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Sir Patrick Stewart, who famously played Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard, has written a new memoir, Making It So.
The Shakespearean actor, knighted in 2010, spent most of the pandemic writing his memoir, paraphrasing his famous line, “Make it so,” from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“My long-term memory is very strong. It only needed me to turn the key on day one for the door to be open and memory after memory after memory and sensation and sensation and feelings all came scuttling back,” said Stewart, 83, in an interview with the Associated Press.
The memoir tells the story of a boy who grew up poor in northern England, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and then starred as the iconic Picard aboard the USS Enterprise and as the equally iconic Professor X in the X-Men movies.
The actor says the greatest challenge in writing his memoir was answering the question, “How much should I say? What should I not say?” He adds, “I wanted to be honest, but I wanted to be so respectful and careful as well.”
It's probably when he writes about his father, a former British Army regimental sergeant major and his outbursts of violence against his mother, that he wants to be careful.
“It’s almost guaranteed that someone is going to come out and say, ‘How dare you? That’s outrageous,’” he said.
Witnessing this violence at an early age makes Sir Patrick Stewart wonder if it was somehow responsible for his career in show business. He writes, “The stage would prove to be a safe space, a refuge from real life in which I could inhabit another person, living in another place and time,” comparing standing in the limelight as a means of escape.
He also writes about how he dealt with premature balding, a topic he has gleefully discussed previously on television appearances such as on The Graham Norton Show. He speaks about it with grace and humor, detailing that despite losing his hair at 19, Stewart would go to auditions with a hairpiece. He then removes it afterwards, quipping, “Two actors for the price of one.”
In the book, he also discusses what he calls his greatest regret: his two failed marriages. “I needed to do better by the women with whom I was romantically involved,” he writes. On the topic of his children, he describes it as “a work in progress.”
Still, he maintains that “some of the happiest days of my life” was writing his memoir. His wife, Sunny Ozell, noted that he “would come down smiling and kind of glowing.”
Making It So is out now.
