The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

When you think that David Niven, James Mason, Ronnie Barker, Arthur Lowe and Powell and Pressburger among many others failed to receive state honours, you’ll concede that a knighthood was wasted on Patrick Stewart, even if for 12 years he was chancellor of Huddersfield University. I mean no disparagement by this. I’m happy for him. But why not Sir Timothy Spall or Sir Timothy West?

Stewart, whose grandmother was Stan Laurel’s babysitter, is a middle-ranking mime with a gurgling bass-baritone. He is chiefly famous for the X-Men franchise and for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus the numerous feature film spin-offs in which he commanded an interplanetary spacecraft. There have also been Beckett plays with Ian McKellen, a one-man version of A Christmas Carol, and for 14 years he was a ‘reliable supporting player’ in the Royal Shakespeare Company. He appeared in the classic Peter Brook A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Tom Snout, the tinker who plays the wall. Stewart clapped together a pair of house bricks.

Deeply attached to Yorkshire’s West Riding, he has ‘recently moved to a house in a lovely section of Los Angeles… with a swimming pool, citrus trees and a wood-panelled study with a fireplace’. In these surroundings he has written what is a zestful, detailed and nostalgic account of his career. His early days sound as gloomy and deprived as anything in J.B. Priestley: the textile mills, lamplighters, coal chutes, outside privy, blacking t’grate, pie-and-pea shops and seeing corpses on display in front parlours.

He was born in 1940, and his childhood was full of people frowning and sighing and being unhappy on purpose. His father was permanently angry and violent, ‘a fierce, formidable man’, a sergeant major in the Paras who never adjusted to a world not at war.