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.
