Patrick Stewart Opens Up About 'Horrifying' Experience of Being Raised in a Violent Home: 'I Felt Shame'

Patrick Stewart is opening up about his experience being raised in a violent home in an effort to raise awareness about domestic abuse.

In an interview for the new ITV documentary Her Majesty The Queen: Behind Closed Doors, the actor said, “Domestic violence was something that people never spoke about. And so I never told anyone. I kept it all to myself. It was locked inside me, and I felt shame,” per U.K. newspaper The Times.

Speaking about his own experienced, Stewart, 84, recalled, “The war ended in 1945. So I was, by the time my father came home, 6 years old. And it was horrifying.”

“The shouting was so loud because he had a huge voice,” continued the Star Trek: The Next Generation alum, adding that he “would scream at my father to stop when he hit my mother and hit her again and again.”

Stewart went on to say that he and his brother Trevor “used to sit on the steps leading down from the bedrooms, right behind the door that opened up into the one living room.”

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And as a result, they “became experts at understanding where the shouting was going, what it was going to lead to, and we always knew the moment that the violence was going to begin.”

“So with that, we would push open the door and burst into the room, and my brother Trevor, who was taller than me, would force himself between my father and my mother so that he couldn’t reach her,” he continued, according to The Times.

“And she would shout out, ‘No, no, no, please, you don’t have to protect me. I’m all right, I’m all right.’ And I yelled at him as well,” the X-Men actor said.

He also recalled a female neighbor stepping in at one point, “bursting the door open when my father was yelling and [she] walked over to my father, pushed her sleeves up, put up her fists and said, ‘Come on, Al Stewart, try it on me. Try it on me.’ “

“And of course, he didn’t. He didn’t touch her,” Stewart added in part, per The Times. “He stepped away. But it was humiliating to have come from such a background.”

Her Majesty The Queen: Behind Closed Doors sees Queen Camilla speaking to domestic-abuse survivors, which has been a key part of her royal work. It also reveals her empathy when she meets women and their families who have experienced domestic abuse and shows her deep understanding of the issue and the help needed for women and girls.

The film, aimed at giving domestic-abuse survivors a voice, is now airing on ITV1 in the U.K.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.