Sean Mathias

Sean Mathias is a Welsh director, writer, and actor born in Swansea in 1956, best known for directing the film Bent (1997), an adaptation of Martin Sherman's play about gay men persecuted in Nazi Germany, and for writing the screenplay for the BBC drama The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), adapted from David Leavitt's novel about a gay son coming out to his own closeted father. Mathias met actor Ian McKellen in 1978 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the two became partners for about nine years; they have remained close collaborators and friends ever since, with Mathias directing McKellen in stage productions including No Man's Land and Hamlet, as well as the solo show Ian McKellen on Stage. Since 2011, Mathias has co-owned The Grapes, a historic pub in Limehouse, London, together with McKellen and businessman Evgeny Lebedev. Mathias's decades of work adapting explicitly gay literature and history for stage and screen have made him a significant, if lower-profile, figure in queer British theatre and film.