Ian Mckellen

Ian McKellen is still adjusting to the fact that he turned 70 this year. "You always think that 70 is the end of the road: 'Somebody died when they were 73; good life,' " he mused on a recent bright fall afternoon, looking wistfully out a hotel window at the flame-tipped trees of Central Park below. "You're closer to death, and you better make sure you don't waste too much of your time doing things you don't want to do. No point in saying things you don't believe in." The renowned Shakespearean was in town to promote his latest project, "The Prisoner," a remake of the cult 1960s British drama about a Big Brother society, which begins Sunday on AMC. It was the day after the New York premiere, and a round of morning interviews seemed to have sapped his energy.

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Thursday. Lindsay Lohan stays out of the slammer, but the judge limits the actress' house-arrest guest list after she flunked a booze test. ( Los Angeles Times ) Movie review: "Cars 2" mixes familiar characters, kid-friendly lessons and a spy thriller plot. ( Los Angeles Times ) Kid-sized peepers? Dolby launches a line of 3-D glasses for pint-sized cinephiles. ( THR ) Studios dish out $25,000 for tables at William and Kate's "essentially sold-out" black-tie event in Hollywood.

The acclaimed English actor Ian McKellen will bring his one-man show, "Ian McKellen Acting Shakespeare," to the Old Globe Theatre Oct. 6-11, the Globe has announced. In the show, McKellen, who won a Tony Award in 1981 for his Broadway performance as Salieri in Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus," portrays several of the Bard's characters he has played on the English stage.

SERIES The Vampire Diaries: Isobel (guest star Mia Kirshner) is back on a new episode of the supernatural drama (8 p.m. KTLA). American Idol: Season 4 contestant Constantine Maroulis performs on the talent competition's results show (8 p.m. Fox). The Bear Whisperer: Steve Searles tries to prove he's smarter than the average, well, you know, in this new nature series (10 p.m. Animal Planet). The Real Housewives of New York City: The Big Apple edition of the reality franchise is back (10 p.m. Bravo)

Ian McKellen -- Gandalf to "Lord of the Rings" fans -- joined the elite circle of Britain's Companions of Honor today. Companion of Honor is the top honor in the British system, limited to 65 living people. McKellen, 68, was knighted in 1991. Australian pop diva Kylie Minogue, another on Queen Elizabeth II's New Year's Honors list, was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE.

Film star Ian McKellen, who played the wizard Gandalf in the Oscar-winning "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, will appear on stage as a cranky pantomime dame later this year, actor Kevin Spacey said Thursday. McKellen will play Widow Twanky in December in a reworking of the classic pantomime story of Aladdin that is taken from the "Arabian Nights" tales, Spacey told a news conference to announce his first season as artistic director of London's Old Vic Theatre Company.

Sir Ian's coming! Hide the hotel Bible! In a profile by John Lahr in the Aug. 27 edition of the New Yorker, Ian McKellen, who may be occupying a Los Angeles hotel room while he leads the Royal Shakespeare Company in "King Lear" and Chekhov's "The Seagull" at UCLA's Royce Hall, Oct. 19-28, confesses that part of his agenda as an openly gay famous person is ripping the page with Leviticus 20:13 out of the Bible whenever his hotel room comes Scripture-equipped.

Casual Shakespeare sounds like an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp. But actor Ian McKellen, who tonight opens a six-day run of his one-man show "Ian McKellen Acting Shakespeare" at the Old Globe Theatre, expects his audience to relax with the Bard. "Don't be put off by the title," McKellen warned during a one-day promotional visit last month. "It's really a party in which the audience and I have a chance to let our hair down.

Great performances don't have to appear in great films; they don't raise everything else to their level; they can't even be counted on to make co-stars look good. All they do is astonish, which is what Ian McKellen does in "Gods and Monsters." Though he's also currently appearing in "Apt Pupil," McKellen, one of England's finest theatrical actors, shows up only sporadically on screen.

Ian McKellen, presenting an award at the Tony ceremony last Sunday, delivered the plug of the year. The hottest ticket in London this season is for Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," he told the millions of potential theater ticket buyers who were watching the show on TV. "You wait until it comes here--it's going to win every Tony." OK, it was a terribly premature prediction.

They gained Oscar glory working together on "American Beauty. " Now actor Kevin Spacey and British director Sam Mendes are teaming up again for a transatlantic stage production of Shakespeare's "Richard III," producers said Thursday. Spacey, 51, will play the title role in the play, which depicts the short reign of the English tyrant. Memorable feature versions starred Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen. It will open in February 2012 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater in New York, followed by a brief international tour before playing at London's Old Vic theater in May. —Reuters Close look at WWII aircraft Bombers and torpedo planes will be the stars of the latest expansion of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, and visitors will be able to get close-up views of the war planes on elevated catwalks.

Lynn Redgrave, a member of the distinguished British acting family who became an overnight sensation playing the title character in the 1966 film "Georgy Girl" and later achieved acclaim on stage as both an actress and a writer, has died. She was 67. Redgrave died Sunday with her children at her side at her home in Kent, Conn., said her publicist, Rick Miramontez. "Our beloved mother Lynn Rachel passed away peacefully after a seven-year journey with breast cancer," her children, Ben, Pema and Annabel, said in a statement Monday.

Ian McKellen is still adjusting to the fact that he turned 70 this year. "You always think that 70 is the end of the road: 'Somebody died when they were 73; good life,' " he mused on a recent bright fall afternoon, looking wistfully out a hotel window at the flame-tipped trees of Central Park below. "You're closer to death, and you better make sure you don't waste too much of your time doing things you don't want to do. No point in saying things you don't believe in." The renowned Shakespearean was in town to promote his latest project, "The Prisoner," a remake of the cult 1960s British drama about a Big Brother society, which begins Sunday on AMC. It was the day after the New York premiere, and a round of morning interviews seemed to have sapped his energy.

For its third original dramatic series, AMC has chosen to reimagine -- as a six-episode miniseries that will run in a clump from Sunday to Tuesday -- Patrick McGoohan's 1967 British spy-fi show "The Prisoner." (It first aired here in 1968.) If the network, here co-producing with the U.K.'s Granada and ITV, was out to prove itself unafraid to mount another show as slow as "Mad Men," it has succeeded, with the difference that "Mad Men" is never boring. In the original, a cult classic so revered that remaking it would seem the very definition of imprudent, McGoohan played a secret agent who resigned his job and awoke in a fanciful metaphor for the English class system called the Village, where the originalhe has been given a number, Six, for a name.

Better offer: Roger Rees has canceled a spring tour of his one-man Shakespeare show, "What You Will" -- which was to have stopped in Long Beach, Santa Barbara and San Diego -- because of an offer to star in a London production of "Waiting for Godot" with Ian McKellen. Saying farewell: BBC America will air David Tennant's final three episodes of "Doctor Who" beginning Dec. 19. Episodes starring Matt Smith as the new Doctor Who will begin airing next year. Staying put: Adam Jasinski, the winner of the CBS reality show "Big Brother 9," was ordered held without bail in Boston Friday on charges of attempting to sell 2,000 oxycodone pills.

Ian McKellen raised more than a few eyebrows when he went the full Monty as "King Lear" on a worldwide tour. But in PBS' "Great Performances" adaptation airing tonight on KCET, McKellen barely shows off his backside. "PBS has its rules," he said with a sigh. "It's all right to see someone have their eyes gouged out, but it's not right to see an old man with his trousers down." Though he was fighting a bad case of jet lag, McKellen, 69, put on the charm during a recent visit to Los Angeles.

Ian McKellen doesn't dominate the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Chekhov's "The Seagull" the way he does "King Lear," both of which are running in repertory at Royce Hall as part of UCLA Live's International Theatre Festival. But his indispensable presence is a marvel of aesthetic balance and discretion that serves as a kind of metronome for the rest of the cast to follow.

Richard of Gloucester is one of Shakespeare's most magnificent monsters and "Richard III" is a film audacious enough to match his astonishing villainy. Made with gusto, daring and visual brilliance, this stripped-down, jazzed-up "Richard" pulsates with bloody life, a triumph of both modernization and popularization. Shakespeare's plays have been subjected to numerous interpretations, so many that when the Folger Shakespeare Filmography was published in 1979, it took 64 pages to list every one.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's "King Lear," directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Ian McKellen, which played here at UCLA's Royce Hall in October 2007 -- without me in the audience, unfortunately -- becomes available to all Americans tonight via the PBS "Great Performances" series. It's not a straight live filming of the stage production but has been redesigned for television, though with the same players wearing, as far as I can tell, the same clothes.