Sir Patrick Stewart will recount his life story, including plenty of Star Trek and X-Men anecdotes, in the memoir, Making It So, out Oct. 3. Stewart, who has a dulcet, Shakespearean speaking voice, also narrated the audiobook edition of the memoir himself.
“Revisiting my life from my earliest memories and into the present has been an illuminating journey for me,” Stewart, age 82, said in an Instagram post. “It’s a life lived far beyond my expectations, and I hope you enjoy reading the book this fall.”
Stewart told Entertainment Weekly that he chose to write the book himself and turned down offers from ghostwriters. So Stewart took advantage of Covid lockdowns and started writing. “From the moment that I … raised my hands to start typing the first sentence I was lost, and I didn’t expect to be,” he told the magazine. “It took me a while to realize how immersed I was. This will sound rather pretentious, but it would take some time for me to shift my head from my childhood, my teenage years, my first experiences as an actor, back to today and now and, what did I really want for supper?”
The actor was born in Yorkshire, England and got his start acting for the Bristol Old Vic Company and later the Royal Shakespeare Company. He began taking film and TV roles in the early Eighties, including small roles in Excalibur and Dune, before signing on to play Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered in 1987 and ran through 1994. He subsequently reprised the role in several Star Trek franchise movies and starred in the recent spinoff, Star Trek: Picard, which aired its final episode last week. He also played Professor Charles Xavier in several X-Men films and guested on shows like Frasier and Extras, among other roles.
In 2015, Stewart told Rolling Stone that his Next Generation castmates helped him loosen up after years of taking acting too seriously. “If I’m funny in any way at all, they made me funny,” he said. “‘Oh, my God, if I’m going to keep up with these guys, I’ve got to find a way to be funny as well.’ And so, I did. On Star Trek, we made this pledge to one another. Each one of us would be responsible for one big belly laugh a day. So you could say that’s seven to nine big laughs. That’s not bad for a day of work, is it?”