From villain to heart-throb, the many loves of Captain Picard
MARCUS BERKMANN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Making It So: A Memoir
Patrick Stewart Gallery Books £25
Iprobably find it harder to admit than I should, but I have been a fan of Patrick – now Sir Patrick – Stewart for many years. Not only was he by far the most articulate and charismatic captain of the USS Enterprise – greater even than the sainted Shatner – but he played the evil Sejanus in I, Claudius and, silent but incredibly menacing, the KGB’s Karla in the original Alec Guinness versions of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.
This means he has been in four of my favourite TV shows of all time. That’s a fair old hit rate – but press interviews, chat show appearances and his demeanour suggest that he is a thoroughly good egg.
So when the opportunity came to review his memoir, I virtually tore the phone in half.
It’s a lovely book – long, discursive but generous, kind, sometimes selflacerating and awestruck at the remarkable turns his life has taken.
For Sir Patrick was born not with a silver spoon in his mouth, but in Mirfield in West Yorkshire, in a two up, one down house with an outside lavatory, where he escaped to read.
He had what his wife Sunny calls ‘a Victorian childhood’, and Sir Patrick himself doesn’t demur.
His father was ‘a fierce, formidable man’, who served in India with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and rose to sergeant. When the war began he was already in his 40s but joined the Parachute Regiment, so he was away when Patrick was born in 1940, and for most of the first five years of his life. Sir Patrick remembers his mother being at her happiest during this time, and she obviously loved her son very dearly. When his father returned, he had little or no idea of what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and his ‘dark moods’ and violent tendencies infested the household. Sir Patrick doesn’t go into gory detail but he does say this: ‘All I know is that when I was five, I was very happy. By the time I was seven, I no longer was.’
From the get-go it appears that Sir Patrick was a fully paid-up heterosexual. As a nine-year-old he snogged a neighbouring girl in the house’s Anderson shelter, the only practical use it ever had, and was roundly told off for it. Thereafter it was crush followed by crush followed by crush, and then three marriages, which he now regards as probably two too many.
His first lasted more than 20 years and brought two children, both now in their 50s; his second was to a member of Star Trek’s production staff and lasted just three years.
His third, to the indefatigable Sunny, is obviously a stayer. She is a singer-songwriter nearly 40 years younger than him, which he regards as irrelevant, and I think we can give him that.
But I am reminded of the actor Dennis Quaid, who first married someone slightly older, then someone slightly younger, then someone much younger. Quaid’s fourth wife is 39 years his junior. As someone on Twitter put it: ‘His fifth wife hasn’t been born yet.’
Sir Patrick dedicates his book to the two mentors of his early acting career: Cecil Dormand, his English teacher at Mirfield Secondary, who introduced Shakespeare to him via Shylock’s speech in The Merchant Of Venice; and Ruth Wynn Owen, the voice coach who taught Patrick and his acting contemporaries out of school hours, and was responsible for the magnificent accent Sir Patrick has regaled us with.
Among those contemporaries was Brian Blessed, who even then was a character: ‘He seemed to know so much about life and creativity and he had the most colourful vocabulary. His tales of woe, peril and sexual conquest were peppered with swear words, idiomatic expressions and eroticism… I didn’t care: his imagination was as great as his storytelling.’
How Sir Patrick became an actor occupies the bulk of the book, to the extent that we don’t reach Star Trek: The Next Generation until beyond page 300. Years working at the Royal Shakespeare Company stood him in good stead on that show, for Sir Patrick is at heart a team player, and formed lasting friendships with his shipmates.
Indeed, I had no idea that he had a long affair with Jennifer Hetrick, the actress who played Vash, his love interest in an episode called ‘Captain’s Holiday’. (There’s more about ‘Jenny’ in the book than about his second wife.)
Sir Patrick’s book is magnificent. As Whoopi Goldberg comments on the back cover: ‘He is a kind man… compassionate and sensitive… but his greatest asset as a human being is the fact that he is so completely and unapologetically himself.’
I wept once or twice on public transport while reading it, and if you love Star Trek as much as I do, you might too.