Patrick Stewart was endowed with an abundance of actorly gifts, among them a commanding baritone that rumbled up from some deep inner reservoir, and a merry intelligence that beamed from his eyes.
Note also the alchemical physical presence that centered him in any scene he graced, whether onstage in Shakespearean roles, afloat in the vastness of the “Star Trek” universe or anchored to earth in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”
Yet one attribute above all defined him throughout much of his career — his baldness.
Stewart, who died on Wednesday at 86, started losing his hair in his late teens, a result of hereditary alopecia. On him, the baldness that other men spend billions annually trying to reverse seemed desirable and sexy. Far from registering as a marker of aging, a loss of virility or a reduction of social status, it somehow added to his aura of potency and quiet command.
The lack of hair seemed to augment the gravitas of the character for which he was best known, the coolly intellectual space traveler Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” its movie franchise and the sequel series “Star Trek: Picard.” It also placed him in a lineage that included storied hairless leading men like Telly Savalas and Yul Brynner.
Each of those actors became a sex symbol who ran counter to the pretty boys cranked out by the Hollywood assembly line. So did Stewart, who was voted television’s “most bodacious’’ man by readers of TV Guide in 1992.
By then he had been playing Picard for about five years. Outranking Burt Reynolds and Luke Perry, Stewart garnered 54 percent of the readers’ votes. In deciding to let his chrome dome shine, he distinguished himself from William Shatner, the actor who wore a toupee while playing Capt. James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” series of the 1960s.
In his bodacious baldness, Stewart was a forerunner for a generation of leading men. We now take for granted the sleekly hairless superhero images of actors like Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Chris Meloni or Jason Statham. But it is worth remembering how often in show business thinning hair, or a lack of it altogether, has been linked with career death, and that actors like Humphrey Bogart and John Travolta resorted to wearing hairpieces onscreen and off.
Stewart certainly gave it some thought. In his best-selling memoir, “Making It So,” and in interviews throughout his life, he made no secret of his early efforts to disguise the hair loss. Almost completely bald before turning 20, he resorted to hats and wigs and barbaric early attempts at transplant. For a while, he had a comb-over so unconvincing that close friends held him down and lopped it off.
“As I reconciled myself to my fate — or is it pate? — I realized that I had been given a strategic advantage,” Stewart wrote in his memoir. He recounted showing up for repertory auditions wearing a small hairpiece, only to remove it for the director, saying, “See what you’ve got? You have a young actor in his early 20s. But you’ve got a character as well. Two actors for the price of one.”
While Stewart had already achieved ample success before being cast in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” it was his role in the beloved franchise that vaulted him at warp speed to international renown.
He was 46 by then and well-known in the business. Even so, his image was not yet indelibly linked with his lack of hair. As he told the Vogue journalist William Norwich in 2002, he had passed through the stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining and depression, but had yet to arrive at full acceptance of his hair loss.
For the final audition to play Picard, Stewart went so far as to have his agent courier his personal hairpiece from London to Los Angeles. It is hard now to imagine the assured and cerebral captain wearing a toupee. All credit, then, to the Paramount executive who insisted on having Stewart drop the wig, thus giving the world an enduring icon of baldness.
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