![]() I have encountered people all around the world. To this day, does it still surprise you – the worldwide recognition for this series and for this role? Picard was his creation and I never forgot that. But I don’t play golf and am not interested in country clubs and that was very much Gene’s life. He is thought to have saved the lives and basically got everybody out. You know he was a Pan Am pilot, and his plane went down in the desert. And I didn’t know until long after we shot the pilot episode that Corey Allen was one of the stars of Rebel Without A Cause…he was a great teacher and a great director.īut you ended up having a great relationship with Gene? Think it would make more sense" and it made all the difference in the world. So we worked on the scenes I was going to read and when we got in with the studio executives he said to them "I am going to read with Patrick because I Because he wanted it, and it was unprecedented and breaking all the rules. Corey Allen directed the pilot of Star Trek The Next Generation "Encounter at Farpoint" and Corey Allen and on the day of my final reading for Paramount I had a call from the night before and he said "I want you to come in an hour earlier and I want nobody to know you are here and I will meet you in this place and you and I will rehearse together". This past year actor/director Corey Allen died. I have my own idea as he appeared in Star Trek, but I got it. My agent said it was between you and another guy. He met me and I know Rick Berman was a champion for me as was the casting department as was Robert Justman, but Gene, quite sensibly, didn’t want a bald-headed English Shakespearean actor in his new series. He had not been well so his presence got thinner and thinner on stage. Tragically Gene died during our third or fourth year. You overlap the life of Gene Roddenberry and you knew him. ![]() Right down to knowing what to do with your hands, because there are no pockets in space suits. Which is I mention because it was running alongside it. I hear it and say "that’s Star Trek." It is not totally naturalistic. Ranging from being able to sustain heightened language from long speeches, which as the captain I often had. There were so many aspects of acting in classical drama that were of use to me in Star Trek. I got very angry with one journalist and said "look, the fact is that all those sitting on thrones as kings in the Royal Shakespeare Company was nothing but preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise!" And it was absolutely true. That it ought to be below my dignity to do that work. When we were doing the first press for Star Trek, I began to realize that behind a lot of the questions I was getting from the media was a sense that I was in some way, because of my past history with the Royal Shakespeare, slumming to be doing a syndicated science-fiction television show. I could hold my head up in a different sort of way.ĭid your theater work inform work in Star Trek?Įverything informed it. But the confidence that came from Star Trek was another thing. I read somewhere "if you want to know the artist, look at the work." It was another director that persuaded me that there was nothing to be afraid of, and it was in a play called "A Winter’s Tale" about one of the nastiest characters, and this director said "if you will find this man in yourself, and you are prepared to let him out, I will hold hand." And from that moment on everything changed for me. Because if you are an artist it is about what is inside you coming out on the canvas, onto the blank sheet of paper, onto the empty music stage. I was afraid of exposing Patrick Stewart, so I became really good at becoming other people, either physically or by assuming somebody else’s emotional feelings so I wouldn’t have to release any of my own. It wasn’t stage fright, I have never ever had stage fright. I had been very fearful in my earlier years as an actor. It changed everything – my status in the profession, my standard of living, how I felt about myself as a performer. It would be easier to say, were there any areas of my life that were not changed by it. Here is a transcript of the interesting conversation. There was also about ten minutes covering Star Trek. Sir Patrick Stewart talked to WQXR’s Elliot Forrest for over an hour, starting with a focus on his new Broadway play "A Life in the Theater" and also branching into his own earlier years as an actor, being recently knighted and more. Patrick Stewart on Star Trek and Roddenberry Stewart talked about how Star Trek changed his life, his relationship with Gene Roddenberry, and more. Sir Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean Luc Picard, did a radio Q&A event in New York this week promoting his Broadway play but also talking about his career on the stage and also in Star Trek.
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