Stewart made Picard soar
By Commodore Dave Mason
Sir Patrick Stewart stepped on the stage at the Rio casino to thunderous applause that grew even louder after he made an announcement.
“Picard is back,” Stewart told a couple thousand or so fans, who included other USS Angeles members, including Lisa Sobien and me. It was August 2019, and he was announcing the upcoming “Star Trek: Picard” series at Creation Entertainment’s annual “Star Trek” convention in Las Vegas. For fans, “Picard is back” sounded a lot like “I love you.”
Fans certainly loved Stewart, and we will miss him. The Emmy- and Tony-nominated actor died Oct. 28 in Los Angeles after a battle with Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia. He was 86.
There was no doubt Stewart enjoyed being on stage, whether it was at a convention before thousands or in a play in an intimate theater. He talked about his love for the stage when a few other reporters and I interviewed him back in the late 1990s in an almost theatrically dark suite at a Beverly Hills hotel. We were seated at a round table as Stewart promoted his national tour of his one-man play, “A Christmas Carol.”
“Television and movies allow me to have the lifestyle I want,” Stewart said when I asked the former Royal Shakespeare Company actor about his stage and screen work. “But my first love is the stage.”
The future knight, who was born July 13, 1940 in Yorkshire, England, proved to be chivalrous this morning in Beverly Hills as he made sure the suite was warm enough for the half-dozen reporters around a round table with him. He couldn’t have been more gracious as he saw to our comfort before talking about his career.
A couple or so weeks later, USS Angeles Founder Janice Willcocks and I saw Stewart play all 16 characters of “A Christmas Carol” on a bare stage at the Doolittle Theatre, now called the Ricardo Montalban Theatre, in Hollywood, with a chair and a few props. He managed to play the male and female characters in a compelling manner, and it’s an experience I’ll never forget.
Some years later, I saw Stewart read Shakespearean sonnets on stage at the intimate Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. Shakespeare’s words gained extra emotion with Stewart’s magical voice and inflections. Well, Stewart could read a telephone book and make it sound dramatic.
It was Stewart’s performance back in the late 1980s on a stage at University of California, Los Angeles that convinced Robert Justman, an associate producer on the original “Star Trek” series, that he would be perfect to play Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on this new show called “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Executive Producer Gene Roddenberry wasn’t as certain about giving the role to Stewart, but eventually was convinced.
Stewart went on to play Picard with an orchestral finesse, varying his dynamics from a quiet strength to dramatic accents.
Picard was more than a captain. He was the moral center of the USS Enterprise, 1701-D, and Stewart knew how to build his momentum with a gradual crescendo. We saw it build up in episodes such as “Measure of a Man” when Picard defended Data’s right to freedom as an artificial but sentient life form.
“Your honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life,” Picard said to the JAG judge, Capt. Phillipa Louvois (Amanda McBroom).
“There it sits!” Picard said.
Stewart’s portrayal of Picard was at a level of acting that you don’t see everyday on TV or in the movies. Certainly the best of “The Next Generation” films was “First Contact,” in which Picard showed the pain he still felt from the horrible things he was forced to do as the Borg drone Locutus. Again, Stewart knew how to vary his louds and softs like a musician.
His return to TV in “Star Trek: Picard,” which evolved to its third, final and best season into a new chapter for the “Next Generation” cast, captivated fans. In his autobiography, “Making It So,” Stewart expressed his desire to follow up with a “Picard” theatrical movie.
Stewart became known for other movie characters besides Picard, and he was ideal as Professor X in the “X-Men” movies. Stewart gave his characters a sense of strength, and he made them authentic. He also proved to be a good director of “Next Generation” episodes and made behind-the-camera contribution in positions such as associate producer on the 1998 movie “Star Trek: Insurrection.” And he served as executive producer of “Star Trek: Picard.”
Stewart is survived by his third wife, singer Sunny Ozell, who he married in 2013, and two ex-wives, “Star Trek” producer Wendy Neuss (“The Next Generation” and “Voyager”) and Sheila Falconer. He is also survived by his two children with Falconer – Sophie Stewart and Daniel Stewart, who guest-starred with his father in the “Next Generations” episode “Inner Light.”
That episode was a dramatic example of how Stewart could convincingly depict an entire lifetime in 45 minutes. Shakespeare would have been impressed.
Patrick Stewart attends an all-star soccer game in 2004. (Photo by Cdt. Patrick Caughey / Courtesy U.S. Army / Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons)