Star Trek: 10 Biggest Takeaways From Patrick Stewart's Memoir (and One That Wasn't)
3. Jobbing Actor
Nowadays Patrick Stewart is a household name famous for engaging his audience on screen, sitting in the bath dressed as a lobster, or perfecting the quadruple take while a little bit high.
Yet it wasn't always so. Up until his mid-40s, the actor was theatre-based for 95% of the time and had no real desire to stretch his legs outside of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Starting out as assistant stage manager in Lincoln's Theatre Royal, Stewart would end up working around the country in various backstage roles, understudies, and both minor and major roles on the boards.
The Royal Shakespeare Company would give him an extended contract and job security for many years. This allowed the Stewart family a more stable homelife and the chance to set up roots, though touches with cinema in the mid-1970s would tip the actor in new directions.
A good portion of the memoir focuses on those years before televisual stardom changed his life forever. Indeed, that grounding in stage acting provided a lot of the skills for his later screen roles. One notable quirk is that Stewart's voice was attuned to project in theatres, and had to be trained down for TV and movie cameras.