Appreciation: Patrick Stewart’s 70-year career stretched far beyond ‘Star Trek’ and ‘X-Men’

Unless you’re writing for a major national magazine or shooting video for Architectural Digest, it’s rare for a reporter to be invited into a celebrity subject’s home. More likely, it’ll be some neutral space like a publicist’s office, or coffee shop, or hotel room; even more likely, over the phone or Zoom. But Patrick Stewart, when I interviewed him in 2023 at the end of “Star Trek: Picard,” the “The Next Generation” sequel series in which he starred, asked to meet at his house.

Stewart, who died Wednesday at 86, was 82 then, friendly and dapper and emanating a youthful sense of wonder and readiness. He spoke of wanting to learn to play the piano and speak French — ironic for an actor perhaps best known as Jean-Luc Picard. He had written a memoir, “Make It So,” titled for a Picard catchphrase. And he was excited about the house, located on a leafy, McMansion-free, comparatively modest street in what real estate agents would call Hancock Park, where he’d been living with his wife, Sunny Ozell, since just before the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

“We were safe,” Stewart said of the COVID days. “We felt protected here. It was just a walk that way or a walk that way to some shops. I walk to a little post office and my pharmacy is on 3rd Street, and I always take the backstreets. It’s a fabulous neighborhood, it really is. No two houses are the same. I mean, I never thought I’d live in a house that had just got archways everywhere — no doors! Sitting here, you see one, two, three, four, five, six archways.”

From sheer weight of screen time and franchise muscle, “Star Trek: TNG” — which ran for seven seasons (on first-run syndication, a dynamic format that no longer exists), plus four films — and the “X-Men” movies have dominated coverage of Stewart’s death. (Confession: I have possibly seen one “X-Men” movie, though long before there were X-Men movies, I read the comics — so I am familiar with Professor Charles Xavier, a part for which Stewart did not need to shave his head, as well as his nemesis Magneto, played by Stewart’s good pal Ian McKellen.) But there’s more to the story.

Stewart’s 70-year career does neatly divide into BST and AST — before and after “Star Trek,” which arrived in 1987 at its chronological midpoint. The first half is dominated by theater. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1968, after a decade on regional stages, and was a core member until 1982. “So that was my daily experience,” he told me. “Shakespeare and his contemporaries and other great 19th century, 20th century playwrights. It was home to me.” In 1982, he took part alongside fellow RSC members, including David Suchet, Ben Kingsley, Judi Dench and McKellen, in director John Barton’s illuminating series “Playing Shakespeare,” demonstrating the relation of text and performance. You can find it all on YouTube from the Shakespeare Network and really should.

American audiences might have gotten a look at him in David Lynch’s “Dune” or PBS-imported British TV productions like “I, Claudius” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” or as Claudius opposite Derek Jacobi in BBC’s “Hamlet” — but for many Stewart appeared new and fully formed in September 1987 on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. (This paper, reporting on his casting, apparently called him “an unknown British Shakespearean actor,” a fact you will see printed many times over in the wake of his death, and which Stewart liked to repeat.) With a handsome, sculpted head unencumbered by hair and a rich musical baritone, he exuded compassionate authority. You felt you could trust him, not just because it was in the script. With his classical training, he could make the most mundane line sing as if it were written in iambic pentameter, and do it without sounding hammy. He was a fit 47 when the show premiered. And he rocked his body-hugging Starfleet uniform.

After “Star Trek” made him Hollywood-famous, making way for his “X-Men” role — which he reprised for his final film, “Avengers: Doomsday,” coming in December — other projects followed. As an established personality there were opportunities for self-mockery and oddball choices. In Ricky Gervais’ “Extras,” playing himself, he describes a screenplay he’s writing in which his character has the power to make women’s clothes fall off (“and I’ve seen everything”). In Riz Ahmed’s “Bait,” which premiered earlier this year, he was the hallucinated voice of “Pigtrick,” a decapitated pig’s head that is somehow also Patrick Stewart. He donned a bad wig to portray John Oliver on “The Daily Show” and was a regular voice on “American Dad!” More traditionally, he played Captain Ahab, Ebenezer Scrooge and Captain Nemo.

Patrick Stewart as Macbeth and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth in “Macbeth,” the film version of Rupert Goold’s production.

(Manuel Harlan / Illuminations TV)

Did success on the screen boost his stage career? Or was it just a different route to the same place? With McKellen he starred in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in repertory. He adapted Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” into a one-man show and played George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But it always came back to Shakespeare. Returning to the RSC, he played the Ghost and Claudius to David Tennant’s “Hamlet” and the lead in “Macbeth” (both were filmed and broadcast) as well as Prospero in “The Tempest.” He stayed busy as he aged, if not always as busy as he would have liked — the actor’s lot — and when the pandemic killed regular work, he went onto social media and spoke directly to the people in the language he loved so well, reading and commenting on all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets — “A Sonnet a Day” — from March to October 2020 (they’re available on CD).

“We play this game often,” he told me. “I played it when I was a kid: If you could go back in time, where would you go? And I’ve worked on my answer to that question — I want to be in the audience at the very first performance of ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ that’s all, because I know Shakespeare would be there.”

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