Patrick Stewart in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation.' Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection. Sometimes a great casting choice reveals its greatness only after the fact. Terence Young, who directed the first James Bond film, Dr. No, was so distraught upon learning that his producers had hired Sean Connery that he protested, “Oh, disaster, disaster, disaster!” Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the original Star Trek, was downright furious at his deputies for foisting upon him a bald journeyman English actor as the potential star of Star Trek: The Next Generation, telling them, “Patrick Stewart’s name should never, ever be mentioned in my presence again!”
Yet Stewart, who died at the age of 86 on Oct. 28, pulled off the impossible: as Jean-Luc Picard, the new captain of the USS Enterprise, he created a character as iconic as William Shatner’s James T. Kirk. He did so by taking an approach completely different from Shatner’s effectively hammy bombast, presiding over the bridge as an urbane, thoughtful captain who encouraged collaboration and issued commands with the gentlemanly catchphrase “Make it so.”
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Stewart was forty-six years old when he was formally offered the role of Picard and almost fifty by the time Star Trek: TNG turned him into a global star. He carried himself with the graceful lightness of a man who couldn’t quite believe his belated good fortune. The older he got, the more he allowed his silly side to show. On social media, he posted a photo of himself wearing a lobster costume in his bathtub, claws aloft. Slightly stoned on MDMA, he offered a video tutorial on how to execute the “quadruple take,” the double take’s baroque sibling. He compounded his Captain Picard fame by playing Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men movies and cultivating a public bromance with his co-star Ian McKellen, with whom he embarked on a bravura touring production of Waiting for Godot. After two failed marriages, he found true love the third time around, marrying Sunny Ozell, a singer-songwriter he’d met while she was waitressing at Franny’s pizzeria in Brooklyn, in 2013. McKellen served as the officiant.
I came into Patrick’s life four years ago. During Covid lockdown, with his film and TV work stilled, he took it upon himself to undertake his autobiography. Working without an outline, he free-wrote for months on end, producing a massive, unwieldly manuscript that, had it been published as a book, would have exceeded a thousand pages.
My job was to help him whittle it down into a more focused memoir and to draw him out on topics that he had overlooked — his bald head, for example. It wasn’t a frivolous subject. When Star Trek: TNG took off, Stewart made baldness sexy as no man had since Yul Brynner.
Patrick told me that he started losing his hair at a rapid clip at the age of seventeen, when he was studying acting at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. In desperation, he spent money on a dubious hair regeneration treatment, and, when that didn’t work, grew out what remained of his hair and sculpted it into a combover. This aroused the ire of an older classmate, a Hungarian émigré named George Kishvalvi, who was directing Stewart in a student show. Bringing a rehearsal to a halt, Kishvalvi mussed Stewart’s hair indignantly and proclaimed, “Be yourself or you’ll never be an actor!” Shortly thereafter, at the flat Kishvalvi shared with his wife, the Hungarian physically restrained Stewart while the wife, he said, “came at me with scissors, pulling my hair up and chopping it very short.”
Patrick soon recognized the virtue of his natural look. “I would go to auditions with a hairpiece,” he said. “I’d start with it on, but then I would remove it for the director and say, ‘See what you’ve got? A young actor in his twenties and a character actor as well — two for the price of one.’”
Stewart’s memoir, entitled Making It So, came out in 2023. He was immensely proud of it, having laid bare to me during the writing and editing process his insecurity — misguided, if endearing — about his qualifications to be an author, given his lack of formal education.
His exquisite diction and stentorian stage voice notwithstanding, Stewart was a humble product of England’s sooty North. He was born in the West Yorkshire town of Mirfield in 1940 and raised in austere circumstances bordering on the Dickensian, in a “one up, one down” rowhouse with no indoor plumbing. His kindly mother, Gladys, worked in a textile mill. His prickly father, Alfred, was a physically abusive military man who struggled to find purpose or steady employment after serving in the two world wars.
Young Patrick dreamed no bigger than someday becoming, he said, a “long-distance lorry driver.” But like a Dickens protagonist, he was blessed with a kindly benefactor, one Cecil Dormand, an English teacher at his secondary school who recognized in the boy a gift. It was in Dormand’s classroom that Stewart first encountered the work of William Shakespeare, specifically during a reading of The Merchant of Venice for which he was assigned the role of Shylock. Dormand subsequently arranged, with the permission of Stewart’s parents, for Patrick to attend an eight-day drama program during a holiday break, all expenses paid by the local council’s department of education.
Stewart left school at the age of fifteen. Like a baseball pitcher who toils in the minors for a decade before getting called up to the big show, he took the slow way to the top. There were parts in amateur dramatic productions (“am-drams,” he called them), a scholarship-funded two-year ride at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, years of scuffling in various repertory companies, and, finally, in 1966, admission into the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.
In his fourteen years as a full-time RSC member, Stewart was seldom cast in lead roles, playing servants and jesters in the comedies and sidekicks and villains in the tragedies. Though it frustrated him not to reach the dizzy heights of such contemporaries as David Warner and Helen Mirren, he consoled himself that he’d done pretty well for a working-class Yorkshireman.
At a bit of a loose end in 1986, he accepted an offer by an American friend, David Rodes, a professor of English at UCLA, to come to California and perform some selections from Shakespeare for a series of master classes Rodes was teaching about the Bard. One of these, at the university’s Royce Hall, was open to the general public. It so happened that Robert Justman, a producer of the new Star Trek series then in development, attended Rodes’ presentation and liked what he saw.
There followed a brief, awkward meeting with a brusque Roddenberry — only later did Stewart learn of the Star Trek godhead’s dim view of him — and, finally, over Roddenberry’s objections, the life-changing invitation to play Picard.
His Trek and X-Men success afforded Stewart, at long last, the opportunity to play Shakespearean leads. It was during his 2008 run as Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that he met Ozell; their first date, at the Odeon, followed a performance he’d invited her to at the Lyceum Theatre, the production’s new home after its transfer to Broadway.
Two years later, Stewart was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. His guest of honor at the celebratory lunch afterward was Cecil Dormand, his old mentor.
For all the hardship he endured in his youth, Stewart, a staunch advocate of public investment in the arts, lamented that young people today do not enjoy the advantages he did. “I was fortunate to grow up in a time when there was a compact between the government and the people dictating that the arts were a necessity in life, not a frivolity,” he wrote in the book. “At every level of the rep movement, there were large, enthusiastic audiences, which is why I am irked when theater is dismissed as an elitist art form and a waste of public money.”
The Patrick Stewart I got to know was a contented man who delighted in his daily routine. We visited Chevalier’s Books, near his home in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he was greeted as a regular. He was proud to inform the owners that he would soon be one of the authors whose work graced their shelves.
He and Sunny were also proud of the friendship they had cultivated with a family of squirrels in their backyard. Eager to demonstrate, and with an agility extraordinary for a man in his eighties, Patrick crouched swiftly to the ground and opened a bag of in-shell roasted peanuts he kept near the door. Sure enough, two squirrels materialized and climbed onto his leg, gratefully accepting his offerings. “There you go, dears, there you go,” he said, in the same unmistakable voice that had delivered the words “Make it so” and “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
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