Todd Lehman

Patrick Stewart died on Wednesday at 86, leaving a fortune estimated at $75 million. He grew up in a two-room house in Yorkshire with no hot water and no indoor toilet, sleeping behind a partition in his parents' bedroom. In the video below, Stewart explains how he and his brother knew what kind of night was coming from the songs their father was singing on his way home. Alfred Stewart came home from the war in 1945 as a regimental sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment. He worked Monday to Friday for a modest wage. On Friday nights he bathed in front of the fire, put on the blazer with his badge on it, and drank through the weekend. Patrick and his brother Trevor listened from upstairs and learned to go down at the exact moment an argument turned, so they could put their bodies between their father and their mother. The neighbours heard all of it. Someone would walk to a phone box and call the police. Stewart said the officers who came into his house decided his mother "must have provoked him," and the doctors who treated her told her a fight takes two people. Decades later he found his father's war record. Severe shell shock in 1940, never treated. Specialists told him it was textbook untreated PTSD. The money came too late to be any use. Stewart started on Star Trek: The Next Generation at $45,000 an episode and finished at $100,000. For Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002 he was paid $14 million. His mother Gladys, a weaver, died in 1977. He was cast as Jean-Luc Picard ten years after that. Once he could afford it, he and Trevor found a house to buy and give her so she could get out. She turned it down.