When you think that David Niven, James Mason, Ronnie Barker, Arthur Lowe and Powell and Pressburger among many others failed to receive state honours, you’ll concede that a knighthood was wasted on Patrick Stewart, even if for 12 years he was chancellor of Huddersfield University. I mean no disparagement by this. I’m happy for him. But why not Sir Timothy Spall or Sir Timothy West?
Stewart, whose grandmother was Stan Laurel’s babysitter, is a middle-ranking mime with a gurgling bass-baritone. He is chiefly famous for the X-Men franchise and for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus the numerous feature film spin-offs in which he commanded an interplanetary spacecraft. There have also been Beckett plays with Ian McKellen, a one-man version of A Christmas Carol, and for 14 years he was a ‘reliable supporting player’ in the Royal Shakespeare Company. He appeared in the classic Peter Brook A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Tom Snout, the tinker who plays the wall.
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