@murphy_popcornHearing Sir Ian McKellen talk about Sir Patrick Stewart like this hits different. The thing that shaped Patrick first, in Ian's telling, was Yorkshire, that proud county in the north of England he loved right up to the end. It lived in his accent and in the blunt, stern way he'd tell you exactly what he thought and felt, no half-truths, no dodging the big stuff. Heart on his sleeve, which is why Ian calls him a man to lean on, to look up to, and, in his own words, to love. Their story started half a century back when both were hungry young actors in the Royal Shakespeare Company, though they never shared a production in those early days. Ian's sharpest early memory is bumping into him on a central London street, right when Patrick was weighing a lead role on Star Trek, and Ian's advice was pure caution: think about your UK stage career, do you really want to risk disappearing into Hollywood for years? He took the leap anyway, and thank goodness, because it gave us devoted Trekkies plus X-Men and a run of classical stage work, Shakespeare and Ibsen and Arthur Miller and Peter Shaffer and Pinter and Beckett, at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London's West End and on Broadway. America became his adopted home and where he met his adored Sunny, who stood by him through sickness and health. Still, Yorkshire never let go, and the Chancellor role at Huddersfield University in Yorkshire stands as a point of pride for a performer held in that kind of esteem on both sides of the Atlantic, someone who used his fame to lift up cinema and theatre alike. ๐ญ๐๐
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