Patrick Stewart has had an impressive career spanning nearly 60 years, including playing Professor Charles Xavier in "X-Men" and Captain Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek."
It's fair to say that Stewart's lack of hair is synonymous with both roles — Professor X, after all, is bald in the "X-Men" comics.
And in his new memoir, the British actor opens up about going completely bald when he was just 19.
Stewart explains in "Making It So" that he was just 17 when he began to lose his hair, and his first reaction was to look into hair loss treatment.
"I wanted to be able to pay for treatment at a hair clinic in Bristol," he writes. "I had grown up with thick, dark, wavy hair, but in my first year of drama school, when I was 17, it started to thin out at an accelerated rate."
The star adds: "The more hair I lost, the more attention I paid to the clinic. Finally, one day, I screwed up the courage to walk in and have a chat with the people inside. They told me what the treatment would cost. That's when I realized I needed more cash in my pocket."
To raise the money he needed, Stewart recalls working as a bricklayer near his family home in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, in England.
"Just up the road from my parents' house was the office of a small building firm. I walked in, found the boss, and asked him if he had any unskilled work available just for three weeks," Stewart writes. "He told me that his chief bricklayer needed a laborer and that I could start right away. The job was right down the street. Perfect."
Unfortunately for Stewart, the treatments were unsuccessful.
"The clinic treatments in Bristol that I'd invested my hard-earned bricklayer money into achieved nothing," he writes. "I must have had three or four sessions, which involved the placing of electrode patches on my scalp, some massaging by hand, and the application of various creams."
Stewart adds: "But it was hopeless. By the age of 19, I was as bald on top as I am now."
