Sir Ian McKellen has shared a candid and gently humorous reflection on ageing, mortality and continuing to work at 86, admitting that recent health scares have changed how he views life, though not his desire to keep going.

In an interview with The Times, the veteran actor spoke openly about his outlook following a serious fall in June 2024, when he tumbled off the stage during a London theatre performance and was hospitalised with a fractured wrist and a chipped vertebra. 

Looking back on the experience, McKellen said: “I have accepted that I’m not immortal. Yet I still function.”

The The Lord of the Rings star explained that his thoughts about mortality now come as much from watching others as from his own physical changes. 

“Really the inevitability of mortality comes not just from what you are feeling about yourself, but the simple fact that your friends die — all the time,” he said. 

“When you are young, death is astonishing, a fascinating thing, but it’s a feature of getting older. Death becomes ever present.”

After spending three days in hospital, McKellen did not return to his role in the stage production Player Kings and later revealed he had been dealing with what he described as “agonising pain”. 

On medical advice, he also skipped the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival premiere of his upcoming film The Christophers, explaining in a pre-recorded message that it was “better safe than sorry”.

Now, however, McKellen is back at work in a different way. 

He is currently appearing in An Ark at New York City’s The Shed, an experimental production that uses virtual reality technology. 

Although he and his fellow actors are not physically present in the room, audiences see them through VR headsets. 

McKellen said the format felt like a sensible step after his accident. 

“I thought that was the safest way of getting back to work,” he told The Times, joking that filming allows for pauses that live theatre does not. “You can’t stop live theatre.”

Even so, he has since returned to the stage on a limited basis and said the experience reassured him. 

He noted with relief that he still enjoys performing, does not find it unsettling, and can remember his lines. “Considering my age, all is well,” he said.

Reflecting on the deaths of close friends, McKellen said he has found some comfort in how people approach the end of life. 

“Regrets? I’ve had a few,” he admitted. 

“It’s never satisfactory when someone dies, but I take comfort that when the people I’ve been close to are dying, they seem ready, even welcoming of it.”

Despite his reflections, McKellen made it clear he is not slowing down. “I feel that I’ve still got more to do,” he said.

His upcoming projects include The Christophers, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon, which arrives in cinemas on 10 April, as well as Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, where he stars opposite Johnny Depp, due in November. 

He is also set to reprise his role as Magneto in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Avengers: Doomsday, scheduled for release in December.

For McKellen, acknowledging mortality has not dimmed his enthusiasm, if anything, it seems to have sharpened his appreciation for still being able to do what he loves.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveiled sweeping new rules to keep children safe online.

On Monday, February 16, Starmer extended regulations to AI chatbots, paving the way for a potential social media ban for under-16s following the Grok AI scandal involving Elon Musk’s X platform.

With these new rules, the government plans to close a legal loophole that previously exempted AI chatbots from key provisions of the Online Safety ACT.

This means that AI chatbots such as Musk’s Grok and OpenAI’s ChatGPT must now prevent children from accessing harmful content or face fines of up to 10% of global revenue.

Starmer said: “These AI chatbots are forming friendships with children that can take them into all sorts of places they shouldn’t be going.”

Major key actions include:

• The government plans to amend the children’s well-being bill with “Henry VIII powers” to implement any future under 16s social media ban without any hinderance
• AI chatbots will follow illegal content duties similar to traditional social media platforms, curbing infinite scrolling and setting age limits on VPNs used to bypass restrictions
• Ministers will introduce “Jool’s law” needing platforms to preserve deceased children’s data within five days of a death being reported and make it accessible to coroners

Chief executive of the UK’s leading children’s charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, warned: “Social media has produced huge benefits but lots of harm. AI is going to be that on steroids if we’re not careful.”

Robert Duvall, who starred in such classics as “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II,” “M*A*S*H,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Tender Mercies,” for which he won the Academy Award, has died, his wife announced in a social media post Monday. He was 95.

Luciana Duvall said in a statement that her husband died Sunday at their home “surrounded by love and comfort.”

“To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything,” she wrote. “His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented. In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all.”

One of the best actors of his generation with a career spanning nearly seven decades, Duvall was noted for his understated performances, subsuming himself into characters that manifested moral conflicts or ethical struggles.

Some of his most indelible portrayals included Tom Hagen, the Corleone family’s consigliere, in the first two “Godfather” films; Mac Sledge, a country singer seeking to redeem himself, in “Tender Mercies”; and his debut film appearance, as Boo Radley, a shy man who befriends young Scout, in the 1962 adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

But Duvall could also go large, as shown by his full-throttle performances as Lt. Col. Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now,” who leads a helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village in order to secure a safe zone for surfing; Bull Meechum, the overbearing Marine pilot and father in “The Great Santini”; and Frank Hackett, a corporate TV executive who runs roughshod over a news division in “Network.”

Working with such directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman and Dennis Hopper, Duvall was one of the most visible and dependable actors in the 1970s and ’80s. He brought gravitas and a touch of subversion to such films as “True Confessions,” “The Stone Boy,” “Rambling Rose,” “The Natural,” “Colors,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “A Civil Action.”

And as he aged into mentor roles — as race car driver Tom Cruise’s pit crew chief in “Days of Thunder”; a hostage negotiator opposite Denzel Washington in “John Q.”; Michael Keaton‘s editor-in-chief in “The Paper”; an astronaut leading his crew to save the planet in “Deep Impact” — Duvall brought a commitment to anchoring a story in reality. In all, he earned seven Oscar nominations.

Even in small parts, he could steal a movie. In 2004, he explained to CBS’ “60 Minutes II” that, whether his characters were heroic or villainous, down-to-earth or tenacious, there’s a bit of Robert Duvall in all of them. “Has to be. It’s you underneath,” he said. “You interpret somebody. You try to let it come from yourself.”

“You can’t step over the line”

A Navy brat (his father retired as a rear admiral), Duvall was born on Jan. 5, 1931, in San Diego, California, and raised in Maryland, Missouri and Illinois. He took drama classes in school, appeared in stage productions, served for a year in the Army in the 1950s, and then studied acting in New York alongside Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman and James Caan. He made his off-Broadway debut in 1958’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.”

Duvall had early TV roles on shows like “Playhouse 90,” “Naked City,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Route 66” and “The Untouchables,” and he made his first film appearance in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

He continued with a hefty resume of TV roles, including “The Outer Limits,” “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” “The Time Tunnel,” “The Wild Wild West,” “Judd for the Defense,” “Mod Squad” and “The F.B.I.” But Duvall began making bigger and bigger appearances on movie screens, including in “Countdown,” “Bullitt,” “True Grit” (as outlaw Ned Pepper) and a starring role in Coppola’s “The Rain People.” He also appeared on Broadway in the thriller “Wait Until Dark.”

Then came “M*A*S*H,” Altman’s 1970 satire of war, in which Duvall played Maj. Frank Burns, a by-the-book Army surgeon whose religious zeal didn’t get in the way of his having an affair with the hospital’s chief nurse, Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman). Burns becomes a foil and the butt of jokes of other doctors at the M*A*S*H unit until he is literally driven into a straitjacket.

Duvall followed “M*A*S*H” with a lead role in a science fiction film directed by one of Coppola’s friends, George Lucas. Inspired by one of Lucas’ film school shorts, “THX 1138” starred Duvall as a worker in a dystopian future who breaks free of the state’s mind-control efforts and escapes to a ravaged landscape.

But an even bigger role – in the context of popular culture – was Duvall’s supporting turn in Coppola’s “The Godfather.” Cast opposite Marlon Brando, James Caan and Al Pacino, Duvall played an Irish lawyer who had been “adopted” into the Corleone family – his sole client. Balancing the wishes of Brando’s Vito Corleone, the hot-headed antics of Caan’s Sonny and the resistance of Pacino’s Michael, Tom Hagen was a tested voice of reason, a deliverer of bad news and an instrument of revenge (as when he directed the dismemberment of a movie studio head’s prized horse).

“As an actor and a character both, you can’t step over the line,” Duvall told the A.V. Club in 2022. “[Hagen’s] an adopted son, so he is a member of the family, kind of; maybe not a thousand percent, but he’s very important to the family. And as an actor, you can’t step over that line, either. You have to kind of keep yourself in the background a little bit and then be called upon when needed.”

He would repeat the role in Coppola’s sequel, “The Godfather Part II.” But when Coppola went to film Part III of his gangster saga, Duvall and the studio couldn’t come to terms on salary, and so Tom Hagen was killed off.

“It smells like victory”

Duvall’s work in the 1970s included crime films (“Badge 373,” “The Outfit,” “Breakout”) and Westerns (“Lawman,” “Joe Kidd,” “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid”). He appeared uncredited in Coppola’s “The Conversation”; starred in a barely released adaptation of a William Faulkner short story, “Tomorrow”; played Dr. Watson opposite Nicol Williamson‘s Sherlock Holmes in “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution”; and had a showy turn in the Sidney Lumet-Paddy Chayefsky satire “Network,” about a fictional TV network that boosts a mentally unstable news anchor to raise its moribund ratings. He also starred as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in an ABC miniseries, “Ike.”

But 1979 marked two of Duvall’s most celebrated roles. In Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” he played Lt. Col. Kilgore, who leads a helicopter attack on a suspected Viet Cong village, blaring Wagner on loudspeakers. Kilgore’s bare-chested speech (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning … it smells like victory”), as a forest is incinerated nearby, articulated the brutality and insanity of war and became one of cinema’s iconic moments.

Duvall took his role seriously, even as explosives were discharged all around him. “I played a guy that didn’t flinch, so I didn’t flinch. You know what I mean?” he told Esquire magazine in 2014. “I played that kind of guy – a non-flinching guy. If you flinch when the script says not to flinch, you should be fired.”

The film, an independent production backed by Coppola, became a high-water mark in Hollywood’s approach to the Vietnam War. It also earned Duvall his second supporting actor Oscar nomination.

On the opposite end of the theatrical marketing spectrum from “Apocalypse Now,” Warner Bros. had little faith in “The Great Santini,” adapted from the Pat Conroy novel. Duvall played Col. Bull Meechum, a hard-as-nails Marine fighter pilot whose domineering personality collides with his family, in particular his 18-year-old son, Ben (Michael O’Keefe). The movie received little love when it was barely released in 1979; it was even shown on airplanes under a different title (“The Ace”). It wasn’t until summer 1980, when it received a belated release in a New York theater, followed by cable TV play, that it won positive reviews and a following. The movie earned Oscar nominations for both Duvall and O’Keefe.

In 1983, Duvall starred in the drama “Tender Mercies,” playing Mac Sledge, a country singer whose alcoholism derailed his career and who tries to make a spiritual and professional comeback. Written by Horton Foote, “Tender Mercies” was a quiet movie about a broken soul seeking redemption with a new family, his longings and aspirations voiced through country and gospel songs.

He sang every song himself. (That was part of his deal.) “They were trying to get around it,” Duvall told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” in 2006, “but I said, ‘No, no. This has to be part of it. You cannot dub later. I have to do that.'”

He won the Academy Award for his performance. “Not to brag, but I got calls from Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson telling me I had the character just right,” he told Roger Ebert in 2012.

Duvall had said his favorite role was Gus McCrae, the Texas Ranger turned philosopher cowboy, in the 1989 TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove.”

He admitted in a 2014 interview with Cowboys and Indians magazine that he didn’t always see eye to eye with the series’ Australian director Simon Wincer. “Sometimes when you have a little turmoil, it can turn out better than if everything is in total harmony,” he said.

In playing such roles — stoic, quiet, complicated — Duvall told the Los Angeles Times in 1992, “I have a certain confidence. But this is an unforgiving milieu. You have to approach it by being unforgiving of yourself. You always start with zero, starting with the simplest things. I talk, you listen. You talk, I listen. With each part, you begin with the basics.”

Other films included “Rambling Rose,” “Newsies,” the TV movie “Stalin,” “Falling Down,” “Sling Blade,” “The Man Who Captured Eichmann,” “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway,” “Secondhand Lions,” “The Road,” “Get Low,” “Crazy Heart,” “Jack Reacher” and “The Judge.”

He filmed a 1974 documentary about rodeo riders, “We’re Not the Jet Set,” and then directed his first narrative feature, in 1983: “Angelo, My Love,” set in the world of the Roma. He was back in the director’s chair three more times, including “The Apostle” (which he also wrote), in which he played a Pentecostal preacher on the run from the law. The performance earned him his fifth Oscar nomination. He later directed “Assassination Tango” and “Wild Horses.”

Filmed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the thriller “Assassination Tango” was Duvall’s tribute to the tango. He starred opposite his girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza, who he’d met years earlier when she invited him to the opening of a tango shop. She and the three-times-married Duvall — four decades older than Pedraza — discovered they shared a passion for tango. They married in 2005.

Duvall talked with “60 Minutes” about his obsession with the Argentine dance: “It gets in your blood in a quiet way, kind of a sweet thing that sits there. He’s leading, he’s telling her what to do, but she embellishes. But in our politically correct world, up in the United States, they call it the leader and the follower. Down here, they call it the man and the woman.”

The qualities of Duvall’s work, from the histrionic to the silent, were evident in the naturalness of his delivery. As he said to “Sunday Morning,” “What makes what I do work? It’s this, what we’re doing right now: talking and listening. … That’s the beginning and the end. The beginning and the end is to be simple.”