Patrick Stewart
Patrick Hewes Stewart, OBE (13 July 1940) is an English film, television and stage actor. He had a distinguished career in theatre for nearly fifty years, including performances as various characters in Shakespearean productions. However, he is perhaps most widely known for his television and film roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films.
Stewart was born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom, the son of Gladys (née Barrowclough), a weaver and textile worker, and Alfred Stewart, a Regimental Sergeant Major in the British Army who served with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and previously worked as a general labourer and as a postman.Throughout childhood, he endured poverty and disadvantage, an experience which influenced his later political and ideological beliefs. In 2006 Stewart made a short video against violence for Amnesty International, in which he recollected his father’s physical attacks on his mother and the effect it had on him as a child, and he has given his name to a scholarship at the University of Huddersfield, where he was Vice-Chancellor, to fund post-graduate study into domestic violence.
He attended Crowlees C of E Junior and Infants School, and in 1951, aged 11, he entered Mirfield Secondary Modern School,where he continued to study drama. At age 15, Stewart dropped out of school and increased his participation in local theatre. He acquired a job as a newspaper reporter and obituary writer, but after a year, his employer gave him an ultimatum to choose acting or journalism.He quit the job. His brother tells the story that Stewart would attend rehearsals during work time and then invent the stories he reported. Stewart also trained as a boxer.
Bristol Old Vic students Patrick Stewart (left) and Christopher Tranchell studying a script at home, 1958.
v In 1957, at the age of 17, he embarked on a two-year acting course at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He lost most of his hair by the age of 19 but he successfully marketed himself to theatre producers after performing an audition with and without a wig, heralding his performance as “two actors for the price of one!”
Following a period with the Manchester Library Theatre, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1966 where he appeared next to actors such as Ben Kingsley and Ian Richardson. He made his Broadway debut as Snout in Peter Brook’s legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then moved to the Royal National Theatre in the early 1980s. Over the years, Stewart took roles in many major television series without ever becoming a household name. He appeared as Lenin in Fall of Eagles; Sejanus in I, Claudius; Karla in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People; Claudius in a 1980 BBC adaptation of Hamlet. He even took the romantic male lead in the BBC adaptation of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South (wearing a hairpiece). He also appeared in Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View series (Episode 6), as Horatio.
He also had minor roles in several films such as King Leondegrance in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), the character Gurney Halleck in David Lynch’s 1984 film version of Dune and Dr. Armstrong in Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce.
Stewart and his first wife, Sheila Falconer, have two children: Daniel Freedom and Sophie Alexandra. Stewart and Falconer divorced in 1990. In 1997, he became engaged to Wendy Neuss, one of the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and they married on 25 August 2000, divorcing three years later. Four months prior to his divorce from Neuss, Stewart played opposite actress Lisa Dillon in a production of The Master Builder. The two dated for four years, but are no longer together. He was 40 years her senior. He is now seeing Sunny Ozell, at 31 she is younger than his daughter.
