How acting titan Sir Patrick Stewart overcome demons after abusive childhood… and battled to contain his own anger
As Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard and X-Men leader Professor Charles Xavier, he was the epitome of calm leadership under pressure.
But actor Sir Patrick Stewart, who has passed away aged 86 after a secret health battle with Alzheimer’s, spent his life fighting his own personal demons, coming to terms with his abusive childhood.
His father Alf was one of the last men evacuated from Dunkirk and then parachuted into Italy to fight in the brutal Battle of Monte Cassino where 54,000 Allied troops were killed or injured.
Back home in Mirfield, Huddersfield, he subjected the seven-year-old’s mother to brutal beatings.
Often, the young child would stand between his father’s fists and his mother in a desperate attempt to shield her.
“As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him,” he said. “If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down.
“For those who struggle to comprehend these feelings in a child, imagine living in an environment of emotional unpredictability, danger and humiliation week after week, year after year, from the age of seven.
“My childish instinct was to protect my mother, but the man hurting her was my father, whom I respected, admired and feared.”
It was on stage where he found a way to break free from his home life and forge his own path.
“I managed to find my own refuge in acting,” he said. “The stage was a far safer place for me than anything I had to live through at home – it offered escape.
“I could be someone else, in another place, in another time.
“However, whenever the role called for anger, fury, or the expression of murderous impulses, I was always afraid of what I might unleash if I surrendered myself to those feelings.”
Born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, near Huddersfield, life was bliss until his father Alf returned home from war with what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder.
He said: ”My parents’ bedroom had a partition built into it, which is where my old brother Trevor and I slept. No hot water, no cooking facilities, no toilet, bathroom. Just an open fire and a gas ring.
“I’d never known anything else.”
Reflecting the violence at home, Stewart’s own anger was close to the surface and he struggled to contain it at school.
He said: “I was beaten with a cane by my headmaster when I was 14, when I was innocent of what he was accusing me of.
“It was one of the hardest moments ever, because I wanted to attack him. I would have killed him.
“If I’d actually got my hands on him, I don’t think he’d have made it out.”
His salvation came in the form of English teacher Cecil Dormand who put a copy of Shakespeare in his hands and encouraged him to perform.
It was the Mirfield Secondary Modern School drama club that gave him a glimpse of something beyond the confines of his terraced home and violent abuse.
He said: “The first moment that I walked onto the school stage I felt safe — it was the safest place I’d ever been.
“For one thing I wasn’t Patrick Stewart because I didn’t like Patrick Stewart very much.
“And it was a different world, it wasn’t my world — because I didn’t like that very much either.”
He got another dreaded summons to his headmaster’s office. But this time instead of a caning he saw Mr Dormand and someone from the West Riding County Council who offered him an eight-day residential drama course.
It was there he met a young Brian Blessed, who he would later perform with in the classic TV drama I, Claudius.
Years later they bumped into each other together at a glitzy awards ceremony in Los Angeles:
“There we were: two working-class boys from Yorkshire, walking down the red carpet.”
He left school at 15 and got a job as a junior reporter on his local paper the Mirfield & District while dedicating every moment to acting, much to the annoyance of his editor.
He said: “There were about a dozen amateur dramatic societies in my community. Every church, every chapel had one — even if it only meant doing a pantomime once a year.
“The editor eventually said ‘You’ve got to give it all up, this acting business, and learn to be a journalist. If you don’t, you can get off my paper.’
“So I went upstairs, packed up my typewriter and left.”
He got a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and in 1966 joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, a relationship that would last for nearly three decades.
He went on to win two supporting actor Olivier Awards for his Shakespeare performances, for Antony and Cleopatra in 1979 and Hamlet in 2009.
He was awarded a knighthood for services to drama in 2009 and was knighted by the late Queen in 2010.
The stage was his true love despite one appearance on Coronation Street in 1966 and playing John Le Carre’s Russian spy Karla in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People.
But in 1987 he was tempted by what he thought would be a quick Hollywood cash grab and be back home on the stage in a few months.
But Star Trek: The Next Generation became a global smash and his cultured, thoughtful Picard became an iconic role.
The sci-fi TV series ran for seven years, with Sir Patrick starring in Star Trek Generations in 1994, Star Trek: First Contact in 1996 and Star Trek: Insurrection in 1998 and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002).
He said: “I was contemptuous. I knew of the original Star Trek, of course… I thought, ‘This is not what I do. I’m a classical actor.’
“I thought I’d just go to California for a year, get a tan and earn some money.
“I came to love Jean-Luc Picard and to admire him, and he has had an effect on me. Some of his qualities, I believe, have rubbed off on me.
“The sense of responsibility, the sense of duty, the determination that you will not be compromised.”
In 2000, he was cast as powerful telepath Professor Charles Xavier in the film adaptation of Marvel‘s X-Men comics.
He would come back to the series in 2014’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past, 2017’s Logan, 2022’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness and 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
Again, his thoughtful, nurturing persona and his rivalry with old friend Sir Ian McKellen’s Magneto became cinema legend.
He said: “I love him deeply. So does my wife. He married us — he performed the ceremony in a Mexican restaurant.”
Singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell was Stewart’s third wife and eyebrows were raised at their 38-year age gap.
He had two children, Daniel, 59, and Sophie, 54, with his first wife Sheila Falconer who he married in 1966 and divorced 24 years later.
He was briefly married to producer Wendy Neuss in 2000 then he met and married Sunny in 2013.
The couples’ fun Instagram posts of the Shakespearean actor in hilarious situations, like being dressed as a lobster, burst his rather serious Shakespearean public face.
Making home in Los Angeles, where he watched every game of his beloved Huddersfield Town, he started having weekly therapy sessions to deal with his traumatic childhood.
Stewart said: “It wasn’t until I came to California and people would say, ‘You’re not in therapy? Let me recommend somebody.’ I was introduced to a brilliant woman with whom I did therapy weekly for about six years.
“It was thanks to her that all this stuff came out and I realised that acting was an escape for me.”
In 2006 a routine check up discovered an 85 per cent blockage in his heart and he underwent emergency surgery to fix it by having a stent inserted.
He said: “I was diagnosed very unexpectedly during my annual physical by my cardiologist, who said ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’
“To which I said ‘Well actually, I’m going for lunch.’ And he said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
“And in five minutes I was on a gurney giving details of my next of kin and so it was rather dramatic.
“I didn’t have time to brood on it, but what I did know was that I was in the best possible hands I could’ve been in and I was going to be taken care of whatever the outcome.
His mother Gladys died in 1977, three years before Alfred. After turning 80 in 2020 and with the pandemic and lockdown in full swing he began to think about his own mortality.
He said: “When my father was living alone, I believe he missed her badly.
“And perhaps he might even have regretted aspects of their married life.
“I was already older than both my parents when they died, but I think it was the coronavirus. It did something to me.
“It made me feel so vulnerable.”
In a final video posted on Instagram before his death, Sir Patrick reflected on love and the emotions evoked by his performances of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
He said: “I hope it has brought pleasure and curiosity but more than anything else I want it to have communicated all the multiple features that love might have.”