Photograph of the Month - March 2009

Since June 2007 the National Portrait Gallery has highlighted a recently acquired and previously unseen photographic portrait to coincide with a current event, anniversary or a display elsewhere in the Gallery.

Film, television and stage actor with a career that has spanned almost fifty years. Born in Yorkshire, Stewart studied acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. Twenty years after his Broadway debut in 1971, Stewart performed his one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol and his performance as Scrooge in the television film and on stage was critically and publically acclaimed. He made his film debut in 1974 but is best known on screen as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek films (1994-2002) and as Professor Xavier in the X-Men films (2002-6). Stewart appears as Vladimir opposite Ian McKellen in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot opening at the Malvern Theatres on 5 March and in London at the Haymarket Theatre (6 May – 28 June)~

Israeli-born, award-winning photographer Kander moved to London in the 1980s . He is a contributor to publications including The Sunday Times Magazine and regularly exhibits his work. Fifty-two of Kander’s portraits of Barack Obama’s top advisors and aides were published in The New York Times Magazine (18 January 2009).

Previous Photographs of the Month