Sir Patrick Hewes Stewart, OBE (born 13 July 1940) is an English film, television and stage actor, and university Chancellor.
Stewart was born on July 13, 1940 in Mirfield near Dewsbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of Gladys (née Barrowclough), a weaver and textile worker, and Alfred Stewart, a Regimental Sergeant Major in the British Army who served with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI) and previously worked as a general labourer and as a postman.
Stewart said this of his father: "My father was a very potent individual, a very powerful man who got what he wanted. It was many, many years before I realized 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."
Throughout childhood, he endured poverty and disadvantage, 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. He attended Crowlees C of E Junior and Infants School. He attributes his acting career to an English teacher named Cecil Dormand who then "put a copy of Shakespeare in my hand [and] said, 'Now get up on your feet and perform'". In 1951, aged 11, he entered Mirfield Secondary Modern School, where he continued to study drama.
At age 15, Stewart dropped out of school and increased his participation in local theatre. He acquired a job as a newspaper reporter and obituary writer, 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.