Stewart’s brutal upbringing

As a child, Patrick Stewart always knew when his father was about to erupt into violence, said Emily Dugan in The Independent (U.K.). On Friday nights, he would lie awake with his older brother, anxiously waiting for their laborer father to return home from the pub. If their dad was singing Irish folk songs, their mother was safe. “If he was singing army songs, that was bad news,” says the Star Trek actor. “He would find fault with something and the conflict would escalate.” Police and doctors were often summoned to the family’s home in northern England, but would do nothing to stop the violence. “My mother would be lying on the floor bleeding, [and] the things [that were] said were unbelievable. A policeman once said, ‘It takes two to make an argument.’ Which is a way of saying he must have been justified to be violent.” Stewart was left to try and defuse his father’s rage. “I would go down the stairs to be as close as possible to the door if something bad happened. I knew exactly the moment when I would throw the door open and rush in and say ‘Stop!’ or literally put my body in between them,” says Stewart, 72. “It’s sad when a child becomes an expert on those issues.”

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