Tributes have poured in for Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86. The distinguished actor had a long and varied career that began on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company before going on to global stardom on the screen in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises. Stewart was born in Yorkshire in 1940, and had spoken of a challenging childhood marred by alcoholism and domestic violence – something he campaigned against for much of his life. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw
Kentridge’s cine-musical creation, made to accompany Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, is a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour, exploring humanity, grief and idealism
The Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan is showcasing an amazing cine-musical creation, perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen. Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by the 71-year-old South African artist and film-maker William Kentridge. It is shown with the live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, and this event is partly in honour of the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth this year, and partly to honour Shostakovich’s reportedly unrequited love (and lifelong friendship) for his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.
The 10th symphony was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after his death, so it seems probable that Shostakovich had been at work on it for some time before this, long enough beforehand for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin’s death. Could part of it perhaps have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? Yet the music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin’s genocidal tyranny, a darkly ambiguous respect for the great dictator whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation; perhaps there is also a feeling in the music’s swirl that a great and terrible era has passed away, and with it a kind of grief at all that had been sacrificed to it.
From Jean-Luc Picard to Charles Xavier, the actor’s Shakespearean training – and that sonorous voice – made him a unique charismatic force in Hollywood
No actor showed the commercial potential of blue-chip British classical training like Patrick Stewart. With style, technique and the most minutely self-aware, almost vaudevillian sense of mimicry, Shakespearean thesps can turn their hand to American movies and high-end American television and show the American method actors how it’s done – sometimes, even, at the beginning of their screen careers, at a competitively low wage.
Stewart was one of the thoroughbreds of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1970s stage generation who had also had classy small screen roles, such as his intimidating Sejanus in I, Claudius opposite Derek Jacobi. But he effected a warp-speed leap to pop culture stardom by getting the role of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Federation starship USS Enterprise, in TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, the hugely successful reboot of Star Trek that ran from 1987 to 1994, spawning four separate feature films and then another series, Star Trek: Picard.
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