As the headline guest at this year’s Huddersfield Literature Festival Sir Patrick Stewart will be on stage tonight (FRIDAY) at Huddersfield Town Hall to discuss his life on stage, in TV’s Star Trek - The Next Generation and the X-Men movies.

As an exclusive preview the Examiner was given 15 minutes with Mirfield-born Sir Patrick and put a variety of questions to him that had been suggested by readers. Here are his answers.

Katy Lennox: If you hadn’t gone into acting, what do you think you’d have done for a living?

Sir Patrick: I wouldn’t have had a living, I’m afraid, because acting is all I can do. I spent one year when I’d left secondary modern school working for the Dewsbury Reporter. That didn’t work out. The editor and I didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on all of my amateur acting activities which prevented me at times from doing the job I was being paid for, which was being a very junior newspaper reporter. So I left the paper and I got a job working in Hudson’s furniture store in Dewsbury. I was a much better furniture salesman than I was a journalist. I was “third sales”, which meant that the store manager came first, the first salesman came next, then there was a number two salesman and then there was me, so the shop had to be busy before I got any customers. But on Saturdays I used to devise this little scheme for myself which was a sort of acting exercise, too. When I knew that all the other salesmen had customers and the next person to come through the door was to be my customer I would stand and wait where I could see the door open when they came in. I would look at them and make a snap decision as to what to what kind of salesman they would feel most comfortable buying furniture from. And then I would become that person.

Sir Patrick Stewart in Star Trek (left) and Coronation Street (right)

Rachel Webster: What would you say to secondary school students who struggle with the literature GCSE, particularly Shakespeare and 19th century novella? If you were the Minister for Education, would you change what has to be studied?

Sir Patrick: I’m not sure I’m really qualified to answer that question in a specific way because my son is now 50 and my daughter is 45 so it’s a long time since they were in education, but I do have grandchildren. The first thing I would do if I had any authority at all is end tuition fees. It should never have happened in the first place and it’s calamitous for many young people. I’m now Emeritus Chancellor at the University of Huddersfield and I know from my personal experience of visiting schools around Huddersfield that a lot of people are very frightened of the costs involved in higher education.

Jane Yelland: What do you think of the threat to all the libraries in Kirklees, and have you any memories of going to Mirfield Library?

Sir Patrick: Indeed. I’ve been a little bit involved with the issue of the protests about the closing down of Mirfield Library and I’m very, very happy and proud to be part of that because the library along with the cinema are the two things that kept me sane and gave me something to look forward to when I was a child. Cinema, of course, because it was pure escapism. I could go to The Vale in Mirfield to see a two o’clock Saturday afternoon matinee and be taken out of my life, no longer Patrick Stewart but somebody else. It was very odd: when the end titles rolled and the house lights went up and the matinee was over I used to sit there crying because I didn’t want to go back out onto the streets. I wanted to stay in the cinema.

Sir Patrick Stewart outside his childhood home in Camm Lane, Mirfield.

Susanna Shotter: If one of the X-Men could have joined you on the USS Enterprise to be part of your crew, which one would you have wanted to be there and why?

Sir Patrick: There were so many brilliant people like Hugh Jackman, who I’m very, very fond of but because I’m a huge fan of her work and she’s a fantastic person I would have to say Jennifer Lawrence.

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Sean Burrows: Are you going to the town match on Saturday?

Sir Patrick: I shall be in the stand, in the crowds, cheering them on against Crystal Palace.

Ken and Bev Barraclough: Do you think Huddersfield Town will remain in the Premiership?

Sir Patrick: I do think they will remain in the Premiership, yes. How supremely confident am I? That’s a question that would make me really uncomfortable. I’ve gone up and down as the season has gone on. We’ve had some extraordinary matches, some extraordinary successes and we’ve got a brilliant manager in David Wagner. It’s the best squad of players that we’ve had in my lifetime. We are a club that can stay in the Premiership and do well, I have absolutely no doubt, but it will be an intense few weeks.

Gareth Wright: What is the favourite role you were offered but didn’t take, that you regretted not taking or were thankful you passed on?

Sir Patrick: There was one role that I turned down. I don’t want to mention the role or the actor that eventually played it because he was a very, very well-known English actor. I turned the role down thinking that it wasn’t good enough. The actor that accepted it actually won an Academy Award for that role. I felt pretty stupid about that. You make these wrong decisions sometimes.

Patrick Stewart with Ricky Gervais on the set of Extras

Tony Earnshaw: Is there any particular role that you’ve missed that you would want to play?

Sir Patrick: Oh, good lord, yes. I never played any of the romantic juvenile leads in Shakespeare and of course Hamlet would have to be the one that I miss most, sadly. But I got to play some of the big ones [like] Othello and Macbeth. People have been talking to me about King Lear; I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet. There have been rather a lot of King Lears recently but maybe in a few years’ time I shall attempt what most people consider to be the greatest actor’s role, certainly for a senior citizen anyway.

Michelle Hodgson (director of Huddersfield Literature Festival): Why do you think it’s important to support the literature festival and what does it mean for the town to have these sorts of events going on?

Sir Patrick: We didn’t have books in my family but I belonged to Mirfield Library. I was down there every Saturday morning. I would take out three or four books at a time and would have read them by the next weekend. Books were, for me, the new landscape that I was beginning to discover through cinema and through amateur acting. It opened up worlds for me that I knew nothing about. I was a bit precocious as well. I read books that were actually above my age, definitely. I mean, you don’t read Dostoevsky when you’re 13 and 14, do you? But I did! They created for me a sense of what the written word - and then subsequently the spoken word - could do: what power it had to change lives and to transform the world. So books and libraries played a huge role in my life and I hope that we can save the Mirfield Public Library.