Sir Patrick Stewart has occupied a long line of dressing rooms, most recently at the Schoenfeld Theatre, where he sat the other day, his large voice filling the room’s small quarters. In David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre,” Stewart plays Robert, a preening regional-theatre actor whose unsolicited backstage wisdom (“An ugly sound, to me, is more offensive than an ugly odor”) begins to irk his young co-star, played by T. R. Knight. The role has got Stewart, who is seventy, thinking about the dressing rooms of his past—specifically, one that he shared with three older thespians at the Sheffeld Playhouse Repertory Theatre, where he spent eighteen months when he was nineteen years old, and already bald.

Patrick Stewart Illustration by TOM BACHTELL

“They would talk to me a little, as Robert does here, though none of them quite as pompous as he is,” Stewart recalled, after a matinée. “One of the most important lessons I remember learning from George Waring was: Never try to tell the whole story of the character in the first scene. When I was here two and a half years ago playing Macbeth”—he is not superstitious—“I deliberately began the performance very low-key, and very much in the shadow of Lady Macbeth. But I could do that knowing that her influence over Macbeth would diminish as his power increased.” Waring was a “short, pleasant-faced man in his thirties, I suppose, and he memorably played Willy Loman with ten days’ rehearsal.” For the part, he wore a three-piece suit, which later became a recycled costume piece that the company dubbed the Acting Suit. “George used to talk about timing,” Stewart said. “From him I learned that, when an audience has laughed, you don’t wait for the laughter to stop before you say your next line. You have to learn, like being on a wave, to surf the laughter.”

Philip Stone “was as bald as I am,” Stewart went on. “I shared a dressing room on and off with him for a year, and I never saw his bald head. He somehow always contrived to have it covered up. The little blue woollen beanie I wear in this play is a direct acknowledgment of Philip. I am told that toward the end of his career he began appearing without something on his head, and I was very happy when I heard that.” In “Twelfth Night,” Stone played Malvolio to Stewart’s Antonio. “He would come offstage and say to me”—Stewart jabbed his palm—“ ‘I had ’em right there, kid. I had ’em fucking right there.’ And I sort of knew what he was saying, but I sort of didn’t. Well, eventually the time came, and I remember saying to myself, ‘Yes, that’s what Philip was talking about.’ ”

He continued, “From Victor Lucas, who was a notorious womanizer, I learned to be immensely proud of being an actor, that it was an honorable profession. But he also let me know that it was an excellent way of getting laid. And from Victor I learned not to take things too seriously. I wish I could have taken a cue from him much earlier in my career than I did, because it took me years to start having fun.” Lucas was “a striking figure—tall and stocky. He had this amazing red hair, and a red complexion to go with it.” He would often flip through trade magazines pointing at actresses’ head shots, Stewart said, “saying, ‘Had her. Had her. She’s a goer!’ If you believed him, Victor had actually had most of the actresses in the British theatre. Maybe he had, I don’t know. But at nineteen, with one girlfriend behind me, I was very impressed.”

In the Playbill for “A Life in the Theatre,” Stewart thanks George Waring, Philip Stone, and Victor Lucas, who are all dead. “Their careers were spent in regional theatre,” he said. “They rarely did movies. They rarely worked in the West End. They never came to New York, to Broadway.” (Waring and Lucas had bit parts on British television. Stone was in a few Kubrick films; you may remember him as the creepy waiter in “The Shining.”) Meanwhile, Stewart’s career evolved: Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, the Royal Shakespeare Company, deep space.

Stewart had to go—he was having tea with Sir Ian McKellen, with whom he shared a dressing room last year, during a West End production of “Waiting for Godot.” “He would walk around the room naked, which at times I found intimidating,” Stewart recalled. “It was Ian’s suggestion that we share a dressing room, and he was right. His point was: we can’t begin to act this play if we meet for the first time onstage. We have got to start the play in the dressing room.” ♦