I should play Jean Luc, I realized, as if he were a character in ‘Henry IV,’ which is about brave men." “There is a formality to the way they speak and comport themselves that remind me of numerous Shakespearean situations I'd been in onstage. His adoration for Shakespeare would serve him well later in his 40s when he was asked to play Jean-Luc Picard, a 24th century starship commander. Stewart dedicates the book to two key school teachers, who fed him a love of Shakespeare and prompted him toward acting. Despite losing all his hair by 19, Stewart would audition with a hairpiece, remove it and then make his case: Two actors for the price of one. “I realized that he had opened up this text to me in ways that no one had ever done before.”Īnother is the grace with which he dealt with premature balding. “When the hour was up and I looked at my book, there was nothing but notes scribbled into it,” Stewart says. One highlight is in 1966 when Stewart, preparing to play in “Hamlet,” is given a one-hour tutorial by the late great director Peter Hall, considered the single most influential figure in modern British theater. “It’s almost guaranteed that someone is going to come out and say, 'How dare you? That’s outrageous.’ Well, I’ve brought it on myself. That was the most challenging part of the experience: How much I should say. “I wanted to be honest, but I wanted to be so respectful and careful as well. Other portraits emerge of people who were kind to Stewart along the way - Paul McCartney, Rod Steiger and Kirk Douglas - and some who were not: Director David Lynch was weird during the original “Dune” shoot and “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry never liked the idea of Stewart piloting one of his starships. “The stage would prove to be a safe space, a refuge from real life in which I could inhabit another person, living in another place and time,” he writes. Stewart wonders if the violence triggered his career. “Sometimes it was with an open hand, other times a closed fist. Stewart writes about how he and his older brother, Trevor, braced for nights when their dad came home drunk and angry. If one shadow looms, it is that of Stewart's father, a former regimental sergeant major in the British Army who was prone to outbursts of repeated violence against his mother. I know I’m going to be hearing, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’” “I know that my therapist is one of the people who is most looking forward to the book. “It’s been a very therapeutic experience,” Stewart says in the interview of writing the book. He grew up without a toilet or a bathroom in his home, sold furniture as a young man, worked up the rungs of regional theater in England - including touring and crushing on Vivien Leigh - before a 14-year-run with the Royal Shakespeare Company and film and TV stardom in Los Angeles. It is a remarkable story of a boy who grew up poor in the north of England, became a great Shakespearean stage actor and then a sci-fi movie icon aboard the USS Enterprise and the “X-Men” movie franchise. It only needed me to turn the key on day one for the door to be open and memory after memory after memory and sensation and sensation and feelings all came scuttling back,” said Stewart, 83, in a Zoom interview from his Los Angeles home. The actor spent much of the pandemic at his computer writing his memoir, and the result is out this fall, “Making It So,” borrowing his catchphrase from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” NEW YORK - Patrick Stewart, who famously played a “Star Trek” captain, has boldly gone where no one has gone before - into his past. Actor Patrick Stewart’s memoir is titled ‘Making It So.“ Gallery Books via AP
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