British actor Ian McKellen feared he would die when he lost his footing and fell off a London stage mid-performance in June.

McKellen, 85, was starring in Player Kings, combining William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts One and Two, in the capital’s West End theatre district, when he tripped during a fight scene.

The actor, who is best known for playing Gandalf in the film versions of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and was also Magneto in the X-Men movies, was taken to hospital.

He did not return to the role for the rest of the tour.

“I am absolutely physically recovered,” McKellen told BBC Radio on Monday.

“It is emotionally that I’ve got some residue that I’ve got to deal with. I said to myself as I slid off the stage … ‘this is the end’, these were the words in my mind.

“Apparently I shouted out, ‘My neck is broken, I am dying’. I don’t remember saying that. So there was a lot going on in my head as the body responded to the fall.”

McKellen broke his wrist and chipped a vertebra in the fall. He said he was saved from more serious injury by the padding of the suit he was wearing to play the overweight character John Falstaff.

“Just two weeks after my accident onstage I want to assure my many well-wishers that the injuries (to wrist and neck) are on the mend. My doctors promise a complete recovery – but only if I avoid work over the next few weeks,” he wrote in the days after his fall.

In a separate interview with BBC television, McKellen, whose stage career stretches back to 1961, said he had no plans to retire from acting and did not want anyone else to play Gandalf in the next instalment of the Lord of the Rings franchise, due in 2026.

McKellen’s latest film, The Critic, based on the novel Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn, in which he plays powerful theatre critic Jimmy Erskine in 1930s London, is out in cinemas later in September.

-with AAP