Captain Picard! My very first bald crush.....! You and Ben Kingsley have one more thing in common (apart from that whole "serious actor without hair" bit)! Now we have to call you "Sir!"
It's official: Patrick Stewart was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace today.
I couldn't be more proud. Actually, yep, I feel rather like a proud mother (er, you know, in that context where "mother" equals "grew up watching him on The Next Generation every night in syndication on Canadian television stations with better commercials"). Particularly because he -- naturally -- sites this as his crowning professional accomplishment. Yay Cap'n. I love to watch peoples' dreams come true. Unless it's Diablo Cody. In which case I just sneer and heckle and do a terrible job of hiding a strangely angry jealousy that manifests itself in smug self-satisfaction when a movie she wrote flops.
Engage.
Heh. Heh. Heh. Remember that? At the end of every episode? The little two-finger "go ahead and put it in drive, Geordie" bit that he'd do. I loved that bit.
But really, I grew up with Jean-Luc as one of the ultimate male role models in my little pre-adolescent television-watching existence. He was perfect. Noble, steadfast, slow to anger - the thinking girl's hero. He read books. He drank tea. He could still weild a phaser with the best of them. He had that fantastic accent. And the bald head (couldn't tell ya what it is about that.....just that I've apparently liked that bald look since I was all of 11 years old. Go figure). He was Jesus in a polyester one-piece jumpsuit, basically.
And I can't even speak for his stage work.....ehhh, I live in the States - big names from the UK stage don't really make it to the American Left Coast all that often, and I can count the number of times I've been to New York on zero fingers, so I'm out of the loop as far as the rest of his illustrious, storied career (which includes a stint in the Royal Shakespeare Company and a Tony nomination for MacBeth).
Here's a quote from the Captain himself:
"This is an honor that embraces those actors, directors and creative teams who have in these recent years helped fill my life with inspiration, companionship and sheer fun...It was an unlooked-for honor but as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theatre and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness...The knights of the theatre represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. And now to find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me."
I took some "cut n' paste" liberties with those quotes (culled from a handful of news sources present at the event), but basically: the man is brilliant. Humble, eloquent, and -- at 69 -- still foxy.
Makes me want to descend down into the dark, uncharted depths of my apartment's storage unit and dig out those VHS tapes (yes.) of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and start from the beginning. What's that? Oh, I can get the entire series online using that subscription service I already pay for? Oh - yeah, I'll do that, then.
In other news:
Whoa, what happened to this guy?
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