babita sharma. our top story: 60 people have been killed in a suspected chemical attack in syria. many of the victims are children. it's one of the worst atrocities of syria's bloody war. the un will hold emergency talks as the us accuses the assad regime of brutal unabashed barbarism. the lights have gone out early on the eiffel tower as paris joins russia in mourning the 1a victims of monday's metro attack in saint petersburg. this story is trending@bbc.com: a red diamond known as the pink stark has set a new world record when it was sold in hong kong for $71 million. —— rare. it was bought after just five minutes million. —— rare. it was bought afterjust five minutes of bidding time in the auction. that's it from me team. stay with us, more to come. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk. welcome to a special

edition of hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur and today i'm joined by an audience here at the bbc radio theatre to celebrate 20 years of hardtalk interviews. who better to have on our birthday than sir ian mckellen? whether you think of him as richard iii or gandalf, he has won hearts and accolades around the world. not just for decades of work on screen but his passion of public campaigning, particularly on the issue of gay rights. ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to ian mckellen. applause

wow, that was quite a welcome. ian mckellen, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. there's a lot to talk about both personal and in terms of yourcampaigning. but i want to begin with a thought about your career. there are very few actors with the diversity you have offered your audiences, from the great shakespearean roles to comic book characters in x—men. is there a consistent, common thread through everything you've done? the common thread is there is no common thread. there's a variety. that's what i always admired in my youth was people playing different sorts of parts in different environments. i'm as proud of having played widow twankey,

which is a drag role in a british christmas entertainment, pantomime, as i am of playing king lear cheek—by—jowel. you did a show exploring your own recent ancestry. with your mother, and she died when you were very young, just 12, you said you thought she would not mind if you were an actor because she thought that actors gave so much entertainment to people. a very early memory is being bathed by my mother. only once a week, actually! your english but so nobody would expect any more! it was the war. there was a certain amount of deprivation. as she was bathing me, she would tell me the story of the radio programme she had heard the night before after

i had gone to bed. as a family, we went out more to the theatre than the cinema. i went with them from an early age and was intrigued and excited to think that it was possible for me to discover how it was done. it being all that scenery, how you learned your lines, what happened behind the door on the stage. backstage is still the most thrilling place. as we came out to meet the audience, that little journey backstage, you said you were getting nervous, i was getting excited. what about your sexuality and choices? in your younger years, being gay was a criminal offence. 0r or you could be committing a criminal offence. as it remains in many countries around the world, yes. was it the space where you could find a way to feel much more yourself, to express your identity in the way

you could not outside the theatre? that is exactly the point. it was illegal for me to declare my love or do anything about it. in the theatre, or at least standing on the stage, i could disguise it and, speaking someone else's words, have an emotional freedom i was not allowed in my own life. and you discover many professional actors are gay and i think for the same reasons that i took up the job. because i want to explore this campaigning you have chosen to do on the gay rights issue, i think it is important to ask you why, even after homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967, it took you 22 years to come out publicly. i'm not proud of it. when you hear me going on and on and my friends say, "would you stop talking

about being gay? !" i do it because for so many years i felt i couldn't. i'm doing it on behalf of other kids like me, growing up in a similar situation, perhaps because of the attitudes of their family or socially where they live. i'm doing it on their behalf. so why did it take so long? i wasn't the only one who took so long. i was the second person ever to be knighted who was openly gay. the first was angus wilson, the novelist. so there were great restrictions, even after the law was gradually changing. gay people were meant to stay in their place and that place probably was what we call the closet, which was not announcing yourself and not drawing attention to yourself. it did mean you were still... as your acting career really took off through the ‘70s and ‘80s

and you are getting more and more important roles and beginning to make that transition from stage to acting on screen, you were bottling a lot of things up. i was. iwonder, looking back, whether you feel you would have been a better, fuller actor younger if you had been more public about your identity. i think probably. it is certainly true of me and practically every person i know who declared their sexuality that life becomes better in every possible way once you're honest. and that affects your work. and my work, which is dealing with honesty and truth about human nature, was likely to be more convincing. that's what friends and colleagues say. 0vernight my acting took on a depth that it hadn't had before because i'm no longer disguising.

i'm now revealing. it's interesting that you say that. when one looks at your transition from being one of the greats in the theatre to also then becoming extraordinarily successful on—screen, in some ways, it came quite late in your career. it came after i came out. after i said i was gay, suddenly all this film work came my way! laughter it runs against what people say today and we'll get to that. butjust in terms of technique as much as anything, and how you express yourself, you have talked about the way in which, earlier in your career, you actually felt looking back that you weren't an actor who was appropriate for the movies. why? if you're playing in a large theatre, 2000 people, you have a responsibility, i think, to make sure that they can all hear and see you and understand what you're up to. that would involve, if you're going to reach an audience way up

there, probably a few hand gestures and open expression. down there, where the critics normally sit, it does not seem very convincing. it is a problem. how do you act in a large theatre? i elected to make it big rather than cut those people out. that's where i used to sit and where the students, those who do not have much money, would sit. that is where my friends are. but it changed for me when i did a production of macbeth, still available on video... laughter judi dench, the greatest lady macbeth there will ever be. in a tiny theatre. that's the point. the comment on acting the part was it was inappropriate. you had to be, you had to exist. that meant a conversation rather than declaration and rhetoric. 0nce i'd done that convincingly,

i never really wanted to work in a big theatre again. i then started to work in the smallest theatre of all, which is cinema, where the camera can be closer to you than anybody. there have been critics... perhaps one of the most famous and voluble was fellow actor richard harris. he lumped you and derekjacobi together. and kenneth branagh. i was in good company. he said, "these guys are technically brilliant but passionless. " yeah, nonsense. laughter when he died, he played dumbledore, the wiza rd. i played the real wizard! laughter you're in a different franchise, let's put it that way! but when they called me up and said, would i be interested in being in the harry potterfilms,

they did not say what part. i worked out what they were thinking and i couldn't. i couldn't take over the part from an actor who i knew didn't approve of me. interesting. you could have been dumbledore? sometimes, when i see the posters of mike gambon, who gloriously plays dumbledore, i think, sometimes, it's me! we get asked for each other‘s autograph. we have to get to the wizards. gandalf became you, you became gandalf. it was an extraordinary bonding of character and actor. you chose, not so long ago, that when you finally leave this mortal coil, your gravestone will simply say, played gandalf, came out. here lies gandalf. yes, that would do, wouldn't it? it's the two sides of my life which have meant a great deal to me. being as famous as the actor playing

who plays gandalf was bound to be, looking back on it, and i don't take it personally at all, i relish it, but i'm now in contact with all sorts of people, particularly very young people all over the world, who i could not possibly have known about. they have let me into their lives to an extent. i visit schools quite a lot to talk about gay issues but i'm welcome because it is gandalf. and they give me the time of day, which they probably would not if some old geezer strolled into the classroom. it's a very, very personal, wonderful thing. i don't feel that about other parts. you don't feel that diminishes some of the other, some might say, more profound parts and plays and films? no. because it's true. the text of tolkien‘s dialogue

is not up to shakespeare. nor is it trying to be. it's a different sort of storytelling. but to be part of the culture, which is what gandalf has always been... gandalf for president was an early button before the films were ever made. to be able to impersonate this character already in the zeitgeist, and meant a great deal as an example of how to behave in the world, which is how young people respond to this old granddad, what a privilege. you've done a lot of tosh, as well. laughter i wondered how long it would be before we got on to "hard talk". well, x—men...

x—men is not tosh. is there a role you've ever turned down for being too puerile or silly? about once a week. lots of stuff. no, no, i've said it many times, x—men is a discussion in a very popular form of what a civil rights movement does. it's not true of superman and those guys, those wimps who suddenly become super men by changing their underwear what other tosh? laughter i'm thinking, i probably have done some! maybe i'm picking away at the wrong thing, but it seems to me there is an insecurity in acting. it's a thing that it is a very insecure profession. your great—great uncle died in the workhouse. i wonder whether that insecurity, even today, is still a part of your make—up. well, i'm extremely lucky

as an actor from that point of view. i've never been out of work. i've taken work that other actors of my standing and generation might not have done because there was not much money involved or it meant going away from home. but whether you're working or not working, to feel part of a group, a tribe of people who know that if a play is working well, the relationship between the audience and and the performers... and the writer, who might be long dead, provides something magical. storytelling is what we as human beings are good at doing. we cannot manage without stories. when it happens in the theatre

and works well, even if you are going to be out of work for the rest of the year, you are blessed. and you're doing it in the company of people who share that excitement. it is a fantasticjob. there's an irony, we have touched on it already, after you came out, your career took off. particularly in the movies. but there has never been an openly gay winner of best actor at the oscars. no. the university of southern california did an analysis of the top 100 movies in 2015. the latest year. and they found that 82 of those top 100 movies do not depict a single lgbt speaking or named character. yes. we had that hash tag "0scars so white". do we need a hash tag "0scars so straight"? you should not look to hollywood for social advance. laughter.

i do not mean to be flippant, but you looked to hollywood forfinancial advice. does that mean you have to hold your nose? no, you don't have to. you just don't go to hollywood. you do your work somewhere else. the movies that we all love and relish are fantasy. that is why we love them. it is not the real world. there are plenty of wonderful films being made about the real world but they do not come out of what we think of as traditionally the hollywood machine. geena davis, for example, and a bunch of women actors and directors are really trying to change the way that women are depicted on the big screen. particularly in hollywood. we now get onto the campaigning work you do. is part of your campaigning work to try and change the way that film as a business works? no.

my campaigning is all about allowing people to be themselves, whatever label they put on themselves. can we really grumble when, finally, it was agreed that moonlight should be the oscar film of the year, without a strong gay storyline? that comes out of gay people, and in that case, black people, wanting to tell a story to which a person responded. that people should be given the freedom to do that. but the campaign to say, right, we must employ more openly gay actors... i don't think that will get you very far. talking about going very far, you have become very active internationally with your gay rights campaigning. i know that you have been in russia recently. i also know that you're about to go to turkey. both of these places strike me as places where you will not be welcome and where you could be in some danger. it did feel like that in russia.

it was in the city of tchaikovsky, one of the greatest gay men to ever come out of russia, and their politicians are homophobic. it means they have a fear or distrust of gay people. as a visitor, trying to be myself, i have to be protected. with bodyguards? oh, yes. what difference do you feel you can make as an outsider, albeit a celebrated famous one, coming into different countries with their own bodies and culture and lecturing them about the way they should organise their society and culture? how can that make a difference? i do feel myself to be english probably first,

then british, then european and then internationalist. when you come out, you join a tribe that is all over the world. and i feel i know what it is like to be oppressed in russia because i remember what it used to be like here. i do have a story to tell which is relevant. and the people, really, that i contact when i go abroad, if i am allowed, other local people who are trying, in their own way, to make their own lives easier... the lgbt people of russia, of whom there are millions. but very few are brave enough to express their individuality and be honest. and i just know that they are very grateful when you arrive and you say, it'll probably be all right. keep at it, keep fighting.

that is all i am really doing. occasionally, you can point out the facts that have got lost. in india, and kenya, they have laws which the british empire put in place. anti—gay laws. when we withdrew, we left these bad laws behind. now these local laws are being defended by the indians and kenyans and they say, don't come to us with your foreign idea. i want to say, no, i want to take this away which we should have taken away when we left your country. we're almost out of time. i want to bring it back from the public ian mckellen to the private and deeply personal ian mckellen. it seems to me that you have always guarded your own private life. i know that at one point, you decided to write an autobiography. you took the money, the advance. i didn't.

it was offered. you handed it back and never actually got it. the point is, you had second thoughts. why? i don't think there is anything remarkable about my private life, from what i can observe. there is a clear distinction between saying, i am what i am, and saying, this is what i do. i do not want to start talking about my relationships. that is not fair, unless the other person is with me talking about it as well. but the idea of an autobiography is very misleading. you get one side of the story. but on the principle, on the issue, i can be bold. and knowing that i am in the right, standing on the moral high ground, that is easier. to be nosy, i will dig a bit more into the personal. you live in a country where things have changed an awful lot in your lifetime. frankly, if you were in your 20s or 30s now, you could, in a way that you could not have back then, you could have

considered, you know, first of all, gay marriage. you could easily have had children, lots of children, whatever. you have talked about being the last of the mckellens. and there's a sense of melancholy in being the last of your line. do you think, if you had your life over, you would have liked all of that? the kids? i used to think the best thing about being gay was that you do not have to have kids. i mean, how many decent parents are there? the misery of the world comes because people had a dreadful upbringing. it seems to me. so i feel like i escaped that. also, i am extremely selfish. i can devote all my time to my career and do things around it without rushing back to change

the nappies or going on holiday with all the kids are all that. oh, how ghastly it sounds! —— i can devote all my time to my career and do things around it without rushing back to change the nappies or going on holiday with all the kids are all that. oh, how ghastly it sounds! but the thrill of my life and the possibility of change in the future is to see kids in school, and i am talking about teenagers, who say, do not come here and talk about being gay. you are only talking about being gay because, for years, people have pointed at you and said you're queer. you give yourself a more sympathetic label. we do not want labels. we do not know if we are gay or not. we might be straight one day, gay the next, and i think, that is the future. we are out of time. thank you for talking to us, sir ian mckellen. hello, there.

high pressure is going to be the dominating force for the weather across the uk for the rest of this week and into the weekend. here it is, just nudging in from the south—west, pushing that area of low pressure out of the way. and that has brought some severe gales to the far north of scotland and certainly to the northern isles. that gradually easing down. so first thing on wednesday, most of the winds will be light, quite a bit of a chilly start across england and wales, particularly in rural places. now, there will be quite a bit of cloud across the northern half of the uk, where it will be quite windy. the best of the sunshine, to start off with, across central and southern areas. so that went quite a feature across the northern half of scotland and for the northern isles. we will see some outbreaks of rain and little patchy rain across western scotland, dry across the east. but generally speaking, it is good to be quite cloudy for scotland, northern ireland, and to the north of england. maybe some light rain or drizzle for cumbria. in the midlands southwards, here we start off dry. could be a bit of mist and fog around but that will clear quickly.

because the winds will be light it will feel not too bad in that sunshine temperatures of about seven or eight degrees to start the day. through the day, it looks like the cloud will move southwards, turning grey for many central and south—eastern parts. i think the sunshine just holding on across the south coast and in towards the south—west, and will see sunny spells developing across say the south—east of scotland with some shelter in the north—west. we get the sunshine, 13 or 1a degrees, on that where it stays cloudy, around 11 or 13 degrees. stays rather cloudy for wednesday evening in overnight, with further spots of rain coming across western scotland, but those winds using all the while. —— and overnight. for thursday and friday, they are looking similar, day by day. so for the end of the week, it is largely dry thanks to high pressure. there will be some cloud around, but also some sunny spells where it will feel quite warm. now across the pond, inti the united states, the masters golf has started off very windy. those winds will gradually ease down on thursday, and into friday, and we should see some good spells of sunshine, then it is even

warm into the weekend with very light winds. that is what is to be happening across the uk to the weekend. this high pressure keating settled. we also import some warm air off the near continent. you see the orange colours bathing much of the country but it could be, locally, very warm across the south—east of england on sunday. but this area of cooler air, as you can see, will be making inroads into the start of the next week. so things are set down to cool down a little bit monday onwards. for saturday, though, starting off rather cloudy, some sunshine breaking through that cloud, and we'll see temperatures reaching the mid—teens celsius in many places. on sunday, it looks like the best of the sunshine will be in the south and east of the country. it'll be very warm, starting to feel cooler and cloudier though across the north—west. i'm mariko 0i. the headlines: the us accuses syria's president of brutal barbarism after an apparent chemical attack left at least 58 people dead. translation: i lost my son, my

children, my neighbours, by daughter. they are all gone. i only have got left. —— god. one of the worst atrocities of the syrian war sparks global condemnation. the un is set to stage emergency talks. prince harry unveils plans to rid the world of landmines, in memory of his mother princess diana.