Long before he earned the title of Sir Ian McKellen, the future actor was born on May 25, 1939, which was only a few months before the U.K. declared war on Germany. Even though he fortunately never had to experience any of the bombing firsthand in his town of Wigan, those first years of his life during World War II were far from ordinary as he needed to do things like sleep under a steel plate at night.
But to support the war effort, food supplies were limited, so many families were forced to survive off of rations that seem like nothing compared to the full supermarkets of today. In the Writings of Ian McKellen, he described the meager diet and said, "On Saturdays, when we stocked up for the week, my mother blended the butter, the margarine and the top of the milk into a spreading paste which only lasted till Thursday. Then it was dry bread until the following weekend. Similarly with meat. We managed a roast on Saturday lunch; which was served cold on Sunday after morning church, then ran out in a shepherd's pie on Mondays."
It was not until McKellen turned 5 years old that the global conflict ended. Yet the end of hostilities did not make sense to him since the war was all he had ever known, as he explained (via Writings), "Only after peace resumed, did I realize that war wasn't normal".
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