Patrick Stewart

Patrick Stewart was born in Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1940, the son of a weaver and a Regimental Sergeant Major, and spent decades as a stage actor before television made his face and voice global property. The career now spans seven decades. He holds two Olivier Awards and a Grammy, and was knighted in 2010 for services to drama.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, which began in 1987, is the pivot. Casting a bald, middle-aged classical actor as a starship captain looked like a mistake and turned out to be the show's central idea: Jean-Luc Picard gave the series a moral centre, and Stewart's habit of playing procedure and diplomacy as though they were high drama is why the technobabble lands like Shakespeare. He carried the character into four features, including Star Trek: First Contact (1996), then back again in Star Trek: Picard from 2020, thirty-three years after the first episode.

The second franchise found him for the same reason. Professor Charles Xavier, played across the X-Men films and again in Logan (2017), is another calm authority figure, and Logan is the one that let him break the instrument, playing Xavier as frail, foul-mouthed and dangerous.

The running joke of his later career is how thoroughly he has undercut the dignity. He narrates the Ted films, voices a character in The Emoji Movie, plays himself as a lecherous idiot in Extras, and turns up in Green Room (2016) as a soft-spoken punk-club owner running a neo-Nazi operation, which remains the most frightening thing he has done, because he never once raises his voice.