Patrick Stewart

• 1. Introduction

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  Patrick Stewart grew a moustache for the role of Macbeth, and when he looked in the mirror just before going on stage, he saw his father's face staring straight back at him. His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in the British Army Parachute Regiment. It was said that when Alfred strode onto the parade ground, the birds stopped singing. Patrick Stewart was born in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on the 13th of July 1940. His childhood there was poor, and it was violent at his father's hands. From that household came an English actor with a career spanning over seven decades of stage and screen. How does a boy who left school at 15 to work in a furniture store end up knighted by Queen Elizabeth II? How does a self-described unknown British Shakespearean actor become a captain that millions of strangers recognise on sight? And why would a man who once asked another actor why she would bother with science fiction spend so much of his life inside it? The answers run from a poor terraced house in Yorkshire to the captain's chair of a starship.

• 2. A Yorkshire Boyhood

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  Cecil Dormand, an English teacher at Crowlees Junior and Infant School in Mirfield, put a copy of Shakespeare into a young Patrick Stewart's hand and told him to get up and perform. Stewart later credited that teacher with his acting career. He entered Mirfield Secondary Modern School in 1951, aged 11, and kept studying drama there. Around that time he met and befriended the actor Brian Blessed on a drama course in Mytholmroyd. Stewart's home was shaped by his father's wartime service. As a result of the Dunkirk evacuation, Alfred Stewart suffered from combat fatigue, now known as PTSD. His mother, Gladys, was a weaver and textile worker, and Patrick had two older brothers, Geoffrey, born in 1925, and Trevor, born in 1935. At 15, Stewart left school and threw himself into local theatre. He supported himself as a newspaper reporter and obituary writer for the local paper. One brother recalled that Stewart would slip away to theatre rehearsals when he was meant to be working, then invent the stories he was reporting or persuade other reporters to cover for him. His editor eventually gave him an ultimatum: choose acting or journalism. Stewart left after one year. A furniture store job suited him better, since it allowed him to attend rehearsals and even let him practise his craft by tailoring each sales pitch to the customer. He also trained in boxing. Stewart and Blessed later won grants to attend the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and Stewart was the first person who was neither an Oxford nor a Cambridge graduate to receive a grant from West Riding Council.

• 3. Years On The Boards

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  On the 19th of May 1959, at the Theatre Royal in Bristol, Patrick Stewart made his first professional stage appearance, playing Cutpurse in Cyrano de Bergerac for the Bristol Old Vic Company. In 1966 he became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he would remain until 1982 and become an associate artist by 1967. He acted alongside performers such as Ben Kingsley and Ian Richardson. In January 1967 he made his television debut on Coronation Street, playing a fire officer. He made his Broadway debut as Snout in Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, then moved on to the Royal National Theatre in the early 1980s. During the early 1970s, UCSB professor Homer Swander recruited Stewart to help teach American university students about Shakespeare, a connection that led toward Hollywood. Stewart preferred classical theatre to other genres. He once asked the Doctor Who actress Lalla Ward why she would work in science fiction or on television at all. He took roles in many major television series without ever becoming a household name, appearing as Vladimir Lenin in Fall of Eagles, Sejanus in I, Claudius, and Karla in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He played King Leondegrance in John Boorman's Excalibur and Gurney Halleck in David Lynch's Dune. His grounding in those years would later give him a striking way to describe a part that made him famous. He said that all those years in the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing kings, emperors, princes and tragic heroes, were nothing but preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

• 4. The Captain's Chair

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  In 1987 Stewart agreed to work in Hollywood on a revival of Star Trek, after Robert H. Justman saw him during a literary reading at UCLA. Stewart knew nothing about the cultural influence of Star Trek or its iconic status in American culture. He was reluctant to sign the standard six-year contract, but did so because he, his agent, and others he consulted all believed the new show would quickly fail. He expected to make some money and then return to his London stage career. His trusted colleague Ian McKellen was particularly vocal in advising him not to throw away his theatrical career for this foray into television. Stewart spent 18 months using the professional name Patrick Hewes Stewart while negotiating the rights to his own name from an American actor who had registered it with the Screen Actors Guild. When he was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Los Angeles Times called him an unknown British Shakespearean actor. Still living out of his suitcase, sceptical the show would last, he was unprepared for production that began at 4:45 am each day. He scolded the main cast for being unprofessional, telling them, in a line he later recalled with embarrassment, that they were not there to have fun. His spirits used to sink whenever he had to memorise and recite technobabble, though his favourite technical line became spacetime continuum. He grew close to his fellow actors and became their advocate with the producers. Marina Sirtis credited him with at least 50 percent of the show's success, because others imitated his professionalism. Jonathan Frakes said Stewart set such a high bar for preparation that the whole cast came to work completely prepared. The show ran from 1987 to 1994 and made Stewart unexpectedly wealthy. During a break in filming in 1992, he calculated that he earned more in that break than from ten weeks of Woolf in London. He played Picard again in films including Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact, and on the 4th of August 2018, CBS and Stewart jointly announced he would reprise the role in a new series. The readers of TV Guide once named Stewart, alongside Cindy Crawford, television's most bodacious man and woman; he said he had never heard of her.

• 5. Mutants And Multiverses

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  The success of Star Trek typecast Stewart as Picard, and other roles became hard to find. Returning to the stage proved difficult too, after so long away. He admitted that he would never have joined The Next Generation had he known it would run for seven years, saying it still frightened him a little to think how much of his life had gone to one role. In the late 1990s he accepted the part of Professor Charles Xavier in the big-budget X-Men film series, the founder and mentor of the superhero team, a role similar in many ways to Picard. He was reluctant to sign on to another franchise, but his interest in working with director Bryan Singer persuaded him. He was joined by Ian McKellen, who by then had conceded that his friend had made a prudent choice. McKellen played Magneto, Xavier's friend and ideological nemesis. Stewart played Xavier in seven feature films, from X-Men through Logan, and announced he would leave the franchise after Logan. In 2022 he returned as a Professor Xavier of Earth-838 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and he is reprising the role in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. From 2017 to 2021 Stewart shared the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a live-action Marvel Comics superhero with Hugh Jackman, before they were surpassed by Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe. He briefly regained the record in 2022 after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, then lost it again in 2024 to Wesley Snipes.

• 6. A Voice For Hire

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  Known for his strong and authoritative voice, Patrick Stewart won a Grammy for narrating Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. He also narrated Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, a recording William Shatner had voiced too, as well as C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle and Rick Wakeman's Return to the Centre of the Earth. He is the voice of the Magic Mirror in Disneyland's live show Snow White, and he narrated astronomical tours such as Nine Worlds and the fulldome shows MarsQuest and The Voyager Encounters. In 2006 he won a Spike TV Video Game Award for voicing Emperor Uriel Septim in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. He voiced Picard in Activision's Star Trek computer games and reprised the captain in Star Trek: Legacy. His voice carried into commercials too, for TSB Bank, Domestos bleach, Shell fuel, and Goodyear tyres, among others. On screen he voiced the pig Napoleon in a television adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm and guest starred in the Simpsons episode Homer the Great as Number One. He plays CIA Deputy Director Avery Bullock on American Dad!, lending his likeness as well as his voice. He also recorded a narration planned for the prologue and epilogue of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, though the final film used another voice; his version appears only on the first edition of the soundtrack.

• 7. Returning To The Stage

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  After The Next Generation began, Stewart soon found he missed the stage. The lengthy filming had left a gaping hole of many years in his CV as a Shakespearean actor, costing him the chance to play Hamlet, Romeo and Richard III. So he began writing one-man shows for California universities and acting schools. One was a version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in which he played all 40-plus characters. He performed it on Broadway in 1991 and brought it back several times, with one show's revenue going to the 11th of September campaign of the Actors Fund of America. He produced it through Camm Lane Productions, named for his birthplace in Camm Lane, Mirfield. In 1997 he took on Othello with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., in a photo negative production. Stewart, a white Othello, played opposite an otherwise all-black cast, a part he had wanted since the age of 14. He and director Jude Kelly inverted the play so that Othello became a comment on a white man entering a black society. In 2008 he played King Claudius in Hamlet alongside David Tennant, winning the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor. When collecting it he dedicated the award in part to Tennant and to Tennant's understudy Edward Bennett, after a back injury had kept Tennant out for four weeks. In 2009 he appeared with Ian McKellen as Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, fulfilling a 50-year ambition that began when he saw Peter O'Toole in the play at the Bristol Old Vic at the age of 17. When the two returned to Broadway in 2014 with Godot and No Man's Land, they toured New York in bowler hats for a playful Twitter campaign, an idea suggested by Stewart's wife. The marketing department disapproved, but the cheap publicity proved a major success and softened his image as a serious actor. Stewart has appeared in more than 60 Royal Shakespeare Company productions, his first being The Investigation in 1966.

• 8. Beyond The Roles

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  In 2006 Patrick Stewart made a short video against domestic violence for Amnesty International, recalling his father's attacks on his mother. He described the physical harm as a shocking pain, and the lasting psychological impact as destructive and tainting, saying a child witnessing such events cannot help feeling responsible for them. He gave his name to a scholarship at the University of Huddersfield to fund post-graduate study into domestic violence, and became a patron of Refuge, a UK charity for abused women. He supports the armed forces charity Combat Stress, having learned of his father's PTSD while researching his family for the documentary series Who Do You Think You Are? Stewart considers himself a socialist and a member of the Labour Party, crediting his father, a strong trade unionist, for ingraining those values. He is an atheist and a patron of Humanists UK, identifies as a feminist, and campaigns for an assisted dying law as a patron of Dignity in Dying. He is a lifelong supporter of his local football club, Huddersfield Town, and was at Wembley Stadium in 2017 when the club won promotion to the top division for the first time since 1972. He is an avid advocate for pit bulls and has fostered several dogs through Wags and Walks, a rescue in Los Angeles; in 2021 the ASPCA gave him their Pit Bull Advocate and Protector Award. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2001 New Year Honours, and made a Knight Bachelor in the 2010 New Year Honours, with the knighthood conferred by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on the 2nd of June 2010. In 2023 he released his memoir, Making It So, narrating the audiobook himself. A further recording is planned for 2026: Patrick Stewart Performs the Complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare.