But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.
Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?
Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.
I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.
It wasn't until the first season ended that I went to my first Star Trek convention. It was in Denver. There were two and a half thousand people there.
Roddenberry had created quite a complex and at times mysterious character. Guarded, cautious, careful in showing his feelings in expressing his ideas about many things - I found that very interesting.
Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment.
I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well.
I began directing episodes, which was a great light every couple of months. We never short-changed our audience, but it became something that you had to work at rather than something that was a pleasure.
I certainly wanted to maintain some sense of mystery about Picard and that's why we never allowed certain situations to fully evolve, like the relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher.
For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.
Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.
I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.
I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.
I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.
I wouldn't know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me.
You get all of your neuroses worked out on stage. I haven't actually played very many nice characters, certainly not on stage. It's not a quality that attracts me.
We had some very distinguished fans: I know one chancellor of a major university who used to schedule his meetings around Star Trek. We were thrilled to discover that Frank Sinatra was a big fan.
I've met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it's just not worth working with them.
As the captain, I was going to be having the dominant role in most of the episodes, and that was appealing. I wasn't interested in coming to Hollywood to sit around.
It still frightens me a little bit to think that so much of my life was totally devoted to Star Trek and almost nothing else.
During my time we had two chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at different times of course, on the bridge, both of whom asked my permission to sit on the captain's chair.
There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation.
The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they're renegotiating contracts.
One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.
We've heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.
I am told that there have been over the years a number of experiments taking place in places like Massachusetts Institute of Technology that have been entirely based on concepts raised by Star Trek.
It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.
Last Wednesday, I stupidly dropped my iPhone in the bath, and my life has sort of spiraled almost out of control.
I never had teenage years. I guess because I was seen to be more adult than anybody around me.
