A friend of mine posted a link on her Facebook page to an essay in Friday's Guardian by Patrick Stewart (aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard). In that essay, Stewart talks about how his father would routinely attack his mother.
For many people, it will probably sound all too familiar; Stewart's probably not even close to the only celebrity who could tell such a tale.
Obviously, I won't quote the whole thing, but I'll just highlight a couple of points. First off, of course, his father appeared to the world as a "good man":
My father was, in many ways, a man of discipline, organisation and charisma - a regimental sergeant major no less. One of the very last men to be evacuated from Dunkirk, his third stripe was chalked on to his uniform by an officer when no more senior NCOs were left alive. Parachuted into Crete and Italy, both times under fire, he fought at Monte Casino and was twice mentioned in dispatches. A fellow soldier once told me, "When your father marches on to the parade ground, the birds in the trees stop singing."
It's not easy hearing Stewart admit something like this:
As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down.
And it's not surprising that it actually had an effect on his acting career:
I managed to find my own refuge in acting. The stage was a far safer place for me than anything I had to live through at home – it offered escape. I could be someone else, in another place, in another time. However, whenever the role called for anger, fury, or the expression of murderous impulses, I was always afraid of what I might unleash if I surrendered myself to those feelings. It was not until 1981, when the director Ronald Eyre asked me to play the psychotic Leontes in The Winter's Tale, that the breakthrough came.
It's a tragedy that Stewart and his mother had to experience any of this. It's an even greater tragedy that there are undoubtedly millions of people still living with this on a daily basis.