Alamy

Stewart describes his mother as a "warm, tender, sensitive person — timid, fearful of everything." He says her fearfulness rubbed off on him, making him "very cautious about things and unconfident." But he wasn't cautious about one thing: his desire to protect his mother from physical and emotional abuse by his father.

When Alfred Stewart concluded his military career as a regimental sergeant major of the Parachute Regiment, he returned home an angry, violent man. "He was a weekend alcoholic who beat up my mother and terrorized the house," Stewart says. "For years I thought of him as the enemy." Though Stewart says his father never hit him, he wrote in a first-person piece for the Guardian in 2009 that, by age 7, he knew "exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and [my mother's] face, a skill no child should ever have to learn."

Despite the abuse, Gladys never left her husband. "She loved him," Stewart says. "My brothers and I would say, 'You must leave him.' But she never would."

Stewart found his refuge in theater. He was cast in a school play at age 12, and he took to acting instantly. "I found the stage a very safe place to be," he explains today. "Everything is predictable when you're in a play. Because of the chaos in my life, I loved the certainty — and the opportunity to become somebody else and not myself."



Soon the boy was taking three buses on Sundays to be tutored by a professional actress who introduced him to Shakespeare and helped define Stewart's future. "I discovered I had an instinct for it," Stewart says. "From then on, all I wanted to be was a Shakespearean actor." Stewart left school at 15 and, after quitting a job at a local newspaper, began steadily working his way up in various repertory companies. In 1966 the Royal Shakespeare Company invited him to become a member. "My dream came true," he says.