Sir Ian McKellen has filmed a heartwarming 80th birthday sonnet message for his friend Patrick Stewart.
The two actors are famed for their close friendship, having become close on the set of 2000's X-Men, when they had adjoining trailers.
In an interview with Wired, Stewart said of their friendship: "On those kind of movies, you spend more time sitting in your trailer than you do in front of the camera.
"So, Ian and I hung out together, drinking tea - and maybe in the afternoon, something a little stronger - and we got to know one another. And the charm of it was that we found that we had so much in common."
Now, to celebrate their continued friendship, which also saw McKellen perform at Stewart's wedding ceremony to his wife Sunny Ozell back in 2013, the 81-year-old read Stewart a sonnet.
Listen to McKellen read the sonnet in the video below:This comes as Stewart himself as been reading a sonnet a day during lockdown to keep his fans' spirits up.
A video of the sonnet was posted to Stewart's Twitter with the following caption: "Sunny and my team took over for my birthday, and arranged this gift for today's reading: Sonnet 81 by @IanMcKellen.
"Thank you, dear Ian. #ASonnetADay"
After Stewart posted his first sonnet earlier in the lockdown, he was overwhelmed by the positive response he received from fans and said the next day: "I was delighted by the response to yesterday's posting of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, and it has led me to undertake what follows...
"When I was a child in the 1940s, my mother would cut up slices of fruit for me (there wasn't much) and as she put it in front of me she would say, 'An apple a day keeps the doctor away.' How about, 'A sonnet a day keeps the doctor away'? So... here we go: Sonnet 1."
If you'd like to catch up with Stewart's sonnets, they can all be found on his Instagram and Twitter accounts.
