When Patrick Stewart fell for the UAE: The star’s love for the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the ‘kindness’ of the people

Patrick Stewart, the Yorkshire-born Shakespearean who became Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier, has died at 86. His family said he died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, in the care of his wife Sunny Ozell, after a short illness with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

Tributes have come in from Hollywood, from the bridge of the Enterprise and from the X-Mansion. In the Emirates, the news lands a little differently. On a few brief visits, the captain came ashore, and he fell quite openly for the UAE.

There was a gala beneath the world’s tallest tower and a roaring red carpet beside the waterways of Madinat Jumeirah. There was a day of wonder under a floating dome in Abu Dhabi. And there was an afternoon when a room full of strangers in Dubai heard Henry V delivered by one of the great voices of the age.

He had been honoured here before: in December 2014 he was named a Chivas Legend at a gala dinner in the Armani Hotel inside Burj Khalifa. Three years later, in December 2017, he arrived with his wife, Sunny, for the opening night of the 14th Dubai International Film Festival at Madinat Jumeirah. The gala film was Scott Cooper’s western Hostiles. Cate Blanchett was in town to chair a jury, and Irrfan Khan and the Egyptian screenwriter Wahid Hamed were honoured alongside him. Stewart collected a Lifetime Achievement Award.

During the festival, the Stewarts made the trip to Saadiyat Island. The Louvre Abu Dhabi had opened to the public barely three weeks earlier. They walked beneath Jean Nouvel’s great latticed dome, where sunlight falls through the layers like rain through palm fronds. Below it, the galleries set civilisations side by side rather than in separate wings.

Stewart was not a casual museum-goer. In an interview in Dubai that week with the film writer E. Nina Rothe, he said he had collected art since his early Picard days in Los Angeles, starting with screen prints and works on paper he could afford. At his wife’s urging, he had recently taken up painting himself.

The museum clearly had an impact on him. On stage at the festival’s In Conversation session on December 8, he urged the audience to go to the Louvre, as Arab News reported: “We went to the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and if you have yet to see it — I know it’s only been open for a little more than three weeks — it’s sensational. The collection is good, but the way it is organised is what makes it unique — unlike any other gallery or museum I’ve been in.”

He also told Rothe that finally standing before Rembrandt’s Man with the Golden Helmet in Berlin had been “very emotional and intense.”

That stage was DIFF’s In Conversation session on December 8, and for many in the room it became the moment of the festival. He was charming, funny and sharply dressed. When an audience member asked about Shakespeare, he launched into the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, unprompted and from memory.

He also spoke with startling candour about growing up in a poor, violent household in Mirfield. The theatre, he explained, had been the safest place he knew, because a play has a beginning, a middle and an end, all rehearsed. “There is no chaos,” he said, as quoted by Arab News. He confessed he had never thought much of Patrick Stewart and much preferred being someone else, and that he still felt that way.

Then came the line that, read today, feels like the real souvenir of the trip. It was his third visit to the UAE, he said, and the first on which he had truly connected with its people: “There is such kindness, such generosity, such welcoming and modesty. We’ve enjoyed it immensely.”

Three visits, a handful of days, and many memories.

He grew up afraid at home and found safety in other people’s words. He built an art collection from prints he could only just afford. In the UAE he found a new museum that moved him, a festival that honoured him, and, in his own words, kindness, generosity and modesty.

He gave a little of that back, too: a Shakespeare speech to a room of strangers, unscripted, simply because someone asked.

The Louvre’s dome still throws its rain of light across the galleries on Saadiyat. Next time you stand under it, remember that Jean-Luc Picard once stood there too, and thought it was sensational.