Patrick Stewart: Gravitas and Dignity

    You had to know this was coming. I write this, whatever it is, as an unabashed fan of Sir Patrick Stewart. Not just because I am a Star Trek devotee, as some of you know, but also because of his brilliant stage acting, especially his Shakespearean roles, of which there were many, and in the end his friendship and acting partnership with his fellow Hall-of-Fame British actor, Ian Mckellen. Two legends interacting like gods on Mount Olympus. Thanks for indulging me.

    Sir Patrick Stewart, the actor best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor X in the X-Men films, died just a few days ago at his home in Los Angeles on October 28th. He was 86. Before anything else, Stewart was a wonderful and gifted Shakespearean actor, trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, and spent much of his career playing authority figures and men in charge: kings, captains, and teachers. 

     [Speaking of those roles, I never tire of watching Stewart portray those numerous Shakespearean roles via The National Theatre of London. The National Theatre (ntlive.com) is a treasure that simulcasts multiples plays every year to American theaters; Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare plays alike. There I found Stewart playing the lead in Othello, Claudius from Hamlet, the lead in Macbeth, and the wonderful Prospero from The Tempest, among many others. The National Theater of London is the gift that continues to give. If you love great stage productions, I encourage you to visit the site and find a theater near you that simulcasts their plays. And for what it’s worth, you can find movies starring Sir Patrick, like a great, great Captain Ahab (Moby Dick) on Netflix, Prime, or Hulu. But I digress.] 

     Stewart belonged to a tradition of Englishness that, according to many, was already going out of fashion when he became truly famous. The Shakespearean voice, the gentlemanly bearing, the assumption that someone ought to be in charge. You know what I’m talking about. It is something we rarely see in the American public eye any longer: Manliness, properly understood.

    Yet today, when authority has become an almost alien skill across public life, there was something deeply appealing about Stewart’s old-fashioned commanding presence. What made Stewart so special, at least for me, was that his authority did not come naturally. Rather, it was itself a performance that had to be worked at and perfected. Stewart was a working-class Yorkshireman who learned to sound like the English establishment. In doing so, I believe he became a better version of it.

    There is something pleasurable about authority when it is knowingly performed rather than simply exercised from above. We can enjoy the dignity, the reassuring sense that someone knows what they are doing. Stewart’s authority charmed rather than commanded us. However grand the character, you could always feel the relatable man behind it. In his memoir, Making It So, he wrote of the bond between himself and his Star Trek character Captain Picard: both had traveled far while remaining connected to their origins. You could sense this on screen, or on the stage. The Yorkshireman was never far below the surface, and his high-status dignity never hardened or fell into snobbery.

    By the time he made it big in television in the 1990s, the Shakespearean style he inhabited was already an object of parody. It came from a tradition of public speaking, intensely focused on breathing, rhythm and the correct emphasis on each word. This grand Royal Shakespeare Company manner was really an imitation of the great stage actors of the previous generation; especially Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud, who were themselves imitating the Victorians before them. 

    Stewart himself later admitted that his “first-season Picard” was too stagey and too big. He quickly learned to soften his style for TV without losing the presence and dignity that came from his stage training. In the end, it was a unique mixture, ideal for the two parts that made him most famous: Picard, the starship captain, and Xavier, the telepathic headmaster of a private school. Both were idealized leaders, fantasies of authority.

    There was an irony in making an old-fashioned English gentleman the captain of a starship. A manner and mode of behavior associated with Britain’s class-bound past became the voice of humanity’s enlightened future. Stewart made old authority attractive again, partly because he understood how ridiculous it could be.

    The affection Stewart earned through his distinctive persona can be seen in the way Picard became a fixture of the internet. His facepalm, from the 1990 episode ‘Deja Q’, is one of its most familiar reaction images, the grand captain brought low by exasperation. Stewart understood his own persona very well and was happy to mock himself in many other television and movie roles over the years. Only an actor who embodied dignity so profoundly could send it up so cheerfully. 

     Ironically, when Stewart signed the 7-year contract to do Star Trek, his British friends told him not to worry; he’d make a lot of money; enjoy Southern California; and be home in a year…because no one thought the the series would last long, including your humble correspondent. Because that fist season was awful! Well, 7 television seasons, 4 major motion pictures, and another short-streaming spin-off later…and he’s an icon, if not a legend. Shows you how much I know!

    Picard’s famous command – “Make it so” – is a strange thing for one adult to say to another. From Stewart, it sounded like reassurance. He represented an English ideal of authority that, when he inherited it, was a pastiche. He filled it with life and made it fresh and meaningful again. It was sincere because it took skill to acquire, and self-awareness to exercise. And now we find ourselves nostalgic for a recent past when this style of authority felt like it had a future.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com