What I particularly like about Broadway is the camaraderie and the friendship of other people in other shows. Everybody knows you're opening and cares about you. There's a real village atmosphere.

Godot is whatever it is in life that you are waiting for: 'I'm waiting to win the lottery. I'm waiting to fall in love'. For me, as a child, it was Christmas. At least that eventually came.

I have got prostate cancer, and I have to keep monitoring that. It's no problem, it's under control and I'm very cool about it, but other people are dying from it.

I'm not quite as cool as I would like to be, really.

I'm fortunate to be famous for two rather imposing characters like Magneto and Gandalf.

The strength of British theatre should be that these actors in their middle years know what they're doing and are good at it. Not rich, not famous, but making a living.

I'd never read 'Lord of the Rings' until I was asked to play Gandalf, so I didn't really know it was a frightfully famous book.

The conventional wisdom is that if you are gay, you cannot play the romantic straight lead in a movie.

Even now, there are young actors who want careers as romantic leading men, and the best thing is not to reveal you're gay.

The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.

I certainly don't disparage someone whose attitude towards their work is utterly different from mine - that's up to them.

The battle going on over gay marriage in America reveals an awful lot. The Bible belt - people hate gay people. Because the Bible tells them? No, the Bible tells them an awful lot of things that they ignore.

It's only fair that stable gay relationships of long standing should have the same rights and responsibilities as married couples. I know the image of gay marriage is to some people horrific and ludicrous.