Phillip

Patrick Stewart, who died on Wednesday at 86, once read Shakespeare at UCLA for $100 and a dinner at T.G.I. Friday's, by his account. About 10 years later Paramount agreed to pay him $12 million to play Captain Picard again. In the audience that night was Robert Justman, a producer on the original Star Trek. He said he turned to his wife: "I think I've found our new captain." He took Stewart, then 46, to meet Gene Roddenberry. By Justman's account, when Stewart drove off, Roddenberry closed the door and said: "I won't have him." For his final audition, Paramount's executives wanted to see him in a hairpiece. "So I said, but it's in London," he told Graham Norton in 2023. "So they had it flown." The contract ran 6 years. His agent's advice, as he recalled it on The Late Late Show: "Do a dozen episodes, maybe less, and make some money for the first time in your life and go home." The agent gave the show 6 months. So he signed. It ran 7 seasons and 178 episodes. He got $5 million for the 1996 film First Contact, Variety reported, and more than twice that for the next one. At 79 he came back for Star Trek: Picard. The wig crossed the Atlantic so Paramount could see Picard with hair. They hired him bald. Roddenberry would not have him. Paramount's offer for a single film came to 120,000 times his UCLA fee.