When you think that David Niven, James Mason, Ronnie Barker, Arthur Lowe and Powell and Pressburger among many others failed to receive state honours, you’ll concede that a knighthood was wasted on Patrick Stewart, even if for 12 years he was chancellor of Huddersfield University. I mean no disparagement by this. I’m happy for him. But why not Sir Timothy Spall or Sir Timothy West?

Stewart, whose grandmother was Stan Laurel’s babysitter, is a middle-ranking mime with a gurgling bass-baritone. He is chiefly famous for the X-Men franchise and for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus the numerous feature film spin-offs in which he commanded an interplanetary spacecraft. There have also been Beckett plays with Ian McKellen, a one-man version of A Christmas Carol, and for 14 years he was a ‘reliable supporting player’ in the Royal Shakespeare Company. He appeared in the classic Peter Brook A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Tom Snout, the tinker who plays the wall. Stewart clapped together a pair of house bricks.

A lot of the memoir is taken up with point-scoring, as Stewart is highly attuned to insults

Deeply attached to Yorkshire’s West Riding, he has ‘recently moved to a house in a lovely section of Los Angeles… with a swimming pool, citrus trees and a wood-panelled study with a fireplace’. In these surroundings he has written what is a zestful, detailed and nostalgic account of his career. His early days sound as gloomy and deprived as anything in J.B. Priestley: the textile mills, lamplighters, coal chutes, outside privy, blacking t’grate, pie-and-pea shops and seeing corpses on display in front parlours.

He was born in 1940, and his childhood was full of people frowning and sighing and being unhappy on purpose. His father was permanently angry and violent, ‘a fierce, formidable man’, a sergeant major in the Paras who never adjusted to a world not at war. Every night after he returned from the pub he beat his wife:

Sometimes it was with an open hand, other times with a closed fist. Always, he aimed for her head. The police weren’t interested. ‘Mrs Stewart, you must have done something to provoke him.’

No wonder church choirs and amateur dramatics provided a refuge, as did sports. Stewart was a champion sprinter and hurdler. He was head boy at Mirfield secondary modern, where an excellent teacher, Cecil Dormand, instilled in his pupils a love of Shakespeare – ‘Heaven on a stick’, says Stewart, who won a scholarship to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. There he was drilled in text, verse, speech and movement. By the age of 19 he was also bald.

Next came weekly rep in Lincoln and Sheffield, where he swept the stage and filled the tea urn. There was a world tour with the 47-year-old Vivien Leigh, who was enfeebled by tuberculosis and mental illness. Stewart had tiny roles in three plays, and was required to deliver a grand total of 19 words. Then he was in the history plays at Stratford and the Aldwych with Ian Holm, ‘the actor I regarded as the best of the best,’ and who later had a breakdown on stage during The Iceman Cometh. Holm couldn’t remember his lines or moves and was found on the dressing-room floor ‘curled up into a foetal ball’, having become ‘increasingly insecure’. He went into films instead and received a knighthood.

Stewart is never insecure, though he can be chippy and pompous. When he tells a story against himself and adds ‘I joined in the laughter’, one doubts he did so wholeheartedly. ‘I didn’t handle it well,’ he says of one of his outbursts. ‘I stormed off the set and into my trailer, slamming the door.’ He can be angry at rehearsals if there is ‘too much fooling around, too much noise and laughter’, and a lot of this memoir is taken up with point-scoring, as he is highly attuned to insults. He didn’t like Robert Helpmann: ‘I would not today tolerate a director handling his company with such condescension and coldness.’ During Julius Caesar, his fellow actor John Wood was ‘continually ill-tempered and ill-mannered toward me’, so Stewart grabbed him by the throat and slammed his head against a door. Of Peter Brook: ‘I don’t mean to make Peter sound like a rude, insensitive bugger, though I was wounded in the moment.’ Alan Howard, who played Oberon, ‘had a bit of a temper. I saw him lose it once or twice’. Tom Hardy ‘wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level’. During Dune, David Lynch was ‘hurtful and discouraging’. Billie White-law was ‘distant… She did not want to work with me’. Gene Roddenberry ‘never warmed to me… I felt as if I was being dismissed, and rather disrespectfully’.

I admire the candour. There is no darling-you-were-marvellous hypocrisy here. Nevertheless, though Stewart tries to laugh off the memory of an autograph hunter at the stage door enquiring ‘Are you anybody?’ it’s a memory that still rankles. When cast as Picard, he was described in the Hollywood press as an ‘unknown Shakespearean actor’, which hardly pleased him. He feels the need to remind us that in that role ‘I was custodian of something held dear by millions of people, probably hundreds of millions’.

The offer of the part came in 1987. ‘There has been nothing more important or financially beneficial than this in your entire career to date,’ his agent stated categorically. You’d think Stewart was embarking on playing King Lear. ‘I took the role of captain extremely seriously,’ he says, perhaps so as not to alienate the Star Trek fanatics who’ll doubtless flock to buy this book. Colleagues on the show described his demeanour as being as cold as cucumber soup. ‘I need to lighten up’, he kept telling himself when he heard of this.

His affective life has been complex. ‘This was indeed a dangerous situation,’ he says of one tryst, ‘because Lisa already had a boyfriend and I was married to Wendy’. There was an earlier wife called Sheila: ‘It wasn’t even close to an amicable split.’ The present Lady Stewart, a former waitress half his age, is younger than his two children.

If I found Making It So absorbing it was because I saw many of the RSC productions Stewart describes so well – the long-gone great days of Peter Hall, John Barton and Trevor Nunn. It’s a shame no mention is made of Smiley’s People, in which Stewart was brilliant as the enigmatic Karla. There are also a few woke tropes I could have done without. Of some harmless banter in the make-up chair Stewart suddenly tut-tuts: ‘This sort of workplace innuendo was customary in those days, but perhaps it would not happen today.’ Also, of a film called Jeffrey, about relationships during the height of the Aids epidemic, he says: ‘I am not so sure that I would play a gay man now, given current sensitivities and the fact I am heterosexual.’ Knickers to current sensitivities. Acting is not being. It is dressing up. It is about transformation, invention and becoming someone else for a little while. But the way we are going, only authenticated mass murderers will be eligible to play Macbeth.