Ian Mckellen

Fresh from his win in the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the wizardly actor Ian McKellen will host NBC's "Saturday Night Live" this weekend. A week later, of course, he's up for a supporting actor Oscar for his role as Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings."

In the backstage lounge behind a black curtain, a tiny girl sits on a white couch, her small legs crossed delicately as she answers a reporter's questions. Eight-year-old Dakota Fanning, co-star with Sean Penn of "I Am Sam," maintains the poise of a seasoned show-biz pro. (Of her film role, she says: "It was just unbelievable working with Sean. I just learned so much.") It's Saturday afternoon at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles and Dakota has just finished rehearsing for the Screen Actors Guild Awards (shown Sunday night on TNT)

Russell Crowe was named best male actor in a leading role for a theatrical motion picture for "A Beautiful Mind," and Halle Berry was voted best female actor for "Monster's Ball" at the eighth annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night. Berry is the first African American to win a SAG award in a leading actor category. Of the 14 previous SAG winners in the leading actor categories, 11 have gone on to receive the Academy Award, including Julia Roberts last year for "Erin Brockovich."

Quick, now--which section of the paper are these quotes from? "The real deal ... attuned to character ... defying everyone's expectations." Observations about the three top GOP guys running for governor? Wrong. Good, but wrong. They're from ads for Oscar-nominated movies, which got me to thinking of these two big campaigns being waged simultaneously--for governor, and for the Academy Awards. We talk about them both as "races." February would be a far more engaging month if the people running for governor campaigned as if they were angling for an Oscar, and the other way around.

Ian McKellen stars as the wizard Gandalf the Grey in the massive film adaptation of "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." On stage, he just finished a limited Broadway run in a new translation of August Strindberg's "Dance of Death" opposite Helen Mirren. Knighted in his native England in 1989, McKellen has a long list of highly prestigious movie credits, including the title role in his own adaptation of "Richard III" and as director James Whale in "Gods and Monsters."

Sir Ian McKellen is asking for silence. He has commanded the Broadhurst Theatre stage for the last 21/2 hours with a corrosive yet richly detailed portrayal in August Strindberg's "Dance of Death," and so the cheering matinee audience quite naturally does his bidding. This is an unusual day, he begins, because his co-star, Helen Mirren, has an infection in her larynx and couldn't be here. "This is the first performance that she's ever missed in her life," he says.

"Yes, these are the real sets," says Sir Ian McKellen, the great English actor, as he squeezes his bottom into a mini-sized chair in a mini-sized Hobbit house, specially flown from New Zealand and reassembled on the grounds of a French castle in the hills overlooking Cannes.

Major League Baseball's All-Star Game has traditionally been one of the summer's primary showcases, and NBC hopes Tuesday's edition will be no exception, following a recent up-and-down ratings history and a summer that Peacock network executives would just as soon forget. All-Star ratings slipped to a 30-year low in 1997--when Fox carried the telecast--but rebounded to nearly 19 million viewers on NBC in 1998 and then 17.

Mark Urman remembers first setting his sights on an Oscar for Ian McKellen, star of "Gods and Monsters," at last year's Cannes Film Festival. The fact that Urman's newly born company, Lions Gate Films Releasing, hadn't bought the film yet only sharpened his appetite. "The whole architecture of our Oscar campaign was planned out before we acquired the film last June," said Urman, a longtime publicist before he became co-president of Lions Gate.

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.