OF course he's going to have the same voice - the voice of justice, of reason, of knowledge - as Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise. But those Shakespearean-trained tones have a surprising effect on the listener. After five minutes with Patrick Stewart, you want to ask his opinion on weighty topics such as Sino-British relations, instead of whether the spandex suits really scratch. After all, he spent nearly eight years dispatching Klingons and making strange life forces live together peacefully at the helm of the wildly successful TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. 'I am very wise. I think that's the reason they cast me, because of the great amount of wisdom I carry about,' jokes the actor. '[But] people usually discover that I'm a much sillier person than Captain Picard is. However, it would seem that the Captain has acquired a reputation almost as a role model. So I try to be on my best behaviour as often as possible.' Stewart is on a serious earth-bound mission at the moment - to boldly publicise the new Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Generations, in which Captain Picard meets up with the original captain of the Starship Enterprise, James T. Kirk (William Shatner) for the first time. Sandwiched between them is the villainous Malcolm McDowell playing the alien physicist Dr Soran. 'I get to play between the wig and the dome,' says McDowell, referring to Shatner's famous hairpiece and Stewart's baldness, which has become something of a sex symbol trademark for the 55-year-old actor. But it wasn't always that way. 'In the space of about a year, between the age of 18 and 20, I lost all my hair and it was just horrible,' he says. 'And I had a feeling then that not only my career but my romantic life was over. And indeed a well-meaning teacher at my drama school did say, 'Patrick, you have to realise you're not going to have much of a career until you're 35 or 40'. That was a pretty chilling prospect. 'But it opened up a wider variety of roles that I might not otherwise have been offered. But I think I've come to terms with it now, you know, and by Jove, of all the cast in the Next Generation series I spent less time in the hair and make-up trailer than any of them.' Stewart, an actor described in the Encyclopedia of Film as an 'urbane, patriarchal presence', spent many years in repertory theatre before becoming a star performer with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Many believe he brings a Shakespearean grace to the role of Captain Picard, but it is not commonly known that the Bard actually brought him the role he is now most famous for. 'It was all an extraordinary accident,' he explains. 'For years I'd had a secret life as a lecturer and teacher of Shakespeare. I did it to amuse myself when I had some free time. It was while I was doing something at UCLA that Robert Justman, who had signed up for my course of public lectures, spotted me. He claims he turned to his wife and said: 'We've found our new captain'. But what I was doing was so far removed from TV and science fiction, he obviously had a vivid imagination. It took them more than six months to finally decide it was me they wanted.' Stewart wasn't so sure himself. 'I was always really quite cynical about this job becoming a reality,' he says. 'It didn't make much sense to me anyway, that they should cast a middle-aged English Shakespearean actor in a role which had become an American icon. And so with my children I was on the receiving end of jokes about pointed ears and all that. It was a terrible shock, or at least considerable shock, when I was finally cast.' Stewart admits to being a bit naive about American television. 'I didn't realise that in agreeing to do the pilot, I was also agreeing to do as many years of the series as the studio wanted to do. But everyone assured me that the series would do at the outside three years. So we know how wrong they were now.' Star Trek: The Next Generation played for seven years; when it was finally taken off the air on May 23 last year, 30 million people watched the last episode. 'It's an extraordinary, extraordinary entertainment phenomenon,' says Stewart, who admits that he wasn't too upset to see it finish. 'I was quite anxious for the series to come to an end. I had been getting very restless and I was keen to move on to other things. And yes, there was some concern that playing Captain Picard might be a brand that would be like a stigma, but that's not proved to be the case.' Star Trek: The Next Generation was taken off the air because the producers were keen to create a new film franchise. And if all goes well, the sequel to the hugely successful movie Star Trek: Generations should start filming in the middle of next year. Stewart hasn't signed up yet. 'I shall from now on be looking at Star Trek scripts in the same way I review any other scripts,' he says, 'but I am very enthusiastic about another Star Trek movie.' Stewart's first film role away from the main deck of the Starship Enterprise was as 'a wonderfully flamboyant gay interior decorator whose lover is HIV positive and is dying of AIDS'. 'Jeffrey' was 'really one of the best roles I've ever had in my career, and hopefully it will be released this August,' he says. 'I had been determinedly looking for projects that would take me as far away from science fiction, Jean Luc Picard, authority figures, military captains, whatever.' Next, he will play Prospero in The Tempest at the New York Festival of Shakespeare (Stewart plans to move there). And he acknowledges that while Captain Jean Luc Picard changed his life, it wasn't a role that required him to stretch as an actor. Stewart no longer has the time to attend too many Star Trek conventions, but staunchly defends the show's fans. 'They're a marvellous group. They get bad press, mainly because there's an over-enthusiastic minority who dress up and so forth, which is perfectly harmless. When you consider our fans range from Dr Stephen Hawking to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Tom Hanks, Frank Sinatra, and goodness knows how many chairmen of universities, we've got some pretty smart people who are fans of the show.' Star Trek: Generations opens this Thursday on the Panasia Circuit