Patrick Stewart, the Shakespearean actor science fiction will not let go

Patrick Stewart

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 13, 1940 Mirfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Logan, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Awards	2 Laurence Olivier · Grammy · Drama Desk · Knight Bachelor

Long before anyone handed him a starship, Patrick Stewart put a blunt question to Lalla Ward, then appearing in Doctor Who: why would a serious actor work in science fiction, or on television at all? To a Royal Shakespeare Company man raised on kings and tragic heroes, the answer seemed obvious. The joke is that his own screen life would be spent mostly in a captain’s chair and a telepath’s wheelchair, and that every time he has tried to leave those two seats he has ended up sitting back down.

The authority audiences hear in Picard has an older source. His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment whose service at Dunkirk left him with what was then called combat fatigue, and the household in the Yorkshire mill town of Mirfield lived with his violence. Stewart has said it took him many years to see how his father had inserted himself into the work: preparing Macbeth, he grew a moustache, looked in the mirror before going on stage and saw his father’s face staring straight back. An English teacher, Cecil Dormand, had put a copy of Shakespeare in the boy’s hand and told him to get up and perform. It took.

He was born on 13 July 1940 to Alfred and to Gladys, a weaver. At 15 he left school for a job on the local paper, where, by his brother’s account, he slipped off to rehearsals and invented the stories he was meant to be covering until his editor made him choose. A grant from West Riding Council sent him to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School with his friend Brian Blessed, and in 1959 he made his professional debut at the Theatre Royal in Bristol.

The Royal Shakespeare Company took him in 1966 and kept him until 1982, across more than 60 productions. In 1979 he won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Antony and Cleopatra. Television used him steadily without making him famous: he was the scheming Sejanus in I, Claudius and the Soviet spymaster Karla in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, while cinema offered supporting parts in John Boorman’s Excalibur and David Lynch‘s Dune.

Then came a literary reading at UCLA. Robert Justman, a producer on the planned revival of Star Trek, saw him there, and in 1987 Stewart was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He balked at the standard six-year contract and signed only because he and his agent assumed the series would fail quickly and send him back to London with some money in the bank. Ian McKellen urged him not to throw his stage career away. The show ran seven seasons and carried him into four films, among them Star Trek: First Contact in 1996 and Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002.

The success boxed him in. Casting directors saw Picard, and returning to the stage proved hard after so long away. The offer that changed things was another bald, principled leader: Professor Charles Xavier in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, released in 2000. He took it partly because McKellen, by then reconciled to his friend’s choice, would play Magneto opposite him. Stewart played Xavier in seven films and announced his exit after Logan in 2017, a farewell staged as a death scene.

Here the tidy version of his story, the classical actor slumming gloriously in science fiction, stops matching what he has actually said. He has called his Royal Shakespeare Company years “nothing but preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise”. He has also said that, had he known the show would last seven years, his answer would have been “No, no. NO”. Both statements stand. The cost behind the second is concrete: the shooting schedule left a hole of years in his Shakespearean record, and with it went the chance to play Hamlet, Romeo and Richard III.

His farewells are just as unreliable. He closed the door on Picard with Nemesis and reopened it for Star Trek: Picard, which ran three seasons until 2023. He buried Xavier in Logan, then came back as an alternate version of him in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022. His 2023 memoir, Making It So, borrows its title from the captain’s order and is candid in a less flattering direction, admitting an affair with the actress Jennifer Hetrick that contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage.

The stage kept finding routes back to him. His one-man A Christmas Carol, in which he plays more than 40 characters, reached Broadway in 1991. When he took on Macbeth in the West End in 2007, some said he was too old for the part; the reviews disagreed. In 2008 he was King Claudius to David Tennant‘s Hamlet, which brought another Olivier and a Tony nomination. With McKellen he played Waiting for Godot in London in 2009 and later took it to Broadway in repertory with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, and the pair’s bowler-hatted tourist photographs around New York revealed a comedian the Shakespeare had hidden. He had already sent himself up in Extras, and later led the Starz comedy Blunt Talk.

This year has been busier than the retirement rumours suggested. He voiced Sir Ritchfield, an elderly ram, in The Sheep Detectives, a Hugh Jackman vehicle that opened in May. On Prime Video he voices a pig’s head in Bait, Riz Ahmed‘s comedy series. In April Simon & Schuster Audio released Patrick Stewart Performs the Complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare, all 154 poems, a return to the sonnet videos he posted during the pandemic; Shakespeare, he said, has been “a vital part of my life since I was 12 years old”. When reports in July claimed Avengers: Doomsday would be his last screen appearance, he told TV Insider he could not imagine ever officially retiring. “I’ll always and forever be an actor.”

His childhood shapes his public causes. He is a patron of Refuge, the charity for women escaping abuse, and in a 2006 film for Amnesty International he described watching his father attack his mother. Researching his family for Who Do You Think You Are?, he learned that his father’s condition had a name, post-traumatic stress, and he has backed the veterans’ charity Combat Stress since. He was knighted in 2010. His first marriage, to Sheila Falconer, lasted from 1966 to 1990 and gave him two children, Daniel, also an actor, and Sophia. In 2013 he married the singer Sunny Ozell, with McKellen officiating.

In December he returns as Professor Xavier in Avengers: Doomsday, with McKellen beside him again as Magneto, the same friend who once warned him that Hollywood would cost him the stage. Nearly four decades after the captain’s chair was meant to be a short detour, the detour is still where the work is, and Stewart, at 86, keeps turning up for it.

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Tags: actors, David Tennant, X-Men, Logan, Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

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