Patrick Stewart - Early Life

Early Life

Stewart was born on 13 July 1940 in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. He is the son of Gladys (née Barrowclough), a weaver and textile worker, and Alfred Stewart, a Regimental Sergeant Major in the British Army and has two older brothers Geoffrey (b. 1925) and Trevor (b. 1935).

Stewart's father served with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and then the Parachute Regiment during the Second World War, having previously worked as a general labourer and as a postman. As a result of his wartime experience during the Dunkirk evacuation, his father suffered from what was then known as shell shock (Post-traumatic stress disorder). In a 2008 interview, Stewart said: "My father was a very potent individual, a very powerful man who got what he wanted. It was said that when he strode onto the parade ground, birds stopped singing. It was many, many years before I realised how my father inserted himself into my work. I've grown a moustache for Macbeth. My father didn't have one, but when I looked in the mirror just before I went on stage I saw my father's face staring straight back at me."

Stewart grew up in a poor household rife with domestic violence from his father, an experience which influenced his later political and ideological beliefs. In 2006, Stewart made a short video against domestic violence for Amnesty International, in which he recollected his father's physical attacks on his mother and the effect it had on him as a child, and he has given his name to a scholarship at the University of Huddersfield, where he is Chancellor, to fund post-graduate study into domestic violence. His childhood experiences also led him to become the patron of Refuge, a UK charity for abused women. In October 2011 he presented a BBC Lifeline Appeal on behalf of Refuge, talking about his own experience of domestic violence and interviewing a woman whose daughter was murdered by her ex-husband.

I believed that no woman would ever be interested in me again. I prepared myself for the reality that a large part of my life was over.

Stewart attended Crowlees Church of England Junior and Infants School. He attributes his acting career to an English teacher named Cecil Dormand who "put a copy of Shakespeare in my hand said, 'Now get up on your feet and perform'". In 1951, aged 11, he entered Mirfield Secondary Modern School (now Mirfield Free Grammar School), where he continued to study drama. At age 15, Stewart left school and increased his participation in local theatre. He acquired a job as a newspaper reporter and obituary writer at the Mirfield & District Reporter, but after a year, his employer gave him an ultimatum to choose acting or journalism. He quit the job. His brother tells the story that Stewart would attend rehearsals during work time and then invent the stories he reported. Stewart also trained as a boxer.