Adam Page remembers the late Sir Patrick Stewart…
Before he was a knight, before he was the captain, before the Royal Shakespeare Company gave him a spear and told him to stand at the back, Patrick Stewart wrote obituaries. A teenaged hack on a local Yorkshire paper. By his brother’s account, he would skive off to theatre rehearsals, then make up the stories he was supposed to be covering. Eventually his editor made him chose; acting or journalism.
He chose right. I didn’t, so here I am doing his old job for him.
He died on Wednesday, October 28th, at home in Los Angeles. Eighty-six. His wife Sunny beside him. Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia, a “brief and poignant journey,” said the statement. Brief. And thank the higher powers for that. That disease usually takes its time, stripping the wires one at a time while the family watch. With him it seems to have hurried. Small mercies, I suppose. They get smaller every year.
And it was a Wednesday. Of course it was a bloody Wednesday.
Let me set the scene, because he always did.
Granny’s front room. The heating ticking like it was building to a confession, with me lying on a carpet patterned to hide a crime scene. A tin of custard creams old enough to vote. Wednesday night, round for dinner, and on the TV a bald man from Mirfield playing a Frenchman in a Shakespearean accent, sitting in a beige chair in a beige room in beige space, raising a finger and saying “Engage” like he was sentencing the void to hang.
I was small, I had no idea what Starfleet was. I didn’t know why the engineer wore a hairband over his eyes, or why the bearded one mounted chairs like he was getting on a horse. (Jonathan Frakes, thank you for your service.) I knew one thing, though. When Picard talked, Granny stopped.
Granny didn’t stop. She would talk through the news, or the Queen’s Speech. But when Jean-Luc Picard stood up and tugged his tunic down, the Picard Manoeuvre, beloved of every middle manager who ever wanted to look like he’d read a book, when he started speaking she would put her cup down and lean in like the vicar was about to read out the will.
That’s authority. You can’t buy or fake that, and God knows the BBC has tried.
People will tell you it was the voice. It’s partly true; that voice was a cathedral organ played by a man who knew exactly how many stops to leave in. But mostly it was the stillness. Kirk shouted and punched, he shagged green alien women. Picard sat down and listened. He thought, on camera and in real time, and made thinking look like the most dangerous thing a human body could do. A captain whose primary weapon was the pause.
Legend has it the producers were nervous about a bald lead and had a hairpiece sent over for him. Think about that. Somewhere in the multiverse there’s a timeline where they put a rug on him, and a Riker who has to look at it every day.
Two episodes. That’s all you’ll get because I think only Hunter S. Thompson could get away with writing a fifteen-thousand-word obituary.
“Chain of Command.” Picard captured, stripped and hung up by the wrists while David Warner shines four lights in his face and insists there are five. Stewart reportedly drew on torture testimony gathered by Amnesty International, and you can feel it in the performance. A man past fifty, naked under strip lights on teatime telly, and he is not playing the hero. He’s playing a body being broken and a mind refusing the arithmetic. There. Are. Four. Lights. I was too young to understand it and old enough to never forget it.
“The Inner Light.” A probe zaps him and he lives an entire life on a dying planet in twenty-five minutes. Marries, has kids. Learns the flute and grows old. Watches his world end. Then he wakes up on the bridge and it’s all gone. Everything but the flute, which they hand him in a box, and which he plays alone in his quarters to nobody. Barthes would call that the punctum: a small, stupid, private detail that lodges in you like a splinter and won’t come out. I said I had something in my eye at the end of that episode. I was lying.
A whole life lived and lost, and the music the last thing left. Watch it this week and tell me you’re fine. I can’t. I’ve tried.
His movie career is messier, and he’d be the first to admit it. Of course, he did admit it, repeatedly, usually while being paid.
The Trek movies first. Generations kills Kirk by dropping him off a gantry in a quarry, which is the cinematic equivalent of losing your nan in Asda. First Contact is the real one; Picard as Ahab, smashing his model ships in their glass cabinet, spitting “The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!” with all the rage of a man who was assimilated, violated from the inside, and never allowed to talk about it. It’s the best acting ever done in a Star Trek movie, because he played it as tragedy and not sci-fi. Insurrection is a two-parter with a facelift. Nemesis gave us Tom Hardy as Picard’s evil bald clone, a casting choice so perfect in hindsight and so ridiculous at the time that Stewart reportedly assumed young Tom would never amount to much. Even Shakespeareans can fluff a line.
But I’m a horror critic, so let’s talk about the weird stuff, the stuff the broadsheet obits will step around like a puddle of something.
Lifeforce in 1985. Tobe Hooper, Cannon Films, the Golan-Globus money pit, naked space vampires loose in London. Stewart plays a psychiatric doctor possessed by one of them, and at one point he erupts into a geyser of blood that sculpts itself into a woman. A Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, turned into a fountain. Julia Kristeva would have a field day with that: the body leaking, the border between inside and out collapsing, the self pouring out of its own skin. And the thing is, he commits. Not a hint of irony. He plays the possession like it’s the storm scene in King Lear. That’s the whole job, you don’t get to choose which material deserves you.
Dune. David Lynch in 1984. Gurney Halleck charging into battle cradling a pug. Never explained. Never needed to be.
And then Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 punk-siege nightmare, where he plays Darcy, the softly-spoken boss of a neo-Nazi bar with a band locked in a back room and a problem to dispose of. It’s the Picard stillness turned rancid. Same reasonable voice and patient pauses. Same sense of a man thinking several moves ahead; only now he’s thinking about box cutters and dogs. It’s the most frightening thing he ever was and he barely raises his voice. He understood what Arendt understood. Evil doesn’t shout, it manages.
Then the other chair. Charles Xavier. Another bald man, another seat, another room full of lost children waiting for a speech. Bryan Singer’s X-Men helped make superhero cinema respectable in 2000, and did so by casting two RSC lags, Stewart and Ian McKellen, and letting them play chess in a plastic prison like it was Beckett. Which, nine years later, it literally was, when the pair of them did Waiting for Godot in the West End. The friendship was real, as were the bowler hats. The pictures of two knights pratting around New York were the best thing on the internet for about three years.
And then Logan. James Mangold, 2017. Charles in his nineties, his great brain failing, seizures that freeze everyone around him, a mind that once held every mind on Earth now unable to hold on to itself. Hugh Jackman lifting him off a toilet. There’s a dinner at a strangers house, a real family and meal, where Charles says, more or less, that this is what life looks like: a home, people who love each other. Minutes later, he’s dead.
I’ve seen it four times. I don’t think I can watch it again. Not this year. Maybe not ever.
He’ll be back one more time in December as Xavier, in Avengers: Doomsday. I’ll go and sit in the dark with a bucket of popcorn the size of a toddler and some twat on his phone two rows down, and I’ll be fine until he appears and then I won’t be.
Oh, and he voiced the poop in the atrocity known as The Emoji Movie. A knight of the realm. The poop. Respect the range.
Stewart always credited his English teacher, Cecil Dormand, who put a copy of Shakespeare in his hands and told him to get up and perform. That’s the origin story; not a radioactive spider, just a teacher in a Yorkshire secondary modern with a battered text and a bit of faith.
Most of us who end up doing this sort of thing for a living had one of those. I went on to do an English Literature and Language degree, the only qualification in the UK that leaves you poorer and more insufferable at the same time. But I can tell you exactly why I stuck with it, and part of the answer is a bald man on Granny’s TV who made the best words in the language sound worth the effort of saying properly.
That was Picard’s trick; Shakespeare smuggled into teatime. Every speech a soliloquy and every captain’s log a Chorus. He’d quote Hamlet at Q and Henry V at the crew, and kids like me absorbed the cadence before we had a clue where it came from. Then you hit the plays at sixteen, or however old, and recognised them, like meeting a relative you’d only ever heard on the phone.
He did the lot. The RSC from 1966. A “photo-negative” Othello in Washington, a white Moor in an otherwise Black company, turning the play’s racial logic inside out. Claudius opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet, all silk and smirk. The best Claudius I’ve seen, because he made you understand exactly why Gertrude said yes. Shylock. Prospero. And in 2020, locked down, a sonnet a day on social media: a man pushing eighty reading at the kitchen table in a cardigan, the single most civilised thing to happen in that whole miserable year.
But his Macbeth. Christ. His Macbeth.
Rupert Goold’s production opened at Chichester in 2007, went to the West End and Broadway, and was filmed for TV a few years later, which is how I found it. On a laptop, years too late, but grateful anyway.
Goold pulled the play off the heath and into a tiled basement somewhere in a vaguely Soviet military state. White walls and strip lights. A clanking industrial lift that moves like it’s taking you down to hell, because it is. The witches are nurses in surgical masks, people meant to keep you alive, very much not keeping anyone alive. It’s a field hospital, a morgue and a kitchen all at once. The play has never smelled more of disinfectant and blood.
And Stewart was sixty-seven. Too old for Macbeth, sniffed the purists, who wanted their Thane young and thrusting. Wrong. That was the whole point. It wasn’t ambition as appetite but as a pension plan. A general at the end of a long career doing the state’s killing, who has spent his life being told “well done” by younger men and sees one last promotion at the table. Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth was younger and hungrier, and he looked at her like a man who couldn’t believe his luck and couldn’t afford to lose it.
The part everyone remembers is, he briefs Banquo’s murderers while making a sandwich. Slicing bread, spreading the butter. Chatting. Arranging a murder between mouthfuls. It’s the banality of evil as stage business, Arendt made flesh, and it’s blackly funny with the audience laughing until they realise just what they’re laughing at. It’s the same move he’d make in Green Room, with the monster not a howling demon but a reasonable man doing his job, just a bit peckish.
Then Goold replays the banquet after the interval, the same scene again with the ghost taken out, so you see what the court saw; a king losing his mind in front of everyone, screaming at an empty chair.
How he recites “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” isn’t grand. There’s no organ or cathedral. It’s flat and tired. A man doing his sums and finding they come to nothing. A man who had spent his whole life on stages, telling us that life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.
Out, out, brief candle.
He wrote obituaries once, so he’d have known they’re never really for the dead. They’re for the people left in the front room with the tea going cold.
So here’s mine. A Wednesday night, the heating ticking away. My Granny leaning in. A bald man on the screen telling a ship full of frightened people that the right thing was still worth doing, even when it was hard, especially when it was hard, and making you believe it simply by refusing to raise his voice.
He was a working-class kid from Mirfield who grew up watching his father hit his mother and spent the rest of his life campaigning so that other kids wouldn’t have to. He made Shakespeare sound like it belonged to people like us, because it does. He made thinking look heroic and made dignity look cool, which in my lifetime has been about the hardest trick going.
At the end of the very last episode, Picard finally walks into the officers’ poker game he’d never once joined in seven years. He looks round the table at his crew, his family, and he takes the cards.
“Five-card stud, nothing wild. And the sky’s the limit.”
Goodnight, Captain, and thank you for those Wednesdays.
Engage.
Adam Page
