This text, and the picture above, where printed in In Vanity Fair, April 1999 UK edition:

The Knight-errant
Sir Ian McKellen,
actor, activist, flavor of the month

Only in Hollywood could a man constantly referred to as the World's Greatest Living Shakespearean Actor be considered an overnight sensation.
He's appeared in more than 100 plays and 24 films, but thanks to his Oscar-nominated role as the randy Frankenstein director James Whale in Gods And Monsters, McKellen, 59, is suddenly a "hot property".
Case in point: his upcoming Mission: Impossible 2.

He attended Cambridge with fellow actors Derek Jacobi and Corin Redgrave. His performance in the Royal Shakespear Company's 1976 production of Macbeth is considered a masterpiece of stage acting.

In 1991 -three years after coming out- he became Britain's first openly gay knight. Only since then has he been able to cry onstage. His most piquant film role with in Michael Caton-Jones's Scandal (1989), playing British politician John Profumo, whom McKellen describes as a "raving heterosexual".

"Saying a gay man can't convincingly make love to a woman on the screen - of course he can. It's called acting."

Photographed by David Hockney in Bridlington, England, on February 2, 1999.