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.
