One way of looking at the extraordinary career of Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86, is to say that it came full circle – from the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s and 1970s, through global stardom in the twin franchises of Star Trek and X-Men, and then back to the RSC and West End stage.
There was more, but Stewart’s touching 2005 performance in David Mamet’s A Life in the Theater at the Apollo in London expressed the actor’s adaptability to an atmosphere of generational change and evolving traditions of live performance.
When he joined the CBC as an associate artist during the 1966-1967 seasons, Stewart already had immense experience in regional representation. His stage debut in 1958 at the Theater Royal, Lincoln, followed by seasons in Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool, appearing in Shakespeare, Pinter and Brecht, prepared him for a multitude of major RSC performances.
His key qualities of stillness and physical authority, as well as his sonorous baritone voice, suited the more relaxed demands of the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) which revived the 1960s television series Star Trek, in which the crew of the starship USS Enterprise had been commanded by William Shatner.
Stewart’s Picard – inspired casting – was the moral center and human heart of the series, surrounded by cyborgs and strange creatures. Polls regularly voted him the sexiest man on television and his head – he was bald by the age of 20 – was hailed as the most famous in the world. American audiences exceeded 30 million and the series won 19 Emmy Awards.
He appeared in several notable films in modest roles, such as King Leodegrance in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), a troubadour warrior in David Lynch’s Dune (1984), and King Richard in Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). Star Trek arrived in Hollywood in 1994 and overlapped with Stewart’s second big-budget science fiction franchise, the X-Men series. As of 2017, Stewart had appeared in seven outings with the superhero team, playing Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, their founder and mind-reading mutant mentor.
He managed some theater between these films, launching his hugely successful solo performance of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – conjuring up 40 characters on a bare stage – in New York in 1991 (it came to the Old Vic in 1993 and won him an Olivier Award) and playing a well-reviewed 1995 Prospero in The Tempest at the Delacorte open-air theater in Central Park, New York.
He followed that in 1997 with a curiously earthy white Othello in Washington. Jude Kelly’s “photo-negative” production – an attempt to reverse the racist mood of the play – featured an otherwise all-black American cast as Iago, Desdemona, Cassio and the Venetian senators.
He was ready to return home, pining for his native Yorkshire and the RSC where he had so assiduously established his career. And 20 years after his global breakthrough, he wasn’t shy about caricaturing his prominent new self in two brilliantly funny cameos – as a nudity-obsessed actor-writer in Ricky Gervais’s Extras (2005) and as a gay Seattle socialite and opera director in the final season of Frasier (2003).
Stewart was born in the industrial town of Mirfield, West Yorkshire, during the Second World War, the third son of Alfred Stewart, a postman and laborer who served as a war sergeant in the Parachute Regiment, and his wife, Gladys (née Barrowclough), a weaver and textile worker. It was not a happy home, with Alfred prone to bouts of domestic violence.
Young Patrick found a more encouraging father figure at Mirfield Secondary School, where his English teacher, Cecil Dormand, spotted a potential actor and thrust a copy of Shakespeare into his hand. Patrick left at 15 to work as a furniture salesman and in local journalism, but devoted all his free time, inspired by Dormand, to amateur theater.
At a drama class in nearby Mytholmroyd, he met and became friends with actor Brian Blessed. They both won scholarships to join the Bristol Old Vic school in the late 1950s. After several years of performing, Stewart was in Trevor Nunn’s sensational 1967 RSC production of The Revenger’s Tragedy with Alan Howard, Ian Richardson, Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley.
During the following seasons, at Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Aldwych in London, he distinguished himself in a wide variety of roles: Touchstone in As You Like It, Hector in Troilus and Cressida, the title role of King John, Snout in Peter Brook’s legendary A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Aufidius in Ian Hogg’s Coriolanus in 1972, Cassius in John Wood’s Brutus and in an award-winning film. Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra (Richard Johnson and Janet Suzman) in the same memorable season.
On television in the 1970s, he played Sejanus in I, Claudius and a silent Soviet intelligence officer in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982).
But his best dramatic performances were on stage, not always in Shakespeare. He was a passionate Bulgarian communist in Trevor Griffiths’ Occupations (1971), a brilliant account of revolutionary politics in the 1920s; an equally passionate Astrov, doctor and eco-warrior, of Nicol Williamson’s feverish uncle Vanya in 1974; and a capriciously tyrannical George to Billie Whitelaw’s Martha in a 1987 Young Vic revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, calming her aggression, in the end, with moving tenderness.
He had been married twice: to Sheila Falconer, another actress, from 1966 (divorced in 1990), and to Wendy Neuss, one of the producers of Star Trek, from 2000 (divorced in 2003). He marked his breakthrough return to British residency by moving to Yorkshire with actress Lisa Dillon, who played Hilda Wangel for her over-the-top architect Halvard Solness in The Master Builder, Ibsen’s great tragedy of romantic pursuit and disaster at the Albery (now the Noël Coward) in 2003. The relationship broke down in 2007. The same year Stewart returned to Stratford to play the more military Antony opposite Harriet Walter. Minx-like Cleopatra, as well as a second Prospero and, in 2008, an Olivier-winning double of Claudius and the Phantom in David Tennant’s Hamlet.
Stewart’s socialism attracted him to Edward Bond’s sour, desiccated portrayal of Shakespeare in Bingo, a role he played superbly twice, in 1977 at the RSC and in 2010 at Chichester, before transferring to the Young Vic two years later.
He then met singer and songwriter Sunny Ozell (who became his third wife in 2013) in New York while performing Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
This formidable Macbeth – directed by Rupert Goold, also responsible for Stewart’s Stratford Prospero – opposite Kate Fleetwood’s terrifying, blood-curdling and tyrannical Lady M, was born in Chichester in 2007, transferred to the West End.
At the same time, Ian McKellen, Stewart’s old friend at the RSC and now a film star, was playing King Lear for Nunn. Two years later, in 2009, they teamed up to play the tramps in Waiting for Godot, a vaudevillian production by Sean Mathias that ended with a soft-shoe mix-up. This moving stage reunion toured the UK, a season at the Haymarket in London and went to Broadway in 2013, in association with Pinter’s No Man’s Land in which they played roles created by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. As Michael Billington noted in London, their radiant and magnificent performances were imbued with the exuberance of a memory tainted by the imminence of extinction.
Stewart, a Huddersfield Town FC supporter, enjoyed politics, grand prix motor racing (he appeared on the BBC’s Top Gear in 2003), beekeeping and puzzles. He has always been in demand as a voice-over artist in animated films, computer and video games, and television commercials.
He was appointed OBE in 2001 and knighted in 2010. He was the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Drama at the University of Oxford in 2007, an Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford in 2010, and Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield (2004-15) where he had the pleasure of presenting his Mirfield teacher, Cecil Dormand, with an honorary doctorate.
Stewart is survived by Sunny and two children, Daniel and Sophie, from his first marriage.
Gn entert
