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<\/p>\nBefore he captained the Starship Enterprise, Patrick Stewart commanded the Shakespearean stage.<\/p>\n
And it was the stage to which he returned time and again, even after Star Trek: The Next Generation and X-Men made him a Hollywood star.<\/p>\n
The theater was where Stewart felt at home, and where he could fill an auditorium with his sonorous voice, tinged with a warm Yorkshire burr.<\/p>\n
Stewart spent a decade and a half with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose former artistic director, Gregory Doran, remembered him as \u201ca true Shakespearean\u201d and \u201ca theater actor in his bones\u201d. In later life, he formed a memorable double act with his friend Ian McKellen, who called Stewart \u201cthe most respected and beloved actor of his generation\u201d.<\/p>\n
London\u2019s West End theaters plan to dim their lights next Tuesday evening (local time) in memory of Stewart, who died in Los Angeles, aged 86.<\/p>\n
A passion for Shakespeare started in childhood<\/p>\n
He achieved both screen fame and stage kudos, a notoriously difficult balance.<\/p>\n
McKellen warned him against starring in sci-fi after Stewart was offered a role in the Star Trek series, which debuted in 1987. McKellen remembered telling him to \u201cthink of your stage career\u201d rather than risk \u201cgetting lost in Hollywood for years and years\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did,\u201d McKellen said in a social media post after Stewart\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Patrick Stewart and actress Kate Fleetwood perform at the Cast of Macbeth Photocall, 2007. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n
Across six decades, Stewart performed in plays by modern giants including Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. But the work of William Shakespeare was his first love and his lodestar.<\/p>\n
During what he later called a \u201chand-to-mouth\u201d childhood in northern England, Stewart\u2019s love of theatre was encouraged by an English teacher and by his mother Gladys, who performed in amateur dramatics.<\/p>\n
He memorised Shakespeare\u2019s soliloquies for fun as a teenager, won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, then performed in rep, mounting a different play every week. It was an in-at-the-deep-end training ground for young actors that he said taught him: \u201cLearn lines, hit your marks, don\u2019t knock over the furniture\u201d.<\/p>\n
Stewart was a core member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for a decade and a half from 1966, and later returned to the company, appearing in more than 40 productions. He moved from supporting parts to starring roles, including Shylock, Prospero, Macbeth, Henry IV and Mark Antony.<\/p>\n
Doran recalled how, in a 2006 production of Antony and Cleopatra, Stewart had played the Egyptian queen\u2019s consort as a military hero \u201cno longer able to live up to his own PR\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cPatrick restored the magnificence of the role in a tragedy so often regarded as \u2018her play,\u2019\u201d Doran said in a statement.<\/p>\n
He was a chilling Macbeth and a complex Claudius<\/p>\n
Stewart’s starship captain, Jean-Luc Picard, had a ramrod-straight military bearing and an underlying humanity. In 2007, he combined a martial exterior with cunning and insecurity for Shakespeare\u2019s Macbeth. In Rupert Goold\u2019s production, set in a chilly dystopia, Stewart\u2019s murderous Scottish ruler had what an Associated Press review called \u201cpantherlike\u201d magnetism, and a charged sexual chemistry with Kate Fleetwood\u2019s Lady Macbeth.<\/p>\n
Stewart earned a Tony Award nomination when the show moved from London to New York in 2008. And he was in his element.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I\u2019m doing now is all I ever wanted to do,\u201d he told the AP during the Broadway run. \u201cI didn\u2019t have any other ambitions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Soon after, Stewart played Hamlet\u2019s murderous uncle-turned-stepfather, Claudius, to David Tennant\u2019s prince in an RSC production of Shakespeare\u2019s tragedy.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Stewart and David Tennant in Hamlet, 2008. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n
The combination of the Star Trek captain and Doctor Who star Tennant made the production a major draw. Hordes of fans thronged the stage door, and the RSC had to ban people bringing sci-fi memorabilia to be signed.<\/p>\n
But it was clear the casting was no gimmick. Critics praised the subtle way Stewart played Claudius \u2014 potentially a one-note wicked-uncle role \u2014 as a charming, seemingly reasonable man of state. The performance won an Olivier Award.<\/p>\n
Stewart and McKellen were a formidable partnership<\/p>\n
Science fiction met the stage again when Stewart teamed up with McKellen. The two working-class northerners turned theatrical knights had first worked together in 1977 in Tom Stoppard\u2019s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and became fast friends while filming the \u201cX-Men\u201d movies, where Stewart played Professor Charles Xavier and McKellen was Magneto.<\/p>\n
In 2009, the two actors starred in Beckett\u2019s Waiting for Godot, and later in Pinter\u2019s No Man\u2019s Land, both directed by Sean Mathias. They performed the plays in London\u2019s West End, on a UK tour and on Broadway, where the two shows ran on alternate days.<\/p>\n
They mined both comedy and existential bleakness from both plays. In Pinter\u2019s tragicomedy about two writers \u2014 one struggling but hopeful, the other successful but trapped \u2014 there was crackling humour and mounting tension in their escalating battle of wills.<\/p>\n
In Godot, they played Vladimir and Estragon, the two drifters waiting for a mysterious someone who never arrives, like a music hall double act.<\/p>\n
The love of Shakespeare never left him. Each day for weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he recorded one of the poet\u2019s sonnets at his California home, posting them on social media. He was delighted that it brought new fans to the Bard.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople will say, \u2018Love your sonnets. Keep them up,\u2019\u201d Stewart told the BBC.<\/p>\n
\u201cLoving Shakespeare as I do, and living at the moment in southern California, to find that I am being accosted by people wanting to talk about Shakespeare and the sonnets is so satisfying, and it\u2019s giving me a great thrill.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before he captained the Starship Enterprise, Patrick Stewart commanded the Shakespearean stage. And it was the stage to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[2567,430,156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-646475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-arts-and-culture","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}