2 for 1 tickets to Casablanca, this coming Monday
Just over 20 years ago, in his mid-forties, Patrick Stewart was doing pretty well as an actor. He didn’t have any savings, but he had a nice house in Chiswick and could afford to send his two children to private schools. “My career,” he says, “had been chugging along in an okay way.” Then he appeared in Peter Shaffer’s Yonadab at the National Theatre. It was Shaffer’s only flop, and Stewart found himself playing to an almost empty house. Next came Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Billie Whitelaw at the Young Vic. It was a hit and ready to transfer to the West End, but Whitelaw didn’t want to go. The money man said the loss of Whitelaw was a problem. He couldn’t take it into the West End without a star people had heard of. “It really hurt, that remark. All those years of work at the RSC. But I guess it was a pragmatic point of view. I wasn’t bankable, and he couldn’t sell this production on my name.”
So, in 1987, he took a television job in Hollywood. Everybody told him to do it – he could make some money, be seen by millions and then come home. It was no big commitment, he was assured, as the series would certainly bomb. “It sounded like a great plan. It was a great deal. That’s why I did it.” The series was certain to fail because it seemed like little more than a desperate attempt to revive an old one. Furthermore, Stewart was to be cast as the most unAmerican hero imaginable, an earl-grey drinking, vaguely aristocratic, vaguely naval type with a French – French! – name, who preferred talking to fighting. On the face of it, the series only made sense as some sort of tax scam. Stewart and the rest of the cast thought nothing of signing up for six years.
But, of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation lasted for seven years, and Stewart was Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise for 178 episodes. Then it turned into a series of films, culminating in Star Trek: Nemesis, in 2002. “It came to a point where I had no idea where Picard began and I ended. We completely overlapped. His voice became my voice, and there were other elements of him that became me.” Stewart was now unbankable in a wholly new way. No director in Hollywood wanted to cast this grand, deep-voiced, bald English guy because everybody knew he was Picard and couldn’t possibly be anybody else. In the event, he effectively reprised the part as Professor Charles Xavier – a grand, deep-voiced, bald English guy – in the X-Men films. “I don’t have a film career,” he says wryly, “I have a franchise career.”
In 2004, however, homesick, pining for the stage and with his second marriage coming to an end (he now lives with the actress Lisa Dillon), he came home with, for a Shakespearian star, a gaping hole in his CV. “There comes a point where you have to start ticking off these roles. I’ve missed out on Hamlet and Romeo, probably Richard III, too. I was even uncomfortably aware when I took on Macbeth that people were saying I was a little old for it. I’ve not done Lear, but Ian McKellen has closed that door for a good few years. If I could fit in only one more Shakespeare role, it would be Falstaff. I’ve always thought of him as a middle-aged Hamlet. It’s a great role.” He’s 67 now and so absurdly buff that he could pass for an absurdly buff 50. We meet at the stage door of the Gielgud theatre – or, rather, we fail to meet, because he rushed in with a Huddersfield Town cap pulled over his face. He doesn’t like the hooker-and thug-infested bit of Soho around Rupert Street, and he and the rest of the cast leave by the front entrance in the evening, hence the speed of his entry and the disguise. He’s doing his Macbeth at the Gielgud, and both he and the show are magnificent, mesmerising. The reviews are raves, and it’s just about to go to New York. It was, I say, the play that turned me on to Shakespeare when I was 14. He laughs. “I think you’ll find a lot of people will say that. I got a sniff of it when I was 14. I thought I was going to play it, and somebody said to me, ‘Stewart, you’re going to get a lot of opportunities to play parts like this – we’re giving it to somebody else.’ As it happened, that production didn’t eventually happen.”
There seem to be three important things about Stewart’s childhood: his luck, his dad and the Yorkshire countryside. He was lucky because, in spite of abject academic failure – he skived off on the day of his 11-plus – he was spotted by a smart English teacher and was taught outside school by a brilliant drama teacher. It was clear where he was going, and, after a spell on the local paper, he became a full-time actor. “It was a smart move, bunking off the 11-plus. I would never have met Cecil Dormand – a great man – and I would have been a grammar-school failure.”
His father had been in the army for 10 years and then enlisted again in 1939. “He was an imposing man, regimental sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment. He had a terrific voice, better than mine. Somebody said when my father walked on the parade ground, the birds stopped singing.” The Macbeth production is set in a modern, military state. Stewart has grown a sergeant-majorish moustache for the part. “When I put my uniform on and look in the mirror, he stares straight back at me.”
From the first, he was a workaholic, an affliction that, he admits, made him a bad father, remote like his dad. “I always chose work over the family – I regret that, I really do. I have a great relationship with my children now, terrific, but I didn’t always have it. I missed out so much. And I don’t think I supported their mother as much as I might have done. It would never occur to me to put family first. It’s still a struggle. It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, I just loved the job so much.”
He did bits of film and television, but everything else was theatre. He pursued his craft with awesome austerity, a habit that backfired on him when he got on the Star Trek set. At an early shoot, he snapped at the rest of the cast: “We’re not here to have fun, we’re here to work.” He says now: “I came to think there was too much fooling around on set. I was very aware of the clock ticking. I was the oldest person on the set, and we were working until midnight or beyond, and it took more of a toll on me than on them.”
The others also concluded he had a poverty mentality, another aspect of his austerity. He was in denial about what he was being paid for playing Picard. For 15 minutes’ overtime, he earned an extra £125, exactly what he had been making in a week at the Young Vic. But he still lived above somebody’s garage.
After a year, he did buy a new car: a Honda. The rest of the cast were in Mercedes and Fer-raris. But the point was – and this, I am sure, is why his Star Trek was easily the most successful iteration of the franchise – that he took Picard seriously.
“I’m very proud of the series. I think we did really good work. Every now and then we did absolute crap, but it was 178 episodes. We really fought to keep the standards high – the script, the language, the story lines, everything. We also acquired an astonishing number of eminent fans: several secretaries of state, chiefs of staff, chancellors of universities. Frank Sinatra never missed Earth is released on November 16 www.bryanappleyard.com a show, and Tom Hanks knows the name of every episode.”
Perhaps the key was that Stewart was such a team player. He speaks warmly of the cast, and they are plainly still friends, especially Jonathan Frakes, who played Riker, Picard’s deputy, and whose shouting of “Red alert!” gave me and my daughter hours of innocent delight. He mentions proudly that Marina Sirtis, the pompous “counsellor” Deanna Troi, had lunch with him in London recently. Best of all, he loves the movie Galaxy Quest, a sublime Star Trek spoof. “Jonathan told me to see it. I said I didn’t want to see the piss taken out of me by Alan Rickman and the rest. He told me to see it in Santa Monica on a Saturday night. I did, and it was perfect, fantastic, one of my all-time favourites. They got it exactly right – that’s how it was, and the ending was right at the heart of the spirit of Star Trek.”
He was missing theatre from the beginning. And so, in his room above the garage, he constructed a series of one-man shows that he took to universities and drama schools in California. The best, A Christmas Carol, made it to Broad-way. The first few nights were full of Trekkies, many in uniform.
But now, he’s back. His rich voice provides the narration for the movie Earth, made by the BBC Natural History Unit, a feature-length version of Planet Earth. And, best of all, he is immersed, for at least two years, in the theatre and Shakespeare. This makes him very happy. He revels in the ensemble and he wallows in the language. “When Macbeth starts, I have three hours to inhabit this role, this man who’s saying these amazing things. It’s not just a great story, it’s mind-expanding just getting your head round this imagery and this language. It’s like a drug – there’s nothing to match it.”
And that third important thing, the countryside? Well, he used to cycle up to the Dales as a boy – “Turning back to go home was a physical pain” – and the landscape infected him for life. In Hollywood, he pined for English hills and valleys. Now he has a house in the south Dales. He reckons he could walk northeastward for three days from there and never see a road. He has also learnt to love southern England. He has just done up a house in Oxfordshire. And he remembers a walk he took over the South Downs. “One evening that I didn’t have a show, I had been rehearsing and I went home. It was midsummer, so it was light, and I started walking. I walked for hours and got to some high point looking down on this valley.” He sighs and his eyes are damp. “And smoke was coming up. I was overwhelmed with feelings I couldn’t articulate. Overwhelmed. It moved me so much.”
Great actor, good man. As the Vulcans used to say, live long and prosper, Captain Picard – sorry, Patrick Stewart.
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I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan and it was a little over a year ago that I saw Patrick Stewart performing here with the Royal Shakespeare Company and I enjoyed the performances immensely. What moved me most I think was the awareness that here's someone who sets the example for one who has found a love in his own work that we should all strive to find in ours.
Chris Kaltwasser, Ann Arbor, Michigan US
I was a pretty big Star Trek TNG fan when I was a kid. Patrick Stewart is an amazing actor. And kind of hot for an old bald dude. :)
I heard he's a Beavis and Butthead fan. That blows my mind. And is awesome.
Sarah, Virginia, USA
Patrick Stewart was also good in the original version of Dune.
Kerry Rose, Houston, Texas
I've seen a lot of Macbeths over the years of my professional career, and Mr. Stewart's made me hear the words as if newly written for him alone. It was a magnificent, mindaltering performance. And, to bow to my inner geek, to be in the same room with Picard was a thrill. Long live Patrick Stewart!
Robert A. Wright, Atlanta, Geogia, USA
Around the early 80s I bump into Mr. Stewart on a video of Derek Jacobiâs Hamlet in a High School British Literature Class. Needless to say, due to being in high school, I was not that consistently interested in it. I think I sleep through half of it over a four day period of classes. Then as an insatiable curious budding actor studying Shakespeare in an Illinois college library, I came across John Bartonâs Playing Shakespeare Video Series which introduced me again to Mr. Stewart. From then on I was hooked and keep track of what he was doing. And now, in light of where he has taken his career in these last two years, I am inspired. It serves as a model to be constantly evolving and challenging oneself in a life's work. Mr. Stewart...Thank You!
George Younts, Charleston, USA/SC
I fell in love with Patrick Stewart well before Trek in the sublime camp of the BBC miniseries "I Claudiu" as Sejanus. Hot Gladiator! Evil character that gets what he deserves. I can't recomend "I Claudius" enough!
Andrew Mondt, Chicago, Illinois
Jean-Luc Picard is the manager everyone of us would love to work for. I love TNG because of him. But I've really enjoyed seeing him back in Shakespear -- his Prospero was wonderful. Long may he shine as an actor in whatever he wishes to do.
Peter, Warwick, Warks
I love Patrick Stewart since I first saw him in an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation. I found his character exceptionally intelligent and highly inspirational for anyone leading a group of professionals. But then I learned that he was a classical theatre actor and that he loved to play Shakespeare and Dickens and so on. I had the pleasure to watch him at Washington when he portrayed Othello in a photonegative version and have followed his career in movies and TV programs. I never have enough of him and I am very pleased to know that he is still having new and great accomplishments and success as the great actor he is. God bless him.
Ana Leticia Pastrana, Mexico City, Mexico
Patrick Stewart is indeed a very fine actor. Being an original trekkie, I must say that Star Trek Next Generation reruns are still a pleasure to watch (I also have been enjoying the recent series Star Trek Enterprise which tells how it all started and is also very well done). Even though we have never met, in my book he is a very intelligent, sexy man with a great sense of humor (yeah Galaxy Quest!). I just love that voice AND the bald head! :) May he continue to enjoy his wonderful life and give us many, many more years of his talent.
P K Landry, Houston, TX
Alot of good things have come out of yorkshire, Geoffrey
Boycott, The Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, Leeds Utd,
to name a few. Patrick Stewart is another great gift from
Yorkshire to the rest of us.
Linda, Bournemouth, England