Sir Ian McKellen has opened up about his Lancashire roots in a candid BBC interview with Amol Rajan.

The Lord of the Rings star was born in Burnley and moved to Wigan shortly before the Second World War in 1939.

In the interview, he spoke about his Lancashire accent and how he was “mocked for it” while studying at the University of Cambridge; he even worries that his accent would cost him acting jobs.

Interviewer, Amol, asked: “Were you conscious of your class origins when you got to Cambridge? You were northern and sounded perhaps a bit different to some of the other people there.

Ian, 82, said: “It’s a nice comfortable accent with flat vowels and some emphasis you wouldn’t get in standardised speech.

“But I was mocked for it, that I couldn’t say the word ‘one’ – I still find it difficult to say this.

“But I was mocked for this by public school boys and I thought that I wouldn’t be able to work as a professional actor unless I could speak as they did so I started rooting out my accent.

“If you are playing a middle or upper class character in a play you must do your best to sound like them – but I always had the Lancashire accent in reserve, you can never get rid of your own accent really.”

However, Ian says he has noticed his Lancashire accent “coming back to him” recently – and reinstated just how import your voice and accent is.

He said: “Of late, I have discovered after listening to myself back in recordings, that I have allowed my Lancashire accent to come back because it is part of me – it is me. Your voice is terribly important.

“It expresses you and it is your way of communicating. It should be full of your personality and your roots and to muck around with the voice that you were given, or have discovered for yourself at an early age, is a pity.”

In the hour-long interview, Ian also opened up about other topics, such as his sexuality and his acting career.

He said: “I’ve always been happily gay – it’s other people who make a problem out of it.”

Despite having a “happy childhood”, Ian said he still has some regrets which he holds to this day, including his regret of not coming out to his dad.

He said: “There was one thing missing, which was that I don’t remember enough conversations about things that really mattered.

“I never talked to him (his dad) about being gay.

 “The idea that he couldn’t have coped with the fact that his son was gay is inconceivable to me, even though I’m not aware that we had any gay friends or that he’d ever thought about it or that it had any impact on his life.

“Therefore it might have come as some sort of surprise to him, but there would have been no moral judgement.”

You can watch the full interview on BBC iPlayer, at: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer