“True, Ian McKellen is not Tom Hanks, nor would he want to be. ‘Oh, it would be totally miserable,’ he said after witnessing the logistical nightmare that is global celebrity. But he remains an actor with a serious following who manages, through a tendency to playfulness, to avoid seeming either elitist or diffident. Certainly, he is not wary of his fans. He reaches out to them – and they to him – through one of the web’s most dizzyingly garish sites, mckellen.com, which he describes as a substitute for the autobiography he will never write.”