Mirfield-born Star Trek and Hollywood actor Patrick Stewart made an emotional return to his roots yesterday, recalling the days when he first trod the boards in the town. He was giving a special one-man charity show in the area last night at Dewsbury Town Hall. Examiner reporter JANE YELLAND caught up with him.

Patrick travelled to Dewsbury from his house in North Yorkshire where he had been staying for the past week.

He recently returned to the UK after he finished making the TV film, The Lion In Winter, in which he plays King Henry II of England, with Glenn Close as his scheming wife Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The film was shot in Hungary and Slovakia over nine weeks.

On Monday he heads off to London to start rehearsals in Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder and in the autumn he jets off to New York for the rest of the year, where he is to do another stage play.

It is all a far cry from his youth when, as a junior journalist on the Mirfield Reporter, he rode to jobs on his bicycle.

"I covered Hopton and Battyeford," he said. "I enjoyed meeting people and talking to them - that was my favourite part of the job."

The job did not suit Patrick, however, as his heart was on the stage and not in the office.

And he recalls being taken to task for describing the stage at Battyeford Methodist Church as an "intimate" little theatre.

"The sub-editor said: `We cannot have language like that in the paper' and crossed it out!"

Shorthand too did not come easy.

"I was taught shorthand and typing from a school that was run from a private house somewhere up towards Dewsbury Moor," he said. "I hated it and my shorthand was shocking.

"If I had had decent shorthand I might still be in that job now."