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Hazel Haley And Gandalf’s Full Monty

Posted Apr 8, 2008 by Billy Townsend

Updated Apr 8, 2008 at 10:51 AM

As you probably know by now, Hazel Haley died on Monday.

There will be many places to find eulogies, so I won’t do one. Besides, she was far more entertaining than anything I would write. So here’s an excerpt from an interview I did with her on the occasion of her retirement. I was coordinating The Ledger’s special section at the time. We had a long talk that veered off on many tangents. We ended up printing some of the best fragments for the section. Here’s my favorite:

SEEING SHAKESPEARE—AND TOO MUCH OF SIR IAN McKELLEN—IN LONDON

“This year, right down the street from my hotel in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company has bought one of the big houses there, and they’re going to do the whole cycle, they’re going to do all 37 plays.

I’ll go to some. A lot of times I don’t enjoy them, actually. A lot of times they don’t suit me. They do a lot of dumb stuff. One time they did `Coriolanus,’ with Sir Ian McKellen. (Editor’s note: McKellen has played Gandalf in the `Lord of the Rings’ and Magneto in the `X-Men’ movies. But he was first a classically trained stage actor.) He came right down to the foots and opened his robe and was naked as a chicken.

Well, I do not want to see Ian McKellen naked as a chicken. That’s not my favorite. I guess they thought that sold tickets.”

The entire collection is worth reading.

And here’s a nice Tribune multimedia piece.