Allen Winter

Patrick Stewart, who died today at 86, became Professor X and Captain Picard. As a boy, he watched his father beat his mother, and heard the doctors who came to help tell her it was her own fault. In the video below, a woman thanks him for helping her survive her own abuse, and his answer brings the whole room to its feet. He grew up in a poor mill town in England. His father came home from World War II a different man and turned his violence on Patrick's mother. Every time the doctors and ambulance men came, they told her she must have provoked him, that it takes two to make an argument. Decades later, Stewart learned from his father's war records that he had been suffering from severe shell shock that was never treated. So he spent the rest of his life working for two charities: one for abused women, in his mother's name, and one for traumatized soldiers, in his father's. He could have spent his life hating his father. Instead, he spent it helping others. Is that the kind of legacy that matters more than fame?