Why patrick stewart is awesome

Patrick Stewart. Read Reviews for the Tick, Tick Find your next job with self-tape audition opportunities for shows across the country. Follow Playbill Now. Want Discount Tickets? While William Shatner was gearing up to helm the Enterprise for the very first time, Stewart was appearing in small roles on television, like dramatizations of Shakespeare and other plays.

Star Trek wasn't even his very first Hollywood role. How very British! In fact, Picard wasn't his first science fiction role, either, as he took the role of Gurney Halleck in David Lynch's adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. So even though Stewart wouldn't become well-known to US audiences until his tenure aboard the Enterprise , he was steadily racking up acting credits and proving himself a worthy and dependable actor with a decent body of work.

He provided for himself and his family this way for a couple decades before being catapulted into fame in his midlife. At 47 years old, Patrick Stewart had a great deal of acting credits to his name, even though no one could call him a celebrity at that time. He was approached to audition for Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late '80s, unaware of what the series meant culturally to American audiences. He was hesitant to sign the six-year contract , knowing it would tie him down to Hollywood and separate him from his stage acting career.

But when he was assured that the show probably wouldn't last that long, he reluctantly signed away. And thus, Captain Jean-Luc Picard as we all know and love him was born.

It's nigh impossible to imagine anyone else in the role of the equally commanding and fair-minded captain, and it's shocking to think that it might not have been if Stewart had placed his stage career over the need to make a little more money.

He brought a great deal of sophistication to what many might've considered a silly pulp show, and even today, he never misses a chance to defend his decision and the importance of Star Trek in the lives of many fans.

After all, Shakespeare was entertainment for the common man, too, once upon a time. One of Patrick Stewart's most recognizable and beloved features, aside from his smooth pate, is his deep, luxurious voice — a voice toned for the stage and utilized in many voice acting endeavors.

Anime fans will recognize him as the voice of Lord Yupa in Studio Ghibli's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind , which he followed up a few years later with the role of the swashbuckling book Adventure in The Pagemaster. Then, of course, there are his recurring appearances on adult animated shows like Robot Chicken and Family Guy , proving that for all his sophisticated theater training, Stewart has a healthy sense of humor and a willingness to be crass when it's called for.

Every October, otherwise known as Domestic Violence Awareness Month, social media is inundated with that one picture of Patrick Stewart holding a bag of groceries and an Amnesty International sign that pleads "Stop Violence Against Women. Reading his personal account of his father's abuse against his mother is heartbreaking, but he seems to recognize the importance of talking about domestic violence, ending the silence so that many women and children can find safety.

To this end, he supports the charity Refuge, which works to aid abused women and children. But in the wake of advocating for women like his mother, Stewart learned that his father returned from World War II with severe post-traumatic stress disorder , which surely led to much of the tension in their household.

As such, he also campaigns for Combat Stress, a charity that advocates for and aids military veterans coping with mental health issues as a result of combat. In this way, he honors the memory of both of his parents, and he serves as a powerful voice for those whom society frequently forgets. Behind the knighted actor and stalwart activist, Patrick Stewart is a guy with some very down-to-earth hobbies. There was a big scene at the end, a parade in the streets, with the whole cast on stage in medieval rags.

I was milling about and ran into Patrick, who was dressed as a woman, which he had just done as a lark. I thought, oh, gosh, grand actors can be a lark too.

Years later, we did Antony and Cleopatra together. He wanted desperately to get back to Shakespeare and the stage, having been a mega film star. We somehow hit a great chemistry — the chemistry of two people who want to play together and the pleasure of working through that language and having that banter and the extremes of emotion that you trigger in one another, and night after night doing it differently.

He is a joy to work with. I always felt he was having the time of his life. The joy he felt about speaking the text just came oozing out of him. He was like a little kid — he was in the best place he could be at that time. We met on a drama course in the Calder Valley. I was always wild and naughty; Patrick was very well-behaved. Amateur theatre was everywhere in Yorkshire at that time but we both dreamed of seeing professional theatre.

I remember we met up once, after not seeing each other for a long time, and we went to see a play at the Old Vic together. We both wept. Twenty years ago I went to Hollywood for a premiere. They asked me if I had any Hollywood friends and I mentioned Patrick.

It was considered impossible for us to become classical actors and we said bollocks to that. Patrick and I will bring the house down. In acting school, I became addicted to Star Trek. When you put somebody with that kind of capacity in an arena like a sci-fi drama they become the cornerstone.

By the time I had the chance to work with him, it seemed impossible to me that he was a real human being. They pursued day after day such incredibly challenging pieces of material without any give.

He and Ian were both thriving in what anyone else would consider the end of their career; instead it felt like it was the middle. They continue to have the appetite to pursue the kind of material that makes them relevant. One day in tech, I was having a particularly miserable time: I had just lost a loved one and was grappling with other painful things. I was doing the best that I could, and my best was just terrible.

When you hurt, I hurt. I have found his kind of love and big-heartedness uncommon in the industry. I do see a little of myself in Patrick and vice versa. We both like to turn a phrase.