It is obvious upon first meeting him that Sir Patrick Stewart is a man of contradictions. The young boy born in Mirfield who grew up in a poor household in Jarrow fraught with domestic violence is now an elegant gentleman at once stoic and kind. His proper Queen’s English is what one notices at once, making all attempts by this journalist to sound intelligent in his presence invalid. And yet Stewart admits that in his youth “you wouldn’t have understood me if you heard me talk, I spoke with not just an accent — we had a dialect, so we used other words as well.” He proceeds to make an example which of course, sounds like he’s speaking a foreign tongue, not even English anymore.
Stewart is also one of the youngest souls I’ve met in my career, yet casually admits “I learned to ski four years ago when I was sixty-three,” quickly then correcting himself “I’m sorry, seventy-three, I’m seventy-seven now!” Mind you, this was a little over two years ago, when we sat down for our leisurely talk in Dubai. His coolest-kid-in-school colored tennis shoes betray just how young at heart the now 79 year old is! And let’s not forget he is one of TV’s most beloved faces — ‘Star Trek: Picard' will premiere next week and has already been renewed for a second season, sight unseen — who honed his craft as a Shakespearean weekly rep player. “A theater company working in a regional theater and doing a new play — in the very first company I worked with, every Monday night. A whole brand new play. So we had five days to rehearse it,” as Stewart explains.
I could go on, but you get it. A man filled with opposing forces, yet one who brings a mystical, nearly otherworldly brand of calm to the conversation.
When I meet Stewart he’s in Dubai, accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award, at what turned out to be the swan song edition of the Dubai International Film Festival. Everyone who met him there gushed about how personal their conversation with the actor turned out to be. He possesses that quality too, making the person who sits across from him feel like they are the one and only for him, at that moment in time. That’s a rare virtue in a world where even a renowned former movie producer on trial in NYC can’t stop looking at his phone in court. But then Sir Stewart is rare — singular and exceptional.
Our talk spans from his love of William Shakespeare, something I share with Stewart through my grandfather’s legacy as one of the Bard’s translators, to him playing Poop Daddy in ‘The Emoji Movie’ about which he jokingly admits, is a role “I’ve been preparing for all my life!”
Sir Stewart also hits on the lessons we can learn from the Bard by pointing out, “I’ve been thinking quite a lot about King Lear recently. And that play is about power, the lack of it, running a country, people who are unreliable and untruthful. People who are dangerous, putting the society at risk, all of those things which should engage us every single hour that we are on this planet because we are in the middle of that turmoil, ALL the time.” And when I point out our current president could well be a Shakespearean character, Stewart confirms “yes he is — there is a character called Dogberry in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and he rather resembles him actually. I’d never thought of that before, but you’re right.”
When I ask him about what attracts him to the diverse roles he’s famous for playing, he anwers “well, that’s it, you’ve used the word. It is the diversity of what I can find to do that first appeals to me. If it is something completely out of the ordinary and new, I’m thrilled about that. Because I like the challenge.”
Since we find ourselves face to face in the Arab world, a place often misconceived and misrepresented in the Western media, I ask Sir Stewart if, as an English actor and resident New Yorker, he feels like an ambassador of sorts. “In what way?” He asks in return. “We think of the Arab world, especially in the US as this incomprehensible “the Other”, that we can’t quite grasp and so we hate, and reject it,” I say, explaining myself. “Ah, yes, yes,” he seems to breathe his answer out, but then clarifies “the very first duty of cinema, theater, television, is to entertain. If it doesn’t entertain and engage you then it’s worthless…And by entertain I mean that in its broadest sense. Make you angry, make you curious, make you laugh, but there is a wonderful potential to show people the world as it is, and also to show them the world as they don’t know it.”
He gives the example of ‘On the Waterfront’ the Elia Kazan directed, Marlon Brando starrer which Stewart watched when he was just a thirteen year old boy. “I was crazy about cinema and I used to go see films I was far too young to see, sneak in, or find someway of seeing things,” he explains. “So I went to see this movie, one Monday night, and they were working, people, in a very very difficult situation. With people who were abusing them and denying them opportunities to work and committing them to poverty or to violence. And it’s what I knew and what I grew up with.” Having only seen “Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds and Tab Hunter and those beautiful American houses and green lawns,” until then, seeing the Red Hook docks and working class America of ‘On the Waterfront’ brought to the forefront the “social aspect of cinema,” as Stewart calls it.
Once dubbed “the man with the poverty mentality” by his acting peers — something which has helped him to remain grounded he concedes — Stewart has been collecting fine art since his first days as Picard. Initially inspired by a reproduction of a Rembrandt painting he found spellbinding, hanging at his secondary school, ‘The Man with the Golden Helmet’ the actor admits that when he finally saw the original hanging at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, he found the experience “very emotional and intense.” While living in Los Angeles, Stewart explains, “in the late 80s I started buying some screen prints and works on paper and things I could afford and it’s grown and grown.” The actor won’t reveal on record his favorite piece, but once I turn the recording device off, he whispers an all too familiar post-impressionist painter’s drawing as the darling of his collection. “I can’t help but stare at it every day I’m home,” he admits.
I ask Sir Stewart about hobbies, and he concedes, “I actually started painting two years ago, very privately, very secretly. It was my wife who prompted me. I’ve collected art for decades and she said, “you need to look at art from a more personal point of view.” So I’m hoping to start taking lessons early in the new year because I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I just put color on paper.” I ask “you’re having fun?” And he enthusiastically answers back “I’m having so much fun,” then adding, “I do jigsaw puzzles which I LOVE. That is my primary form of relaxation.”
Last and not least, Sir Stewart is also a proud Brooklyn resident — living just blocks away from Red Hook, the docks of the working class New York that he watched in ‘On the Waterfront’. Once again, he betrays a special kind of passion when he talks about his neighborhood, “I only discovered after I lived there for a while, three blocks from where I live was the last stand made by 400 Marylanders while Washington and the rest of the Revolutionary Army crossed the East River into Manhattan and escaped, but 400 of these Marylanders held off this vast English army who were attacking them down from Prospect Park towards the water.” While we often forget to think of NYC as having been touched by the American War for Independence, it was an important battlefield. “Where we live was actually the site of the Great Battle of Brooklyn in the great war of Independence. In fact it was THE battle that changed the direction of the war and after that battle, things then got better and better for the American Revolutionary Army,” Stewart says, then continuing “I am hoping to make a documentary, and to actually excavate where these possible sites might be. Where 400 American heroes saved the Revolution but have gone unacknowledged.”
So there you have it. Sir Patrick Stewart — British super star, art collector, skier, crossword puzzle solver and American historian. And as promised, man of contradictions.