Patrick Stewart

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and five and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is an actor. You may well have seen him in his most famous role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek The Next Generation. His journey to the captaincy of the Starship Enterprise has been astronomical. The son of a working-class family from the West Riding of Yorkshire, he signed up for the Bristol Old Vic School, and from there pursued a successful theatrical career, particularly as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, until Hollywood beamed him up to command its Astral Explorer. Seven years later, he was rich and famous and able ultimately to return to what he loves doing best, acting in the theatre. In recent years he's won an Olivier Award for his one-man show A Christmas Carol, and he's currently enjoying critical acclaim in the West End in David Mammet's play About Actors, A Life in the Theatre. I'm looking for that which makes me happy, he says. I have an acute sense of time's winged chariot, and a lot of work has passed me by. He is Patrick Stewart.

Presenter1:26

There's no doubt, it seems to me, Patrick, for you, that the stage is where you're happiest, isn't it?

Patrick Stewart1:31

I became an actor to work on the stage. Everything beyond the stage had happened to me. It happened by accident. I never looked for it. All I expected was that I would spend a life in the theatre.

Presenter1:44

But you've learned the other stuff on the hoof, obviously. Yes, you make it up. I really love the theatre. Now, why is it that directness?

Patrick Stewart1:46

Yes, you make it up as you go along.

Patrick Stewart1:49

Down

Patrick Stewart1:52

It is the absolutely unique experience of going in front of a live audience eight times a week and knowing that it will never ever be the same as it was the night before. You're never repeating something.

Presenter2:04

And you can hear them and they're giving back and there's nobody between you and them to say there's a hare in the gate or you know

Patrick Stewart2:11

No editor, no director, no composer, no studio making its demand.

Presenter2:16

And does that mean then by implication that filming in comparison is frankly a bit boring on occasions?

Patrick Stewart2:23

Well, a famous Hollywood star once said, They pay me for waiting, I do the acting for nothing. No, filming is tremendously exciting because the technical demands of being ready when required to have everything to give in front of the camera, even though you may have waited five hours, or I remember in one case, three days, for a director of photography to light a set in order to say your first line. You have to be ready for it, and it introduces a level of intimacy into the work because of the lens.

Presenter2:57

Because of the close-up, the lifting of an eyebrow can be everything.

Patrick Stewart3:00

Well, I've always felt that film acting was mostly about thinking and not about acting.

Presenter3:07

Probably.

Patrick Stewart3:07

A camera photographs thoughts, and those actors whom I've enjoyed over the years are those actors whose thinking process is on the screen.

Presenter3:17

Yes, you can see it. But when you're acting in science fiction films and so much happens in post-production and you've just got to be there in the right position because after you've been and gone and done it, you know, it's all going to happen afterwards.

Patrick Stewart3:31

Yes. But I find that fascinating too, because when they impose technical restrictions on you, you must not move, you must look exactly at this spot and then at that spot within those technical restrictions it's necessary still to find the truth.

Speaker 13:40

Oh.

Presenter3:47

Hmm.

Patrick Stewart3:47

And

Presenter3:49

But less demanding intellectually and emotionally of an actor's skill. It demands technology.

Patrick Stewart3:54

I can make a lot of enemies if I agreed with what you just said, and I'm not sure that it is intellectually less demanding. But what you're never required to do is to hold the whole event in your hands, in your head and heart, at the same moment. But Star Trek was actually the most demanding. It was physically demanding because of the hours. And Star Trek was not shallow in its storytelling or in its content. So we were often grappling with really quite large and important issues.

Presenter4:27

Tell me about your first record.

Patrick Stewart4:29

This is uh the pastoral from Benjamin Britton's Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings with uh Peter Piers. It's um a piece of music that I've known since I was a teenager and during my eighteen years of living in California English music became more and more important to me because it evoked for me my

Patrick Stewart4:48

by Home, and this piece in particular conjures for me the English landscape and particularly aspect of rural Britain, which I miss so much.

Speaker 25:03

Uh

Speaker 25:26

And the steeds.

Speaker 25:33

With all his kill scarce long.

Patrick Stewart5:43

A character.

Presenter5:52

Part of the pastoral from Benjamin Britton's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and String, sung by Peter Pearce, Dennis Brain on the Horn, and Britton conducting the Boyd Neal String Orchestra, and that was recorded in 1944. And memories for you, Patrick Stewart, of being in America making Star Trek, initially for television, a hundred and seventy eight episodes, followed by four feature films, and later, of course, you've made other films too most recently, the X Men. But when that call first came, back in 1987, you first went over there to be auditioned for Star Trek, uh I mean, y you didn't really realise you were in for the long haul, did you?

Patrick Stewart6:28

I didn't think anything about it except it all seemed like a bit of a hoot and my children got great mileage out of making pointed ear jokes when they knew that I was being interviewed at Paramount. The whole thing was an accident because I was over there doing workshops on Shakespeare and one evening on the campus at UCLA I was assisting a friend, a professor of English, by reading extracts to illustrate this lecture of his and signed up for the course of lectures, was one of the producers and he claimed that he turned to his wife and said, We found the captain. How he could connect the work I was doing there with a science fiction television programme I did.

Presenter7:03

Ah, but

Presenter7:04

Inspirational, better casting.

Patrick Stewart7:06

Well, he couldn't get me cast. They turned me down. Gene Roddenberry actively did not want me in his show.

Presenter7:12

He's the creators.

Patrick Stewart7:13

He was the creator of the original series and of the new one Next Generation.

Presenter7:17

You were too English, you were too much of a classical actor.

Patrick Stewart7:19

Bro

Patrick Stewart7:20

A bald, middle-aged English Shakespearean seemed to be the most unlikely set of ingredients for the captain of the enterprise, for an iconic ruler. I really don't know. I did three auditions for them, spread over six months. And that morning I was told, well, it's actually down to you and another chap. I never found out who the other chap was. I have my suspicions. And suddenly it was shockingly real. You really wanted it then, obviously? Well, I did. I was on the threshold of something that was unimaginably exciting. So when it was offered, it was thrilling. What I didn't know until my agent in Los Angeles spelled it out to me was that in signing my contract, I was signing for six years. And I said, that's impossible. I have too much to do. Really, I have too many plans. I can't do that. And everyone assured me that the new series, Next Generation, would be a failure. There was not one who predicted that it would be the great success it was. And on the basis of their prediction, I signed a six-year contract, believing that it may not even last one year.

Presenter7:29

As you can infer an

Speaker 17:29

An iconic rose.

Presenter8:23

Amazing, isn't it? And the next minute you were watched by thirty million viewers on on American television. Um y fame, the like of which you'd never known.

Presenter8:33

Your face, that famous cranium, was on lunch boxes, real boxes, real ones.

Patrick Stewart8:39

Oh yeah

Speaker 28:39

Yeah.

Patrick Stewart8:39

Yes, yes, yes.

Presenter8:39

And duvet covers across the world. I mean, amazing.

Patrick Stewart8:40

Covers across the world.

Patrick Stewart8:44

Yes. Luckily, it took a long time for me to absorb some of those details. The first year I lived in complete denial, not only of the success of the show, but also of the financial benefits of it, too. Someone, in fact, during that time said that I continued to have a pauper's mentality, because I was simply not acknowledging that they were paying me these ridiculous sums of money to do this work.

Presenter9:06

You're a good working class Yorkshire boy, yeah.

Patrick Stewart9:06

We could

Presenter9:09

Yeah.

Patrick Stewart9:09

Yes, thank and thank goodness for it too, you know, because I'm back in the theatre now and all of that has has proved to be a nice support.

Presenter9:09

Yes, they're going to

Presenter9:17

But it did something else for you as well, didn't it? As I read, it did a tremendous amount for your confidence as an actor.

Patrick Stewart9:24

Yes, and I don't quite know how that came about, Sue, but I suddenly felt that my work had a worth. And sadly, throughout too much of my career, I'd actually felt a little bit second rate. And even though I loved my job, I was scared of committing all of myself to it. Well, doing this series and finding myself so successful and so

Patrick Stewart9:48

appreciated really. It began to infiltrate everything else that I did.

Patrick Stewart9:53

This is Leonard Bernstein's film music for Elia Kazan's film On the Waterfront, which I saw when I was 13. And the film had a huge impact on me because I saw a film about people who actually lived as I was living at the time. And I think it was the first time I was ever aware of film music.

Presenter10:43

Part of Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront suite with Bernstein conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter10:49

So, Patrick Stewart, you acted as a boy, I read, because in your area of Yorkshire, a town called Murfield in the West Riding, there were no fewer than twelve amateur dramatic societies. Why so many? Could they all flourish?

Patrick Stewart11:01

They did. Some of them may only have done one production a year, like a pantomime, for example, but there were 12 fully active drama societies, and I was blessed because in that part of the Westriding, it was not uncommon to perform. Nobody thought it was odd or weird or that you were a show-off if you did that. And when I was given my first role in an adult play at the age of just twelve, I very quickly became in demand. What was the role? It was the role of Hopcroft Minor in brilliant comedy, The Happiest Days of Your Life.

Presenter11:37

And did you know then in that moment as you stepped on the set, this is where I want to be? I mean, how strong was the feeling?

Patrick Stewart11:44

It was very strong, though I couldn't recognize what it was at the time, and of course I couldn't analyse it either, but it was a sense of safety. The moment that I left the wings and walked onstage, I felt wonderfully secure. I felt as though nothing bad could happen to me on stage. And in fact, I still do.

Presenter12:04

But it's a funny word, safe. It it's a very it implies, of course, that you didn't feel safe at a time.

Patrick Stewart12:10

Well, I didn't. My home life was unpredictable and at times dangerous too. Well, I had a very angry father who ended his war service, the Second World War, as a superstar. He was Regimental Sergeant Major of the Parachute Regiment. He was a fearsome individual and a man of great, great talent. But when the war was over, so many servicemen experienced, he came back to something so much more modest, in fact, in my father's case, really humiliating, scrabbling around to find any kind of job, and the disappointment that attached itself to that.

Presenter12:14

In what

Patrick Stewart12:44

I think made him very angry.

Presenter12:45

You had two brothers. You were the youngest of three, weren't you? Did he take it out on you three?

Patrick Stewart12:49

He did. He took it out on all of us and particularly on on our mother. And when he was bad, he was very, very bad. And home life was quite frightening. But they were only moments. There were other times, because he was a huge personality, a great raconteur, a very charming man. When I became an actor, I had to watch him when I took him backstage, because he would hit on the prettiest actresses. And he was so confident and assured in that respect.

Presenter13:16

But in his working life it was all pretty hopeless. Disappointed. Yeah, and and of course the family was poor. Your mother was a weaver, wasn't she?

Patrick Stewart13:18

Disappointed.

Patrick Stewart13:23

My mother worked in the weaving sheds, yes, and did all of her adult life.

Presenter13:28

But the pressure of the poverty must have been quite.

Patrick Stewart13:28

The compression

Patrick Stewart13:31

It was, and most of my friends were living like that anyway, but there was a certain humiliation that was attached to it of, you know, literally the incidence of the red man knocking on the door and my mother and I hiding behind the sofa because we had nothing. And yet looking back, it seems somewhat shocking now, but it was really familiar. It was all there was.

Presenter13:52

Cook number three.

Patrick Stewart13:53

Stephen Sondheim, it's difficult to know where to make one choice, but I've plumped for his wonderful musical Assassins and the opening piece of Assassins. My feeling is that um if I hear this I can fill in the rest of the musical myself.

Patrick Stewart14:08

Hey pal, feelin' blue.

Patrick Stewart14:12

Don't know what to do.

Speaker 214:15

Babe.

Patrick Stewart14:16

Well, I mean you

Speaker 214:18

Yeah.

Presenter14:20

Come here and kill the president.

Presenter14:23

Some guys think they can't be w

Speaker 214:26

When us

Patrick Stewart14:30

First one

Speaker 214:32

Off and go.

Patrick Stewart14:32

Those two rank field dinners

Presenter14:37

William Parry singing Everybody's Got the Right from Stephen Sondyme's musical Assassins. What age were you, Patrick, when you first came across Shakespeare then, and how did it happen?

Patrick Stewart14:46

I was twelve and it was an English teacher, Cecil Dormand, at Murfield Secondary Modern School. He was the first person to put a copy of Shakespeare in front of me. It was the Merchant of Venice. Of all of us in his class, to open it up and say, you read this out loud. This is not a book, it's not a novel, it's not a poem, it's a play and you've got to make it live. And he cast me as Shylock. I I mean, I didn't understand half of what I was saying.

Patrick Stewart15:14

But the words, the sound of that language, simply

Presenter15:18

Yeah.

Patrick Stewart15:18

Grab me.

Presenter15:19

And Shylock's been with you ever since, hasn't he? You've played him twice. I played him twice and I created a

Patrick Stewart15:23

I played him twice and I created a a solo show, a one man show, around the play and around Shylock too. So it it's been a mini obsession.

Presenter15:32

Um

Patrick Stewart15:33

Uh

Presenter15:33

Uh

Patrick Stewart15:33

I'd say.

Presenter15:33

Well, we'll come back to Shylock, but the other interesting point about your origins is that you didn't know it at the time, but theatre was in your blood.

Patrick Stewart15:42

Oh, yes. I believed that except for my mother, who belonged to a group, the Methodist Drama Group in Murfield, my middle brother Trevor, who was the star of the local pantomimes, because he was very good looking and sang nicely

Patrick Stewart15:57

I thought that was it, until just before I went off on tour with the Old Vic Company, I was going to be abroad for many, many months, my father's mother asked me to come and visit her, and she told me about her husband.

Patrick Stewart16:11

who had deserted her when she was young with four very small children, one of them being my father.

Patrick Stewart16:16

And he was an actor.

Patrick Stewart16:18

The last that he was heard of, he was in a play at the Elephant Castle Theatre in London, she told me, and the police went around to arrest him for non-payment of support for my grandmother and the children. He was in the middle of a performance when they arrived. He persuaded the policeman to let him finish the play. He had one more scene to do, and then he would come quietly. Well, he went onstage, did his scene and exited the other side and was never seen again. The family suspicion is that he went to the United States. And I've often wondered if when I first went to the United States, if William Stewart, as he was called, was probably still acting somewhere. But I never met him.

Speaker 116:45

Yeah.

Presenter16:56

But I never met her. And your grandmother felt you should know this, but one can therefore imagine the dismay that your family must have felt when you announced that you were going to be an actor.

Patrick Stewart17:06

Real dismay William Stewart was never spoken of.

Presenter17:08

But isn't it interesting that in Merfield it was okay to be in the amateur dramatic society, but to take it up professionally was just irresponsible.

Patrick Stewart17:17

Yes. In my early days with the Royal Shakespeare Company, I'd come back to Murfield and I'd meet members of the local drama society and so forth, and they'd say, What are you doing? and I'd say, Well, I've just done Henry the Fourth with you know and they said, Oh, you know, we did a Henry Fourth last year, it was bloody wonderful, you know, and would just dismiss out of hand whatever the RSC had done.

Presenter17:29

Wonderful.

Patrick Stewart17:35

Good.

Presenter17:35

Uh

Patrick Stewart17:35

Chord number four.

Patrick Stewart17:37

This is Hector Berlio's The Trojans. I came very, very late in life to opera, and it was thanks to my time in Los Angeles I got to know the general manager of L A Opera, and when he heard that I didn't know any opera, he invited me to see everything on condition that

Patrick Stewart17:54

I would meet him at the interval, or after the opera, and tell him what I thought and felt. Well, one night they were doing The Trojans, and I think for the four and a half five hours that this opera lasts I was literally

Speaker 118:03

This op

Patrick Stewart18:06

Transported with bliss. And this is the love duet at the end of Act Four between Dido and Aeneas.

Presenter19:09

Luis divres et ecstas infinite night of boundless ecstasy and rapture from the end of Act four of Belio's The Trojans, with John Vickers as Aeneas and Josephine Vasy as Dido, with Sir Colin Davis conducting the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Coffin Garden.

Presenter19:24

Patrick Stewart, you went off then to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. You were only seventeen. There you are, arriving in this rather sophisticated environment of a theatre school. How exciting!

Patrick Stewart19:35

I I was just breathless day after day after day. There I was, now, spending twelve hours a day doing the thing that I had come to love in the previous years.

Patrick Stewart19:46

Acting

Patrick Stewart19:47

Learning technique, going to classes. It was a brief course, only two years, but it was packed, it was stuffed with work.

Patrick Stewart19:55

But when it was over I thought it was all over for me too, because it seemed that every student in my year had got a job, or an agent, or a manager, or something, and I had nothing. I went back home to Murfield, and signed on the dole, and rather looked back on two wonderful years and thought that that was it.

Presenter20:12

The other dramatic, formative thing that happened to you during that period was you lost your hair, didn't you? This was sort of

Patrick Stewart20:19

It it happened while I was at school, at drama school, yes, and I was spending the little money that I had on all kinds of expensive treatments to try to stop it. It was sad, really. Nobody said to me, Just give it up, Patrick, let it go. It was hard. I was eighteen and it was difficult. It it undermined me actually. It undermined my self-confidence. I thought no woman would want to look at me and it made me self-conscious, it made me shy. And I also thought that it would be a handicap to me as an actor as well. It proved to be really quite different.

Speaker 120:39

Yeah.

Presenter20:52

But if someone had told you then that you were going to end up, you know, one day with your cranium being one of the most famous in Hollywood, and voted in successive years the sexiest man on American television.

Patrick Stewart20:53

BACTA

Presenter21:04

But you would have known it was going to happen. It was inherited alopecia, wasn't it? It happened to her father.

Patrick Stewart21:08

It was my father, my grandfather, both my brothers, and my own son. Luckily, it has not touched the female side of my family.

Presenter21:16

Record number five.

Patrick Stewart21:17

Tom Leir

Patrick Stewart21:18

I was fortunate enough to get to know him a little when I was working at the University of California, where Tom taught two courses: mathematics and the American musical. We were sitting around a dinner one night, and he looked around the table and said, My gosh, you know what we've got here? We've got guys and dolls right around this table. We'll do it next Sunday. And the following Sunday, in front of an invited audience, we sang with Tom at the piano the whole of Guys and Dolls. He was a wonderful and delightful man, and he makes me laugh like a drain. Little Johnny Jones, he was a U.S. pilot and no shrinking violet, was he?

Patrick Stewart21:55

He was mighty proud when World War III was declared. He wasn't scared, no, sir.

Patrick Stewart22:02

And this is what he said on his way to arm again so long.

Patrick Stewart22:10

I'm off to drop the bomb, so don't wait up for me.

Presenter22:15

Tom Lehrer and so long mumm. You did get into Rep eventually, Patrick, after a few weeks. Seven years you then spent going round the provinces, but that included what must have been a glorious period, because you went off, I think, on the last tour of the Old Vic company, didn't you? Last overseas tour.

Patrick Stewart22:32

That's right. But I was an afterthought. I'd auditioned and been turned down, and then shortly before they began rehearsals, I was working in Sheffield at the time at the Old Rep. I got a telegram saying, if still interested, call Douglas Morris, the old Vic Center. And I did, and they said we'd like you to join the company. That was thrilling. And then I was brought face to face with the reality, which was that of the three plays we were taking on tour, Twelfth Night, Lady of the Camellias and Duel of Angels, my entire vocal contribution to this was the line, Antonio I do arrest thee at the suit of Count Orsino, come so.

Presenter23:10

That was it.

Patrick Stewart23:11

That was it. That was bitterly disappointing and I almost pulled out because I was playing nice roles, you know, meaty roles in rep. But everybody said, no, no, no, you can't miss this opportunity. You're going round the world and literally we did go all the way round the world.

Presenter23:23

Yeah.

Patrick Stewart23:24

I was twenty when I left England, twenty one when I came home.

Presenter23:27

So you had your birthday out there?

Patrick Stewart23:28

I had my twenty first birthday in Melbourne, and the principal guest at my birthday party was our leading lady, Vivian Lee.

Presenter23:37

Wow.

Patrick Stewart23:38

And somewhere there is in a packing case at my house in Yorkshire a golden linen handkerchief.

Patrick Stewart23:45

which Vivian gave me for my birthday, with the handwritten note that accompanied it, and for many, many, many, many years it smelt of Vivian's perfume, which I think she must have drenched it in it.

Presenter23:56

Wonderful. Very memorable, but not great acting experience.

Patrick Stewart24:00

My primary responsibility really was acquiring the best possible sum talent.

Patrick Stewart24:05

But it didn't matter. I was watching terrific acting every night.

Presenter24:08

Gant

Presenter24:10

It obviously stood you in good stead, because after that you joined the Royal Shakespeare Company a little later on, and then you worked with so many of the great signs. You certainly there, Peter Hall, David Warner. You played well, you rose from being the player-king in Hamlet to playing King John, Cassius, and Shylock, as as we've said, Titus Andronicus, Oberon, and so on. A distinguished career.

Presenter24:32

But that insecurity you mentioned early on

Presenter24:36

raised its head from time to time, didn't it? That feeling that

Presenter24:40

Were you quite being appreciated or could you quite do it? Despite the fact and there's a bit of a contradiction here that you say you feel you've always felt safe on the stage.

Patrick Stewart24:49

I think that it seemed to centre on

Patrick Stewart24:53

Being unwilling to completely be myself on stage, instead I was rather prepared to hide myself behind other characters and commit to those characters, but not really risk exposing

Patrick Stewart25:08

Patrick.

Patrick Stewart25:09

In all of that.

Patrick Stewart25:11

And it was one director I only worked with him once, and that was Ronald Eyre, who persuaded me to play Leontes in The Winter's Tale. He's a wretched man, Leontes. He does such wicked and cruel things in this play.

Patrick Stewart25:24

And he said to me, This will only work if you find all of these things in yourself. They're there, you know, they're there in all of us, he said. Let them out, you'll be all right. So in a sense, it was a little like being in therapy, you know, working with Ron. A friend of mine who saw this production said, You would have been more successful in this role if sitting out in the audience we all of us felt that we shouldn't actually be watching what was going up there. It was it really rather too personal.

Presenter25:49

But that was the point at which you feel you're acting

Patrick Stewart25:53

Okay, was it all changed?

Presenter25:53

Change very much for the better.

Patrick Stewart25:54

Oh, from that production on, I could no longer hide.

Presenter25:59

Yeah.

Patrick Stewart25:59

Uh

Presenter25:59

Record number six.

Patrick Stewart26:00

Yeah.

Presenter26:00

Yeah.

Patrick Stewart26:00

A fat swala. When my children were young we did a lot of road trips, long car trips, and there was a five-year age difference between them, and so of course there was often a lot of squabbling and fighting, and sometimes when it began to get a little bit out of control, we would put in a tape, a fat swallow, and the restlessness and the arguments and the yelling would all subside into gales and gales of laughter.

Speaker 126:24

Hold tight, hold tight, hold tight, hold tight, for racket back, it won't be

Speaker 126:30

Mama

Speaker 126:32

Shrimps and rice, they're very nice. I like oysters, lobsters too.

Speaker 126:37

Light red purple.

Speaker 126:40

When I come home from work at night, I get my favorite dish, fish, hold tight, hold tight, hold tight, hold tight, crack back him off the

Speaker 126:52

Nana

Presenter26:53

Flatswaller and Hoe Trite.

Patrick Stewart26:54

Listening to that, Sue, I suddenly realized I I never asked my children when they were growing up if they'd actually understood the sexual euphemism of that song. We never actually discussed it, I recall. I just hope that when they were small it went over their heads.

Presenter27:08

We've mentioned how, Patrick, the role of Shylock, a man made unhappy and and vengeful by the society in which he lived, has come back around for you a few times. And then there was Scrooge I mentioned at the beginning you adopted as your own in your award winning.

Speaker 127:17

Yeah.

Presenter27:20

A Christmas carol, another troubled, unhappy man, another outsider, and in fact the guy you're playing at the moment, Robert, in A Life in the Theatre, lonely, disappointed. It is tempting forgive the armchair psychology, it's tempting to look back across your life and suggest that if we're finding the person from within yourself, it's your father and what you knew about him that you tap into for these people.

Patrick Stewart27:43

Yes. It was unconscious, of course, for decades. I'm now much more aware of that, I think. And it's true, the characters like Shylock and Scrooge have littered my career. Henry the Fourth, another deeply troubled man, tied Sandronica, as you mentioned, a man in poor terrible pain.

Presenter28:01

Some of the buildings.

Patrick Stewart28:01

Oh, yes, how Alvard Solness, yes, yes, agonised in in a cr crisis in his life. And uh I think it has been perhaps a means of getting close to my father, who made me very angry and scared when I was small. In a sense, perhaps it's a way for me to forgive him in different forms, presenting him to the world. Because, of course, some of these men have admirable aspects to them as well. And perhaps I have the opportunity to celebrate that which was admirable about Alfred Stewart.

Presenter28:36

Does Captain Picard fit into the mold as well?

Patrick Stewart28:37

Yes, very much. Absolutely. Dad would have recognised him. Well, he was a commander, a leader, a man who, as I'm told my father did, cared deeply for those who served with him. He was sensitive and brave. I missed national service by about six months, and it deeply disappointed my father. So I think he would find it charming that today a lot of people in the world know me as Captain. And in fact, particularly in New York City, I will be hailed on the street as, hey, Captain, how you doing? I I think my father would rather have liked that. At least somebody in the family made officer class.

Presenter29:18

Record number seven.

Patrick Stewart29:19

Randy Newman, I think, uh perhaps along with Steven Sondheim, the

Patrick Stewart29:24

Primary songwriter living and working in the United States today. And this is one of his tracks called Love Story.

Speaker 129:31

We get a preacher.

Speaker 129:35

Outbuild rain

Patrick Stewart29:38

Uh Uh

Speaker 129:38

Uh

Speaker 129:38

Uh

Speaker 129:40

Yeah.

Patrick Stewart29:40

Oh bare

Speaker 129:44

With an accordion.

Speaker 129:48

Violin

Speaker 229:49

Uh

Speaker 129:49

Uh

Speaker 129:52

Yeah.

Speaker 229:52

And a tenor who can sing

Speaker 229:59

You and me

Presenter30:00

Randy Newman and Love Story. Star Trek Patrick Stewart certainly has given you a dedicated fan base. Are you aware of them, you know, when you do other things in the theatre? I mean, they're there, aren't they? They follow you. I mean, they're pretty obsessive, aren't they?

Patrick Stewart30:10

Fully

Patrick Stewart30:13

Well, they've had a bad press because the media tend to focus on the rather more extreme version of the Trekkie, the ones who will dress up the ones who will have fine heads of hair and cut it all off in order to look like cats. Voluntary aliphans.

Presenter30:25

Voluntary allocation.

Presenter30:28

But they have propped you up on occasions, haven't they?

Patrick Stewart30:31

Very much so. When I launched the Christmas Carol on Broadway, I stood in the wings that first night thinking that my first act on a Broadway stage was going to be throw up. I was so scared. The fans came to see Captain Picard, and what they got was, of course, Charles Dickens. And so the first week of previews were entirely that audience. And then we got nice reviews, and then everything took over.

Speaker 230:45

Yeah.

Speaker 130:45

Oh shit.

Presenter30:54

So it mightn't have happened without them.

Patrick Stewart30:56

No, couldn't have done.

Presenter30:58

We've talked about you making choices, and we've heard the choices you've made along the way. Um but I quoted you at the beginning as saying a lot of theatre has passed you by. What is there now then at sixty four one immediately thinks of Lear? I'm sure you'd like to have a crack at Lear.

Patrick Stewart31:10

Oh yes, yes, that's high on my list.

Patrick Stewart31:13

But there are lots of other roles. Some of the great ones just passed me by, you see. Like what? Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago. I don't know why. I don't think people saw me as playing those roles somehow. And that was probably my own fault.

Presenter31:25

You were always Cassius, not Brutus as if it were.

Patrick Stewart31:28

Yes, yes, yes. So I've got a lot of catching up to do and it's and that's my primary objective now.

Presenter31:34

Do you think it's gonna happen?

Patrick Stewart31:36

Yes, it is, because I want to do this work so much, and my appetite for it is bigger now than it's ever been in my career.

Presenter31:45

Last record

Patrick Stewart31:46

Well, I'm a little embarrassed about this, Sue, because I'm on it. Brent Spiner, who so brilliantly played Day to the Android in Star Trek The Next Generation, is known, certainly to the fans, as having a beautiful singing voice. And he made a solo album called Old Yellow Eyes Is Back. And I suggested to him he should have an Inkspots number on it, partly because I want it to be on the album too. So he sings It's a Sin to Tell a Lie and the backup vocals on this track are provided by Jonathan Frakes, Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, and myself. That is the other male cast members of the crew of the Starship Enterprise.

Patrick Stewart32:24

Be sure it's true when you say

Patrick Stewart32:29

I love you.

Patrick Stewart32:33

It's a sin.

Patrick Stewart32:35

To tell

Patrick Stewart32:38

Oh lah.

Speaker 232:41

Ah

Patrick Stewart32:41

Uh

Speaker 232:41

Yeah.

Speaker 232:43

Million rules of hearts.

Speaker 232:46

Has been broken.

Presenter32:51

That was Brent Spiner, Data the Android, singing It's a Soon to Tell a Lie, accompanied by cast members from Star Trek the Next Generation, including my Castway, Patrick Stewart. Patrick, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take?

Patrick Stewart33:03

It would be the Britain pastoral.

Presenter33:05

To remind me of the English countryside.

Patrick Stewart33:07

Yes, it resonates so deeply for me that to listen to that on my island it would just take me to so many places, both actual and imagined and emotional.

Presenter33:19

And your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare.

Patrick Stewart33:21

Well, people expect me to be a fan of science fiction, and I'm really not, and I don't know much about it, and I'm always embarrassed. So could I have a huge compendium of the world's best science fiction?

Presenter33:36

And a luxury.

Patrick Stewart33:38

I have a billiard table. It's a 1920s antique table. And when I was in California, I played on it, usually alone, every day. And it was an activity that I came to love and became a sort of meditation for me. I'm not very good at it, however. So I thought if I had it there all day long, I could practice and practice and practice. And of course, I'd need to have a shed or some building to keep it safe from the elements.

Presenter34:03

Okay. Patrick Stewart, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Patrick Stewart34:07

Thank you, sir.

Speaker 234:16

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Speaker 235:03

Uh

Speaker 235:03

Uh