Patrick Stewart says he tried to protect his mother from violent father: ‘I would put my body between them’

Actor says it took him a long time to realise just how much his troubled childhood had affected him as an adult

Sir Patrick Stewart has spoken of how he used to try and stop his father’s violent attacks on his mother when he was a child.

The veteran actor, who has previously told of how his troubled childhood affected him as an adult, was interviewed about his life and career for The Sunday Times.

He said that his life changed when his father, Alfred, came back from the war when Sir Patrick was six years old.

“We barely knew him,” he recalled. “He was a stranger to us. He’d drink at the weekends, get angry and hit my mother. I would put my body between them to protect her.

“Sometimes we’d have to call an ambulance or the police. We asked her to leave him, but she wouldn’t – she adored him.”

Sir Patrick, who has supported a number of anti-domestic violence campaigns over the years, said with time, he had come to understand his father better.

In 2012, while filming an episode of the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are?, Sir Patrick discovered that while his father had been an excellent soldier and a war hero, he suffered from what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

During the interview, he said he realised that his father, who died in 1980, had influenced his choice of roles through his career.

“I had been in denial about the impact my father had on my acting until I played Macbeth,” he said. “[The director] Rupert Goold set it in Stalinist Russia. I grew a moustache. And in the first dress rehearsal I was in battle fatigues and my wonderful dresser handed me my AK47, I put it on my shoulder, turned and looked in the mirror. My father was looking straight back at me. And that’s when the penny dropped.

“This man had been influencing my life for years and years and years. There is a great deal of Alfred Stewart in [Star Trek character] Jean-Luc Picard.”

In a 2009 article for The Guardian, Sir Patrick wrote: “As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down. For those who struggle to comprehend these feelings in a child, imagine living in an environment of emotional unpredictability, danger and humiliation week after week, year after year, from the age of seven.

“My childish instinct was to protect my mother, but the man hurting her was my father, whom I respected, admired and feared.”

Sir Patrick recently celebrated his 80th birthday. He said he had intended to throw a lavish party at the Chateau Marmont in LA, but due to lockdown, he instead invited close friends to a small gathering in his garden.

Since lockdown began, he has been entertaining fans by sharing videos of himself reading a different Shakespeare sonnet each day.