Sir Ian McKellen hasn't spent his entire acting career aching to play Shakespeare's King Lear.

"I thought it was beyond me," the veteran English actor said, surprisingly.

"It was never a part I wanted to play. I knew, from having seen other people play it up close, that it takes an awful lot out of you.

"You can't throw off a King Lear. You have to delve into it."

McKellen's reservations notwithstanding, he eventually did delve into King Lear for a stage run that ended last year. A filmed studio version was produced before the cast disbanded, and the results can be seen tonight on the PBS series Great Performances.

"What's perhaps special about King Lear is that the central part is for an old person," McKellen said. "I'm 70 this year, but Lear is over 80 at a time when people died much younger than that.

"He's a man retiring, aware of his frailties of mind and body, hoping to enjoy his retirement, and at that point the person he loves most in the world, his daughter, chooses to rebel.

"In rejecting her, he goes on a journey. And it's very moving to me, as I'm facing old age, to think it's not too late to do anything. It's not too late to reverse your attitude and emerge a better person."

In some ways, McKellen thinks of his own stepmother when he thinks of King Lear.

"My stepmother (Gladys), aged a hundred, died just before we started rehearsing (the stage version of King Lear)," McKellen recalled.

"She very movingly told me shortly before she died that, having been a lifelong Quaker, she no longer believed in God. But she never turned away from the love she needed from other people and she happily gave to them. That became the rock in her life and made her what she was for the last couple of years.

"I think Lear goes on a similar journey. Now, you can't get involved in all that unless you're ready to do it wholeheartedly. So it's a hard task."

McKellen's birth mother died when he was 12 and his father married Gladys a couple of years later. Both McKellen's father and stepmom were theatre buffs, and McKellen described his stepmom as a "big enthusiast" for his career.

The multi-award-winning McKellen is best known to younger audiences as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films and Magneto in the X-Men flicks. So did McKellen's stepmom get to see any of those movies before she passed away?

"She was taken to see Fellowship of the Ring, which she found too noisy," McKellen said. "And she didn't approve of the knighthood (which McKellen received in 1990). Quakers don't approve of calling each other Mr. or Mrs., so it was a bone of contention. She used to laugh at me and send me up about that."

Not everyone in North America is as knowledgable about Shakespeare as McKellen's stepmother was, regardless of whether they're watching in a theatre or on television. But McKellen insisted that's part of the fun.

"Depending where you're playing (in North America), you may well be playing to an audience that is much less savvy about Shakespeare than world-weary, tired audiences in London who see King Lear twice a year, or three Hamlets a year," McKellen said.

"It's wonderful to play to an audience who potentially doesn't know how the play is going to end."

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