‘Star Trek’ Brass Favors Bard Over Sci-Fi

Starship alert! Starship alert! (Warning: Trekkies, take your seats. We cannot be responsible for the impact of the following transmission.)

The commander of the starship Enterprise, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, also known as Patrick Stewart, is not a science fiction fan.

“Gosh, no! Not at all. I have no enthusiasm for it whatsoever,” the 50-year-old British actor confirmed over the phone from his Los Angeles home.

Can this be? Not only has the syndicated TV show “Star Trek: The Next Generation” made him arguably the most recognizable bald actor since Yul Brynner, he even has his own fan club: the International Audience Alliance for Patrick Stewart, which boasts more than 400 members and publishes a quarterly magazine devoted exclusively to him.

Stewart on Saturday performed a one-man program of dramatic excerpts, “Uneasy Lies the Head,” at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland to benefit the fan club and its activities to promote literacy and the arts.

If Stewart isn’t a sci-fi fan, what is his passion? In a word: Shakespeare. A leading actor with Britain’s esteemed Royal Shakespeare Company for more than 20 years, he has also contributed articles to a number of Shakespeare publications, an impressive credential for someone who left school at 15 because he was simply “not interested.”

In addition, since the 1970s he has been an associate director of the Santa Barbara-based Alliance for Creative Theatre, Education & Research, an organization that uses British actors to teach Shakespeare’s plays as living scripts, “not as pieces of intimidating literature.” And he continues to lecture and teach “whenever possible.”

In fact, he was delivering dramatic readings to accompany a lecture at UCLA when he was spotted by Robert Justman, a producer of the original “Star Trek” who was casting the syndicated sequel. “He claims he turned to his wife and said, ‘We’ve found our captain,’ ” Stewart said.

Whenever he appears at “Star Trek” conventions, Stewart says he tries to perform some Shakespeare. Knowing his connection with the Bard, fans frequently write telling him they “have turned to Shakespeare for the first time or turned to him again after not having read his plays since school,” he said. “So that might be said to be a sort of missionary work.”