PREVIEW: Mr Holmes

Mr Holmes - a new film about one of literature's most enduring detectives, will see Sir Ian McKellen take on the title role of Sherlock Holmes.

Ahead of the film's release next week, Sir Ian talks to Keeley Bolger about playing an ageing Sherlock.

So how does Mr Holmes differ from other memorable reincarnations?

''The take of this film is that he wasn't fiction, he was a real man, and he wasn't really like the Sherlock Holmes that Dr Watson portrays in the short stories and novels,'' explains the actor, who has just celebrated his 76th birthday.

''That was the intriguing part of it, that although Sherlock Holmes is a part many, many actors have successfully played and are still doing, this was, at least, not a script that any of them had done before. And part of the newness is Sherlock Holmes is very old.''

Indeed, set in 1947, McKellen's Holmes is 93 years of age for much of the film, with flashbacks to 30 years previously, and living in relative anonymity in the Sussex countryside.

''At my age, I'm inevitably interested in what it's like to be an old man, surviving your friends, trying to make new ones and trying to understand a sometimes alien world,'' says McKellen, who is stylishly dressed in a leather jacket and patterned scarf on the day of the interview.

''It's not a fantasy world that he lives in, but a very real world.''

Although the actor, who was born in Burnley and brought up in Wigan, empathises with his character, memory loss isn't something that concerns him.

''I don't worry on my own behalf about decline, because it's not really happened yet,'' he says, turning his spectacles over in his hands as he speaks.

''But I do with friends and people my age and a bit older. I see what happens, and mortality's ever present, of course. It's no fun seeing an elderly relative decline and change.''

A review of the film will appear in next week's Guide.