WHY SIR PATRICK

HE is one of Britain’s best-loved actors – a near-constant presence on stage and screen for more than half a century.

Fans of Sir Patrick Stewart will tell you they couldn’t imagine the world of entertainment without him.

But the veteran star, who turns 77 next week, admits he has begun to feel his mortality.

Hollywood legend Sir Patrick, best known for his Star Trek role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, told how the deaths of fellow stars Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yeltsin have made him think about his own life. And when it might end.

He admits: “There is a not a day goes by where I don’t think of my mortality.

“I am 76 years old. I am married to a much younger woman and I cannot see her without reflecting on the differences in our ages and expectations and so forth.

Sir Patrick, now with his third wife Sunny Ozell, who is 38 years his junior, adds: “And this has been a horrible three or four years for my profession.

“My generation has been decimated. So many actors have gone.”

Morbid

Sir Patrick has also lost colleagues such as Alan Rickman, Roger Rees and Alan Howard over recent years.

But he is determined not to let the morbid thoughts get him down – and says that acting helps him to live life to the full.

Insisting he’s not ready to be beamed up yet, he says: “One of the great things about being an actor, maybe the best thing, is that if you are working nothing is wasted.”

The acting great even sees s uffering f r om painful osteoarthritis – a hereditary condition his mum also had – as an experience and something he can use in his acting.

“I recently had eight injections in my hands, four into each knuckle,” Sir Patrick says.

“After the third one I thought, ‘I can’t do any more. This is too unpleasant.’ And then you remind yourself, ‘Come on, Patrick, this is all good experience.’

“Nothing is ever is wasted. You store it away and one day you might need it.

“I might need to pretend to experience some pain. Now I know what the hell it feels like. “It is an interesting life.” And it has most certainly been that.

Born in 1940 in Mirfield, Yorkshire, he had a tough childhood in a one up, one down terrace house with a former Army father – now believed to have had PTSD – who was violent towards his mother.

Thanks to a schoolteacher, he fell in love with Shakespeare at an early age and after a scholarship to Bristol Old Vic, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and became a regular on period TV dramas – as well as 1967 cameo in Coronation Street.

It was after David Lynch’s Dune, that the call came for Star Trek: The Next Generation, the follow up to the original series with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The show ran from 1987 to 1994, with 20 million viewers an episode, and spawned four spin-off films.

It made Sir Patrick a superstar. So began a diverse career where he mixed i ndie films, Shakespeare, Seth MacFarlane comedies and, of course, the X Men franchise.

Looking back to the start of his career, father- of- two Sir Patrick says he struggled for work soon after leaving drama school and almost give up.

“Diversity, from the very beginning, has been at the centre of the work that