McKellen regales Shanghai audience with his lines

British actor IanMcKellen meets an audience for the Shakespeare Lives program during the ongoing Shanghai International Film Festival. [Photo provided to China Daily]

At 77, Ian McKellen surprised a 900-strong Shanghai audience with his excellent memory in a recent master talk in Shanghai Theater Academy.

Pick a Shakespeare stage play, and the iconic British actor could quickly recite lines from the work.

And he was disarmingly honest.

"I just did it for Shanghai. I don't do it all the time. So on the night before that day, I started to run through all the paragraphs at bedtime and was unable to fall asleep," he tells China Daily with a big smile on Monday.

One of the greatest actors of his generation, McKellen recently visited the Shanghai International Film Festival, as part of British Council's Shakespeare Lives, a program celebrating William Shakespeare's works as the world marks the 400th anniversary of his death.

In his acting career spanning around half a century, McKellen has between 1960 and 2007 acted in around 20 films adapted from Shakespeare's works.

"Shakespeare is a huge part of my life," he says.

When McKellen was 8 years old, his parents took him to a local theater to watch a Shakespeare play, which made him fall in love with the master and his works. Theaters and plays also acted as a refuge for him to escape from the stress and sorrow of wartime Britain.

"For me, Shakespeare is religion, or a god, because he was so all-knowing. Even 400 years after his death, human nature doesn't change," he says. "People could still be ambitious, or stupid, or greedy, or still want to tell other people what to do. All what happens now are old stories of Shakespeare."

To date, the world's largest movie site IMDb lists Shakespeare as the "writer" of 1,120 titles and some of the earliest films are adapted from Shakespeare's works.

Shakespeare has more films than any other writers credited to his name. And Shakespeare has been in film history right from the beginning, says McKellen.

As it is a part of the Shakespeare Lives program, eight Shakespeare films are being screened at the ongoing 19th Shanghai International Film Festival.

The titles include Richard III, starring McKellen as the title character; Romeo and Juliet (1968), which won two Oscars; and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).

All the films are affected by the personalities of the directors and actors, and the time the films were made. So you can see a display of different approaches to Shakespeare, says McKellen.

McKellen, too, has his own approach to Shakespeare, and it is a bit more modern.

He says the biggest difficulty when doing a Shakespeare film or stage play is to understand the lines.

When asked if there is any shortcut, McKellen quickly picks up his iPad to open an app.