The great Patrick Stewart once told me about his origin story and how he failed miserably as a journalist, which turned out to be a great gift for the rest of us.
“I was a cub reporter,” he said. “I had a very modest education. We left school at 15 in
those days, and my local newspaper took me on. I threw myself into it, aware that I was very lucky to have a job. But I’d become massively involved with amateur theatricals. I loved it. But, there was a problem, which was that all my amateur acting interfered with my work. I got into trouble. I was dishonest. I made things up. I invented stuff.”
“Yes, yes, yes…” he continued, somewhat sheepishly, even decades later. “Because to me, being at the rehearsal was more important than attending a council meeting. Finally, I was found out, when the huge mill in my town caught fire one evening and someone called the newspaper and the editor said, ‘No, don’t worry, Patrick’s right next door.’ Well, I wasn’t there. I was in the rehearsal. I was found out and got hauled before the editor who gave me an ultimatum: ‘Give up all this amateur acting, this ridiculous playing games, and concentrate on doing your job for which we’re paying properly.’ I didn’t like being talked to like that, so I went upstairs, packed up my typewriter, and I left. I went home and said, ‘I’m going to be an actor.’ And my parents said, ‘How are you going to do that?’ And I said, ‘I’ve no idea. I’m going to find out.’ And I did.”
What a wonderful, humble, and gutsy beginning for the man who gave so much to the world. His Captain Picard on Star Trek was erudite, smart, a man of control and precision. (There would be no punching out giant bipedal alien lizards or having affairs with green-hued space courtesans à la James T. Kirk.) His Charles Xavier gave the X-Men franchise a moral center that it deeply needed. But I was fortunate enough to see him on Broadway in the 1990s as Ebeneezer Scrooge in his one-man performance of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It was an unforgettable experience.
To call Stewart’s work in that show a tour de force would be an understatement. He did every voice, every character. He commanded the story. And to watch his Scrooge transform — mean, miserly and bitter at the start of the play (“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”) to a man praying for a second chance (“Spirit! hear me! I am not the man I was!”) — was to witness a human being break.
Scrooge comes face to face with the hollowness of his existence after being visited by the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and those yet to come. Stewart gave the character so much humanity, life, and fear, the terror of a life wasted in pursuit of wealth to the abandonment of all else. At no point did you doubt the spirits were real for Stewart; they existed and swirled through the man during each performance.
Stewart was up there alone, with just a few pieces of furniture as props, some lights and smoke for effects. Yet, being in the audience for that show was to be transported to a haunted Victorian London, mostly by the electricity and power of his voice. He made it so.
Stewart once said that, at first, Scrooge was the hardest of the production’s more than 40 characters to bring to life onstage. But then Stewart had a realization: “A good friend of mine…pointed out that Scrooge was me, that Scrooge exists in all of us, in other words.”
That’s what has made his performance of that familiar story stay with me so many decades later. We all do have a Scrooge lurking within us — distracted, selfish, too busy humbuging our way through the annoyances of daily life.
That was not unfamiliar territory for Stewart. His father was a World War II vet who came home with PTSD. He drank and was abusive to young Patrick and his mother. Acting, Stewart told me, helped him “get out of the house” and find ways of processing the trauma of growing up poor in post-war England. His early life was much more akin to the beleaguered clerk Bob Cratchit than that of Scrooge, but he knew and deeply understood both characters and brought them fully to life. With his virtuoso performance, he created something magical on that stage.
Stewart recreated the one-man play six years ago for charity on Broadway. I had the great privilege of talking to him when he was taking a break from rehearsing his lines, while sitting by the fire in his country house in England — which is exactly what you imagine and want Sir Patrick Stewart to be doing. He spoke to me about how the play had changed for him since he’d last performed it some 17 years earlier.
“I’m not the person I was 20 years ago, and I am seeing this story very differently today,” Stewart told me. “I am seeing it much more as a political document than as a lovely Christmas story. It’s full of bitter, savage attacks on the inequalities of life. When Jacob Marley comes to visit Scrooge that first night, he tells him how he ruined his life by being only obsessed with money-lending and so forth. And Scrooge says to him, ‘But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.’ And Marley says, ‘Business? Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business.’ And I never made quite enough of that before, because that’s what the story is about. It’s not just about being rich or poor, but it’s about if you have resources, what do you do with them? Do you make them available to people who have less? Do you do all that you can to care for them? And that’s not a spirit that’s abroad much in our world today, is it?”
That spirit certainly lived in Stewart, much of whose energy went to philanthropic efforts, including support for domestic violence victims, LGBTQ causes, and veterans with PTSD. It will live on in the extraordinary work he leaves behind, performances that made the world a little brighter and better for the rest of us.
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