Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins team up for Starz's 'The Dresser'

Two of Britain's finest actors, Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins, team up for the first time in “The Dresser,” a new TV adaptation of Ronald Harwood's comedy-drama premiering Monday, May 30, on Starz.

Directed and adapted by Richard Eyre, the piece takes place in a small British regional theater during World War II, where a provincial touring company is performing Shakespeare's “King Lear.” Many of the troupe's male performers are away in military service, and its very elderly star — addressed here only as “Sir” (Hopkins) — is teetering on the precipice of senility as he attempts one of the Bard's most challenging roles. It's up to Norman (McKellen), Sir's devoted if severely alcoholic dresser, to help his master pull himself together.

Harwood drew inspiration for his play, which was adapted as a feature film in 1983, from his real-life stint as dresser to Sir Donald Wolfit, a famous Lear in his day before his death in 1968. The two main roles are favorites of older actors, since the play offers such a perceptive and affectionate look at life in the theater.

“Why do actors want to act? Why do they night after night go onstage and repeat the same performances over and over? 'The Dresser' more or less answers that, that you have to go half-mad to survive that kind of life,” Hopkins says.

“I think every actor recognizes themselves and their past in this play,” McKellen says. “And if you, as an outsider, want to know what it feels like to be in a dressing room and a desperate performance is minutes away, this play tells you exactly what that is like.”

Although this marks their first professional collaboration, McKellen and Hopkins, at ages 77 and 78 respectively, vividly convey a sense that their characters have lives and destinies that have long been intertwined. McKellen says he suspects Norman is a failed thespian himself.

“I think in his past, it's quite clear, (Norman) has had some sort of mental breakdown,” McKellen says, “(but) he found that he could dress, he could help, he could be there. He found a job within the theater.”

Both stars give mesmerizing performances. McKellen's Norman is comically fussy, but he shows us that the character's devotion to Sir isn't blind loyalty — it's steeped in a keen awareness that he doesn't have a Plan B for his life if and when this job goes away.

Hopkins' Sir is touching as a fading star who is frightened by his failing faculties, but he's also occasionally scary, as when a worshipful young ingénue (Vanessa Kirby) visits his dressing room and he regards her as little more than a prospective sex toy.

Like McKellen, Hopkins has undertaken the role of King Lear himself, but shortly after that production, at London's National Theatre in 1986, the actor abandoned the stage, a decision he chalks up today to insecurity and a sense that he simply wasn't up to the challenge of theater work. Even filming bits of Sir's onstage performance as Lear before a live audience made him nervous, Hopkins admits, but McKellen helped him get more comfortable.

“('The Dresser') touched something in me,” Hopkins says. “I thought, 'I know what this means.' It was a painless revisit to a world that I ... wasn't comfortable with. Now I can understand why so many great actors love Shakespeare. I wish I had that.”