In Making It So, the actor Patrick Stewart chronicles his working-class childhood in a two-up, two-down in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, where his “weekend alcoholic” father, still traumatised after fighting in the second world war, would return from the pub and terrorise his wife as his children watched. Stewart found refuge in books at the local library – at home he would don gloves and a hat and read in the family’s outdoor toilet – and, with the encouragement of a schoolteacher, developed a love of Shakespeare. This, in turn, led him to the stage and a place at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, after which he worked in rep and at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Stewart, whose booming baritone has lately taken on a warmer and more gravelly timbre, is the book’s narrator. The actor reveals how it took years of therapy for him to process “the impact of the violence, fear, shame and guilt I experienced as a child”, and how he would later draw on memories of his father when playing tyrants. He goes on to detail his casting as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as the mutant Professor X in the X-Men films, roles that would propel him to superstardom. While Stewart expresses regret for his two failed marriages, in his third to the singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell he appears to be having the time of his life. Throughout Making It So, he never loses his sense of wonder at where his career has taken him and where he has ended up.
• Making It So is available via Simon & Schuster, 18hr 50min
Further listening
Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome, Garth Marenghi, Coronet, 8hr 14min
The first book in the TerrorTome series finds the horror writer Nick Steen sucked into alternative reality by his typewriter, where the visions of his imagination come to terrifying life. Read by the author.
Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward, Bloomsbury, 8hr 11min
Ward reads her novel about the daughter of an enslaved woman who is separated from her mother and forced to walk from North Carolina to New Orleans, witnessing horror and humanity along the way.
