure Hannibal Lecter.
"I was very keen that the poster would encourage people to think Oh, I see, this isn't what I expect," says McKellen. "Because I know what they expect. They expect to be bored. They expect it to be generalised, pretty, removed from their own experience. They expect it to be a pageant. They expect it to be worthwhile and they expect not to have a good time.
"All those negatives are what I've spent 35 years in the theatre trying to counter. I don't find it going down market to show London on fire in the poster, although you never see that in the movie. What one is trying to say is here is a presentation of Shakespeare you will find congenial."
The film certainly confounds most expectations of how Shakespeare will look or sound. Running at only 90 minutes barely half the length of the 1955 Laurence Olivier film version it moves and looks like a thriller. Like the 1990 Richard Eyre production at the Royal National Theatre, on which it is based, the adaptation employs the device of parallel history, imagining a 1930s England in which Mosleyite fascists have seized control of the country, with Richard as the intended figurehead of a Nazi state. When Richard offers to swap his kingdom for a horse, it is because his jeep has stalled on the battlefield.
However, McKellen insists that the main alterations concern concept rather than text. He points out that, having performed the play 300 times before starting his script, he was perhaps more familiar with the source material than any previous screenwriter faced with a classic text.
"My job on the production was to stick up for Shakespeare. I was his agent. And, hand on heart, there is nothing on the screen that did not spring from the text or my understanding of it. But you have to keep asking yourself will they understand it? Do they know what I'm talking about? That will affect the way I speak it. It will affect the way the characters are introduced, what they wear."
BECAUSE budget and fashion demanded a short film, McKellen's script took an axe to the structure of the text familiar to play goers, but tried to use only a scalpel on those parts of the play that were retained. Because of the setting, the introduction and identification of some characters was changed, so that, for example, the "Lord Chamberlain" becomes "Prime Minister". The main stylistic decision was that thees or thous would be removed and the line "Cousin, thou wast not wont to be so dull" was altered to "Buckingham, you never used to be so dull", because, in McKellen's view. "wast" was too fustian and "not wont" might be heard by modern popcorn crunchers as a double negative.
The longest agonies concerned the soliloquies.
"I thought Richard could have a confidant he spoke to. Or he could be speaking to himself, gnawing away. But I don't believe people speak to themselves like that. Nor does Shakespeare. The soliloquies are direct communication with someone. It's part of Richard's need to tell people what is going on. You just have to go along with it, although it is worrying in cinema to break the convention of the fourth wall."
McKellen has, for the moment, forsaken the stage. Playing only his second big screen lead at the age of 56 he previously starred behind a big beard in the 1980 D. H. Lawrence biopic, Priest of Love McKellen's main difficulty of creative acclimatisation was the question of potential audience.
"The matter of who exactly you are making a film for seems to me a very difficult one," he says. "When you do a play, you're doing it for about a thousand people who are there with you. And your performance is clearly amended by their reaction. But a film? You are making an artefact which will be seen in an amazing array of different circumstances.
"How many people are going to be watching it on British Airways or Virgin Atlantic on a screen in the back of the seat the size of a cigarette packet? And to think I was worrying when making it that a hair might be out of place in my moustache. Most of them won't even be able to see that I've got a moustache"
McKellen admits to frustration at his previous lack of cinematic credits. This lacuna in his career was made worse by the fact that he seemed the one exception in his generation of British stage actors contemporaries such as Courtenay, Finney, Bates, Hopkins and Jacobi had all received the call from California.
The actor insists that the imperative is not financial on Richard III, he had to return his salary to pay for another day's filming of the battle but artistic or even biological It would be very nice to have made a film that people want to go on seeing after I'm dead. Just simply because when I see films with dead actors in them, it's a wonderful way to survive. Particularly for someone who doesn't have children, actually."
Most bachelor movie stars promoting their new film would have felt it prudent to follow up that last remark with an assurance that they might yet be a father if they met the right woman. But McKellen famously doesn't have to do this. He declared his homosexuality in a radio discussion in 1988. Since then, he has discovered against the dire warnings of his many still closeted colleagues in show business that his career has flourished.
He has even become bankable in Hollywood, officially a 100 per cent heterosexual culture. He is soon to play an elderly, Nazi, war criminal suspect in the new movie from Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects. Called Apt Pupil, it comes from the same quartet of Stephen King novellas which has already spawned the films Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption. He is talking to Spielberg about the sequel to Jurassic Park.
Being openly gay does not seem to be holding him back, yet a general silence on the subject prevails.
"It's the intimacy of the press and the Hollywood machine, entirely dependent on each other," he suggests. "An awful lot of the journalists who cover the industry are themselves secretly gay. So there is no pressure apart from a few activists for gay stars to come out. When I was in Hollywood recently, I asked one of the showbiz writers when the first Hollywood star would be honest about his homosexuality. And he looked at me with what I can only describe as fear and said Ian, I hope never. And that's a man charged by his editors with telling the truth."
Are film actors right to think it will ruin their careers?
"Well, until someone's tried it, we won't know, will we? I can't see it's held back k.d. lang or Jimmy Somerville. If people can come to terms with musicians who are gay, why not actors? It's the view of film producers that audiences feel uncomfortable with gay actors, or won't take them seriously in heterosexual roles. Yet I get more fan letters from women who find me sexually desirable than from men. Hence my barren private life"
BUT Hollywood, he suspects, is unlikely to see the current conspiracy of silence as a problem. This is a place where Jews were encouraged to change their names and left wingers had to betray their friends or emigrate. British show business, too, seems unlikely to witness a rush of McKellen like confessions in a period when Michael Barrymore's publicists have been reassuring his deserting viewers that their hero might not be homosexual after all.
McKellen, however, remains opposed to the idea of "outing" the Establishment's clandestine homosexuals. His official line is that he "doesn't want to rob anyone of the joy of saying it themselves". But most of the people in question will never seek that joy the last line of their obituaries slyly winking "he never married" and it seems more likely that the actor's objection to "outing" comes from his own nature as a conciliator and moderate.
A noisy moderate, though Although he admits that "vanity and a wish to be in the same nominal company as Sir Laurence" played a part in his acceptance of a knighthood in 1990, McKellen's honour also had a campaigning aspect the first publicly declared homosexual to kneel before Queen Elizabeth. He subsequently became the first openly gay man to shake John Major's hand in 10 Downing Street. This encounter apparently deeply disturbed some of Major's other friends.
"I was talking to the latest biographer of John Major recently," says McKellen. "He said How many times have you seen Major? And I said I met him once and then went to Downing Street and never since. And he said. Oh, but I was talking to Lord Tebbit today, who said you were never out of Downing Street and that this is his biggest quarrel with John Major. I must say that making Norman Tebbit that angry is very gratifying."