Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died

 

 

By Anita Gates and William McDonald 

Patrick Stewart, who overcame a bleak childhood in England’s coal-mining country to find acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before making an unlikely career pivot in middle age that would bring him his greatest fame, playing a noble starship captain on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.

The death, from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, was announced on social media.

With a commanding baritone voice — he had shed his Yorkshire dialect as an acting student — Mr. Stewart was by his late 40s an eloquent, statesmanlike presence on the British stage. But to many American television viewers, Mr. Stewart was a new face when he made his debut in 1987 as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “The Next Generation,” the first live-action spinoff of the original “Star Trek” series of the late 1960s.

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Picard was said to have been born in France, but Mr. Stewart played the part with a British accent.Credit...CBS Photo Archive

Old and new fans embraced the balding, graying Picard and the members of his 24th-century crew, among them a pale-skinned android with deadpan comic timing; an intense, half-alien mind-reader; a gruff Klingon; and a blind human engineer wearing a vision visor. Over the show’s seven seasons, Picard became known for his preternatural calm and his trademark directives “Engage!” and “Make it so.” (Mr. Stewart titled a 2023 memoir “Making It So.”)

Mr. Stewart went on to star in four feature-film spinoffs — “Star Trek Generations” (1994), “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996), “Star Trek: Insurrection” (1998) and “Star Trek: Nemesis” (2002) — before returning to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in 2020 in a TV sequel that he could call his own, “Star Trek: Picard,” which ran for three seasons.

The Enterprise was neither Mr. Stewart’s first science-fiction home nor his last. He appeared in David Lynch’s original film version of “Dune” (1984) as the weapons teacher Gurney Halleck. Years later, he was Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X, in five “X-Men” movies, playing a wealthy telepath in a wheelchair who leads other mutants with superpowers. Those films, some of which also starred Mr. Stewart’s close friend Ian McKellen, included “X-Men” (2000), “X2: X-Men United” (2003) and “Logan” (2017).

By the time he became a screen star, Mr. Stewart was a lauded stage veteran in Britain, where he began working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. After making his first public stage appearance at 19, he performed in both classical and contemporary works alongside fellow up-and-coming actors like Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Glenda Jackson.

In 1986, he won the London Fringe Theater best actor award for his role as the humiliated husband, George, in the Young Vic’s production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He also won Olivier Awards (Britain’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony) for playing Enobarbus, Mark Antony’s best friend, in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (1979) and Claudius, opposite David Tennant’s Danish prince, in “Hamlet” (2009).

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In the “X-Men” movies, Mr. Stewart played Charles Xavier, or Professor X, a powerful telepath and leader of the X-Men.Credit...Kerry Hayes/20th Century Fox

To most American film and television fans, however, he was always Picard, even after the “X-Men” movies. And though in terms of substance the character may have been light years removed from his meatier roles with the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart continued to express pride in his work as that resolute ship captain, dismissing theater-world peers who had looked askance at him when he went to Hollywood.

“They used to ask me ‘Why, why, why?’ as if I was somehow slumming it,” he said in a 2003 interview with the London newspaper The Independent.

“What snobbery!” he said, adding: “For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s fine. I really believe we created an admirable individual.”

A Grim Upbringing

Mr. Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, England, a small, industrial river town in West Yorkshire. (He was given no middle name but later invented one, Hewes, when he joined a union that already had a member named Patrick Stewart.) His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in the British Army, and his mother, Gladys (Barrowclough) Stewart, was a weaver at a textile factory. Patrick was the youngest of their three sons.

The family scraped by, living in a grim little house with no running hot water. The bathroom was outside, in a brick communal outhouse for the neighborhood, one stall to a family. Patrick used his family’s stall as a reading nook.

Much later in life, he wrote and spoke about the domestic violence that had shattered his childhood. His father was reduced to working as a semiskilled laborer after his military career, and became what Mr. Stewart described as a resentful “weekend alcoholic” who physically attacked his mother for years, sometimes in Patrick’s presence.

As Mr. Stewart recalled in a 2009 article he wrote for The Guardian, “I knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn.”

The family dynamic was complicated. Despite the abuse, Patrick’s mother remained with her husband until her death in 1977, and throughout his life Patrick regarded his father with a mixture of anger, fear, sadness and regret. Interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2023, after his memoir was published, he told a reporter, tapping the cover of a copy, “I wish my father could have seen this.”

Patrick was 12 when an English teacher, Cecil Dormand, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship, handed out scripts for “The Merchant of Venice” and instructed him to read the part of Shylock. Patrick went on to work with local drama groups.

Graduating from secondary school at 15, he took a job as a junior reporter with the local newspaper but quit after a year; his editor had complained that he was spending too much time on his theater avocation. After that, he worked for a year as a furniture salesman to save money for drama school, though a local arts council ended up giving him a full scholarship so that he could enroll in the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theater School, which accepted him in 1957, when he was 17.

Two years later, he made his professional acting debut, as the marooned pirate Tom Morgan in “Treasure Island,” with the Lincoln Repertory Company in Lincoln, England. In other early appearances, he took the title roles in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (1963), at the Manchester Library Theater, and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Life of Galileo” (1965), at the Bristol Old Vic.

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Mr. Stewart in 1970, during rehearsals for “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London.Credit...Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

As part of the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart played more than a dozen roles, mostly supporting, in Stratford-upon-Avon and London between 1966 and 1969. He was the Player King in “Hamlet,” Grumio in “The Taming of the Shrew,” Cornwall in “King Lear” and Hector in “Troilus and Cressida.”

A Working Actor

By the age of 19, Mr. Stewart was already balding, a result of hereditary alopecia. (He wore wigs for many screen and stage roles.) And he was already frequently hearing the prediction familiar to many young character actors: The first 20 years of your career will be difficult; true fame, if it ever comes, may take a while. It was a forecast that was largely borne out.

Mr. Stewart continued to find work, including on British television series like “Coronation Street” and “Story Parade.” By the 1970s, he was winning substantial roles in BBC TV movies and mini-series.

He portrayed Lenin in “Fall of Eagles” (1974); the postwar prime minister Clement Attlee in “The Gathering Storm” (1974); John Thornton, a brainy mill owner, in “North and South” (1975); Sejanus, head of the Praetorian Guard, in “I, Claudius” (1976, seen in the United States on “Masterpiece Theater” in 1977); and the Soviet spymaster Karla in brief, nonspeaking appearances in two John le Carré adaptations, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982).

Mr. Stewart made his Broadway debut in 1971 in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He was Snout, the tinker who portrays the wall between Pyramus and Thisbe in the comedy’s lowbrow play-within-a-play. It would be 20 years before Mr. Stewart appeared on Broadway again, in a 1991 run of a solo production of “A Christmas Carol” he had developed a few years before. The holiday-season show, which he repeated on Broadway in 1992, 1994 and 2001, received a Drama Desk Award for outstanding solo performance.

He was largely considered an unknown when the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Mr. Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in a program that was open to the public.

A TV producer who was involved in developing a new “Star Trek” series happened to attend and soon persuaded Mr. Stewart to audition — even though, as Mr. Stewart later wrote, he knew “next to nothing” about the franchise.

Surprised to get the part — the “Star Trek” creator, Gene Roddenberry, who was overseeing the new series, had not been keen to hire him at first — Mr. Stewart expected the project to be a short-term commitment. How, he remembered thinking, could the show possibly succeed with a middle-aged pacifist captain with a French name and a British accent?

After its run ended, Mr. Stewart continued his stage and television career, now with the power of Hollywood fame behind him. Between 1995 and 2013, he starred in a handful of Broadway productions, two of them Shakespearean: He was Prospero in “The Tempest” in 1995 and, in 2008, the title character in “Macbeth,” for which he was nominated for a Tony.

He also played a self-satisfied bigamist in Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” (2000); a desperate, possibly dangerous homeless man in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker” (2003); and a veteran actor who has seen it all in David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater” (2010).

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Ian McKellen, left, and Mr. Stewart in Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” on Broadway in 2013.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In 2013, Mr. Stewart and Mr. McKellen co-starred in two plays in repertory, an offering that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called “absurdly enjoyable.” Mr. Stewart was Vladimir, the cerebral one, in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and the wealthy man of letters in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land.”

On American television, he portrayed a restless 17th-century spirit in “The Canterville Ghost” (1996); Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick” (1998); Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” (1999), this time with a cast of 50 or so; a wealthy rancher pointedly named Lear in “King of Texas” (2002); and Henry II, opposite Glenn Close, in “The Lion in Winter” (2003).

‘Being Silly’

Though his rock-steady Picard only rarely seemed to lighten up, Mr. Stewart was, in fact, no stranger to comedy.

He “got rather good at being silly,” The Sydney Morning Herald wrote. He played King Richard in Mel Brooks’s 1993 film spoof “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” parodying Sean Connery with a thick Scottish accent. He appeared in about 120 episodes of the animated series “American Dad!” as Avery Bullock, a C.I.A. deputy director with too many character flaws to count.

When asked to name the most distinguished moments of his career, Mr. Stewart often mentioned — not altogether facetiously — his appearances on “The Simpsons,” in 1995 and 2013, and “Sesame Street” (1996), on which he performed the soliloquy “B or Not a B.”

When he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1994, one of his sketch characters was an erotic-cake baker with a fetish even his customers couldn’t deal with. And the legion of projects for which he served as narrator included “Ted,” Seth MacFarlane’s 2012 movie comedy about a teddy bear with the soul of a frat boy.

After hundreds of screen and stage roles, Mr. Stewart — Sir Patrick since his 2010 knighthood — gave one of his final performances in “The Sheep Detectives” (2026), in which he was the voice of Sir Ritchfield, a wise old Boreray Blackface ram in a flock of crime solvers.

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Mr. Stewart with his then-wife, Sheila Falconer, in 1988.Credit...Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images

Mr. Stewart and Sheila Falconer, a choreographer, married in 1966, had two children, and divorced, almost a quarter-century later, in 1990. His marriage to Wendy Neuss, an American producer, also ended in divorce. The trigger in each divorce, he acknowledged in his memoir, was an affair with a younger woman. “In a life chockablock with joy and success,” he wrote, “my two failed marriages are my greatest regret.”

In 2013, he married Sunny Ozell, an American singer 38 years his junior, in a makeshift ceremony in a Mexican restaurant after a performance of “No Man’s Land” in Berkeley, Calif. His co-star Mr. McKellen, donning a cloak for the occasion, officiated, having been licensed by the Universal Life Church.

Mr. Stewart’s survivors include Ms. Ozell; his son, Daniel, who is also an actor; and his daughter, Sophie.

For Mr. Stewart, acting was a compulsion, he said, something he was driven to do. In 2011, a BBC interviewer asked him to describe the experience of being onstage. Mr. Stewart answered, “It feels like being a giant.”

And he saw no reason to quit, even in his later years.

“Acting was the thing that made me happy when I was 13 years old,” he wrote in his memoir, “and that is still the case 70 years later. I have so much more work to do. I am not done with the stage. I still want to try another TV comedy. I still have so many characters inside me that I need to let out.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

1. Alex Williams :

   Shakespeare? Sure. Captain Picard? Whatever. To me his shining moment was his absurdist self-parody in Ricky Gervais' "Extras," where he describes a screenplay he's working on about "a man who controls the world with his mind. "For instance, I'm walking along and I see this beautiful girl and I think I'd like to see her naked, and so all her clothes fall off." Gervais: "It's a comedy, is it?" Stewart: "No."

 

 

Uma tarde na Lagoa

 

Um churrasco na lancha com Flávio Bolsonaro, lobistas e garotas de programa durante a pandemia

João Batista Jr., de São Paulo, Ana Clara Costa, do Rio de Janeiro, e Breno Pires, de Brasília

Às 20h30 da noite de 16 de julho de 2020, o consórcio montado por veículos de imprensa para contabilizar as vítimas da Covid registrava um marco trágico: 1.299 mortos apenas naquele dia. No total, 76.822 brasileiros já tinham morrido em decorrência do vírus, e os números não paravam de crescer. Poucos minutos depois desse registro público, mais precisamente às 20h49, o jatinho de prefixo PR-SAD decolou do Aeroporto de Congonhas, em São Paulo, com destino a Brasília.

O jato executivo Embraer Phenom 300, que pertencia à empresa Prime You e já teve Daniel Vorcaro como um de seus usuários, havia sido destacado para transportar dois empresários: Danilo Berndt Trento e Francisco Maximiano, diretor institucional e dono da Precisa Medicamentos, respectivamente. Os dois diziam representar o laboratório indiano Bharat Biotech, responsável pelo desenvolvimento da vacina Covaxin, e queriam fechar um acordo com o governo de Jair Bolsonaro para produzir vacinas para o Brasil.

Embora, àquela altura, as vacinas ainda não fossem uma realidade palpável no mundo, havia uma corrida para sua pesquisa, produção e comercialização. Contratos começavam a ser firmados. Como o Brasil tinha um presidente negacionista, o país estava fora do páreo. Tanto a americana Pfizer quanto a chinesa Sinovac tentavam negociar com o Ministério da Saúde, mas nada avançava. A Precisa Medicamentos já era uma grande fornecedora do governo, a quem vendia de testes rápidos de Covid a preservativos femininos. Mas a empresa via a oportunidade de aumentar seus laços com a gestão de Jair Bolsonaro.

Para azeitar a perspectiva de bons negócios, Danilo Trento e Francisco Maximiano decidiram promover um passeio cujo objetivo era agradar ao primogênito do então presidente, o senador Flávio Bolsonaro, hoje candidato à Presidência da República pelo PL. A dupla recorreu então a um procedimento de praxe: procurou seu agente de viagens, Raphael Barão, dono da Barão Turismo, e o encarregou de organizar um churrasco a bordo de uma lancha, no Lago Paranoá, em Brasília. O principal atrativo do passeio, porém, não seria a picanha, mas três garotas de programa trazidas de São Paulo.

Havia seis pessoas a bordo naquele voo na noite de 16 de julho de 2020. Eram elas: os empresários Danilo Trento e Francisco Maximiano, o agente de viagens Raphael Barão e três garotas, duas loiras e uma morena. A aeronave aterrissou no aeroporto de Brasília às 22h12. De lá, todos os seis se dirigiram ao hotel Meliá Brasil 21, localizado no setor hoteleiro Sul da capital federal. O evento na lancha só ocorreria no dia seguinte.

Os jornais amanheceram em 17 de julho como de costume: tomados por notícias sobre mortos, infectados e desvios de recursos que deveriam ser usados para tratar os doentes. Por volta das 10h30 da manhã, um carro estacionou em um dos decks com acesso ao Lago Paranoá. O automóvel estava carregado com bebidas, como vodca, gim e cerveja, além de petiscos, destinados a abastecer a lancha de uma cabina, com cerca de 20 metros de comprimento, que estava atracada à beira do lago.

Entraram na embarcação Danilo Trento, as três garotas e o condutor da lancha. Logo em seguida, chegou o convidado principal da festa: Flávio Bolsonaro, que veio acompanhado de seu amigo, Alexandre Santini. Àquela época, Santini era sócio de Flávio Bolsonaro na operação da franquia da célebre loja da Kopenhagen, no Rio de Janeiro. (De acordo com o Ministério Público do Rio de Janeiro, a loja foi usada para lavar dinheiro oriundo da prática de rachadinha operacionalizada por Fabricio Queiroz, ex-PM e operador da família. O MP estima que 1,6 milhão de reais em espécie, devolvidos por assessores da Alerj, foram lavados por meio da loja de chocolates. O caso foi arquivado depois que o STF anulou as provas, em 2021). 

Quando a lancha zarpou, pararam no Alô Grau, um restaurante flutuante no lago, onde compraram mais comida e bebida. A conta, paga por Barão, ficou em 1.949 reais. O barco então circulou pelo Lago Paranoá. O Sol era inclemente e os tripulantes temiam que algum drone do entorno os registrasse em seu veraneio pandêmico. Santini e Flávio Bolsonaro ficaram sem camisa. Santini exagerou na bebida. À certa altura, Flávio desceu à cabina com uma das garotas. Ela não foi a única a fazer esse caminho acompanhada do senador naquela tarde. Santini e Trento não desceram. Passaram a maior parte do tempo na proa da embarcação.

O passeio de barco se encerrou por volta de 15 horas. Mas havia ainda uma surpresa. Com o barco já atracado no deck, Danilo Trento, o interessado em vender vacina para o governo, quis presentear Flávio Bolsonaro com um mimo. Ele tirou de seu pulso um relógio Rolex, com pulseira em tom prateado, e colocou no pulso do senador. Flávio Bolsonaro foi embora usando o novo presente.

Terminado o passeio, era hora de partir. Amigo e sócio de Flávio Bolsonaro, Santini pediu carona para voar de Brasília para São Paulo no mesmo jatinho em que estavam os dois empresários, o agente de turismo e as garotas. Ele então foi até o hotel onde estava hospedado, o Royal Tulip Brasília Alvorada, localizado próximo ao Palácio da Alvorada, para pegar as suas coisas.

A aeronave decolou de Brasília às 17h55 e aterrissou em São Paulo às 19h13. Pouco tempo depois, às 20h30, o consórcio de imprensa divulgaria os dados de óbitos por Covid naquele dia: 1.110 pessoas.

Ainda que aprimorada, ramificada e institucionalizada por Daniel Vorcaro, que contava com uma equipe de três promoters para oferecer serviços sexuais a autoridades, de políticos a ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal, a prostituição como engrenagem de lobby e corrupção não foi inventada pelo dono do Banco Master. Em Brasília, a moeda extrapola reais e dólares e contempla também encontros privativos e discretos em lanchas e hotéis. “Esses eventos acontecem em dias de semana, que são menos concorridos. Em geral, os barcos ficam parados ao final da barragem, quando não há outros barcos nem sequer fiscalização”, diz um ex-assessor parlamentar que frequentou algumas festas em lanchas com prostitutas, duas delas na presença do próprio Flávio Bolsonaro (“uma antes e outra durante a pandemia”).

A regra tácita em todas as festas desse tipo, em que circulam políticos, juízes, desembargadores e outros poderosos em atividades subterrâneas, é que as garotas de programa passem por uma revista. O uso de celular é vetado e, para não haver risco de vazamentos, as bolsas das profissionais são confiscadas. Em geral, nesses encontros, há mais mulheres que homens. “Uma média de duas a três mulheres por convidado”, diz uma participante que pede para não ter seu nome divulgado por temer por sua segurança. “As lanchas têm dois andares, com uma ou duas cabines.”

Em setembro deste ano, o jornalista Rodrigo Rangel publicou uma reportagem no site PlatôBR mostrando como Alexandre Santini, que estava no passeio de lancha no Paranoá, promoveu encontros de Flávio Bolsonaro com garotas de programa. Em uma outra coincidência, a reportagem de Rangel também noticia que o senador recebeu o mesmo mimo: um relógio Rolex. De acordo com o material do PlatôBR, tratava-se de um relógio modelo Submariner Date, avaliado em 305 mil reais. Foi comprado pelo advogado Alan Belaciano, que representava interesses privados junto a autoridades de Brasília.

Para reconstituir o passeio de lancha do dia 17 de julho de 2020, a piauí conversou com uma pessoa que estava na embarcação sob a condição de não revelar sua identidade, cruzou quebras de sigilo de Barão, Maximiano e Trento enviados às CPIs da Pandemia, do INSS e do Crime Organizado, ouviu dois pilotos, um ex-deputado, três assessores parlamentares e uma garota de programa que não participou daquele evento, mas já esteve em outros similares. A reportagem ainda confrontou os dados aéreos obtidos na apuração com os de uma plataforma de rastreamento de voos em tempo real.

Raphael Barão funcionava como uma espécie de concierge das viagens de Trento e Maximiano. Além de organizar a logística, também viajava junto. Apenas em 2020, ano em que aconteceu o passeio de lancha no Paranoá, a Barão Turismo recebeu cerca de 4 milhões de reais das empresas que integravam o grupo econômico da Precisa Medicamentos. Quando a turma da Precisa viajou à Índia para negociar com a Bharat Biotech, Barão também organizou a viagem e dela participou. Como o grupo em torno da Precisa tornou-se alvo da CPI da Pandemia e a prestação de serviços de turismo não foi devidamente comprovada no período por Barão, as autoridades acabaram quebrando seu sigilo e o de sua agência, assim como os de Maximiano e Trento, altamente envolvidos nas suspeitas de irregularidades na compra da vacina.

Nas sessões da CPI realizadas em agosto e setembro de 2021, um ano depois do passeio de lancha, o senador Randolfe Rodrigues afirmou que Barão mantinha uma empresa nos Estados Unidos usada para lavar dinheiro de Trento. O empresário negou. O senador Renan Calheiros quis saber de Maximiano se Flávio Bolsonaro havia intermediado o acesso da Precisa ao alto escalão do Ministério da Saúde. Maximiano negou. Calheiros perguntou, então, se fora Flávio quem aproximara a empresa do presidente Jair Bolsonaro, para que ele telefonasse ao primeiro-ministro da Índia, Narendra Modi, e referendasse o negócio com a Bharat Biotech. Maximiano não respondeu, invocando o direito ao silêncio. Randolfe Rodrigues então perguntou a Trento se ele conhecia alguém da família Bolsonaro. Houve, enfim, uma resposta afirmativa. “Já estive em eventos institucionais com o senador Flávio”, disse Trento, antes de se corrigir: “Eventos públicos, não institucionais, desculpa.”

Flávio Bolsonaro, por sua vez, saiu publicamente em defesa da Precisa Medicamentos durante a CPI. Na oitiva de Emanuela Medrades, diretora da empresa, chegou a congratulá-la: “Cabe aqui um parabéns também público, pelo fato de a senhora, ao representar o laboratório indiano, ter batalhado para que fosse economizado dinheiro público”, afirmou. O elogio destoava dos valores negociados: o contrato da Covaxin previa o pagamento de 80 reais por dose, enquanto a Pfizer oferecia sua vacina por cerca de 56,30 reais e a AstraZeneca, por 18 reais.

As negociações haviam despertado suspeitas no servidor do Ministério da Saúde Luis Ricardo Miranda, irmão do então deputado Luis Miranda, que denunciou publicamente as irregularidades. O contrato acabou sem que o primeiro pagamento fosse realizado. Flávio, porém, ironizava o escândalo. “É a primeira vez que eu vejo, na minha vida, um desvio de dinheiro público em que não tem um real que foi pago. Que dinheiro público? Então, eu fico satisfeito e até concordo com a oposição quando eles dizem que esse é o maior escândalo de corrupção do governo Bolsonaro, porque, no maior escândalo de governo, de corrupção, segundo eles, não houve corrupção.”

O relatório final da CPI recomendou o indiciamento de 78 pessoas, entre elas Flávio Bolsonaro, Danilo Trento e Francisco Maximiano.

Em 20 de outubro de 2020, três meses depois do passeio de lancha, a proximidade com Flávio já havia rendido à dupla Trento e Maximiano uma demonstração concreta de prestígio. O senador abriu caminho para que Maximiano e outro executivo de sua empresa fossem recebidos pelo presidente do Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES), Gustavo Montezano. A reunião, realizada virtualmente em razão da pandemia, tinha como objetivo discutir linhas de financiamento para uma nova empresa de Maximiano no setor de telecomunicações. Para deixar claro que endossava a empreitada, Flávio participou da ligação.

Quando a agenda veio a público, numa reportagem da Veja, o BNDES explicou que haviam ocorrido duas reuniões, uma delas com a presença de Montezano, e que nenhum financiamento fora contratado. Flávio, por sua vez, publicou um vídeo em que admitia ter “amigos em comum” com Maximiano em Brasília, mas negava manter com ele qualquer “relação comercial ou financeira”. “O que eu fiz sim foi pedir ao presidente do BNDES que ouvisse uma boa ideia que foi trazida pelo senhor Maximiano, para que o BNDES pudesse entender e, quem sabe, dar algum suporte para levar internet para o Norte e Nordeste”, justificou.

A reunião com Maximiano foi o único encontro oficial de Flávio com o BNDES, na condição de autoridade e sem outros parlamentares, desde o início da gestão de Montezano, em julho de 2019, até aquele momento. Para o presidente do banco, tampouco se tratava de uma agenda corriqueira. Montezano recebia com frequência deputados e senadores, individualmente ou em grupo. O incomum era que chegassem acompanhados de um empresário amigo, interessado em financiamento público.

Àquela altura, Flávio Bolsonaro já demonstrava interesse pelo mercado de telecomunicações. Frequentava viagens promovidas pelo senador Ciro Nogueira e pelo então ministro das Comunicações, Fábio Faria, para eventos internacionais do setor. Os parlamentares que integravam o grupo de trabalho responsável por acompanhar o leilão do 5G no Brasil, porém, não eram convidados para essas viagens.

Uma das viagens internacionais de Flávio como senador, a Las Vegas, em janeiro de 2020, coincidiu com a de Danilo Trento. Foi antes da pandemia e do passeio de lancha. A viagem custou 12,5 mil reais aos cofres do Senado apenas em diárias. Na programação, Flávio visitou o ateliê de Romero Britto, almoçou com executivos de uma empresa de navios turísticos e hotéis-cassinos e fez “visitas técnicas” acompanhado do então presidente da Embratur, Gilson Machado Neto, o sanfoneiro. Encontrou-se até com Sheldon Adelson, magnata dos cassinos que morreria no ano seguinte. No pedido de autorização da viagem ao Senado, Flávio declarara que seu objetivo era “promover o turismo brasileiro no mercado internacional”, atrair cruzeiros e estimular o “investimento e instalação de novos resorts”.

Como Trento também estivera em Las Vegas exatamente naquele período, a CPI da Pandemia interessou-se em saber se ele havia viajado na companhia de algum senador. “Sr. Senador, com todo o respeito e baseado no meu habeas corpus, eu irei permanecer em silêncio”, respondeu. Diante da recusa de Trento em esclarecer o episódio, Flávio apressou-se em divulgar uma nota: “O senador nunca se reuniu com o Sr. Danilo Berndt Trento em Las Vegas, nem possui vínculo de qualquer espécie com o mesmo.”

Las Vegas não seria a última ocasião em que Flávio Bolsonaro apareceria associado ao universo dos cassinos. Em janeiro de 2025, segundo o colunista Lauro Jardim, do jornal O Globo, o senador passou o fim de semana anterior à posse de Donald Trump em Miami, no Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Estava acompanhado do amigo Willer Tomaz, com quem é suspeito de manter uma sociedade oculta numa bet, conforme revelou a piauí. Segundo Jardim, a dupla passou a madrugada numa sala de jogos reservada. Flávio acompanhou Tomaz até o caixa do cassino ao fim da noitada, às 6h30. Lá, o amigo sacou 236 mil dólares em dinheiro vivo.

Na noite da última terça-feira, 20 de outubro, O Globo revelou que Tomaz havia pago a um site para desativar links com informações que o desagradavam. Um deles remetia a uma notícia cujo título, à luz dessas viagens, ganhava especial interesse: “Flávio Bolsonaro é contra PL dos Jogos, mas frequenta cassinos e se reúne com operadoras em Las Vegas.”

Até o fechamento desta reportagem, Flavio Bolsonaro não se manifestou. Também procurado, Danilo Trento não atendeu às ligações da piauí e, por mensagem, pediu para antecipar o assunto por estar em uma “call”. Uma vez informado sobre os detalhes da pauta – os voos, a confraternização na lancha e o Rolex –, interrompeu a comunicação. A reportagem também procurou os advogados de Francisco Maximiliano, por mensagem de WhatsApp e por e-mail, mas não obteve retorno até o fechamento desta reportagem. 

PIAUI 

 

 

Já vi tira feita com IA e é uma coisa meio assustadora, diz Laerte

  

Aos 75, cartunista reflete sobre interpretação de obras satíricas e possibilidades cataclísmicas da IA

'Overman', filme inspirado em herói 'altamente não recomendável' da artista, estreia nesta quinta nos cinemas

 

Jullia Gouveia

 Um homem enorme, feito de puro músculo, com máscara, capa e vestes roxas e amarelas coladas, está parado, em pé, no meio de um engarrafamento. "Ei, Overman, não pode voar?", pergunta um motorista. "Hoje não. Rodízio", responde o super-herói. Foi essa a tira que introduziu, em 1998, nesta Folha, o herói satírico da cartunista Laerte.

Overman, diz a artista, não é um personagem de caráter muito firme. "Ele mora num muquifo, divide o quarto com um cara e aceita qualquer possibilidade desse negócio. Qualquer coisa cabe nele. Dizer que ele é um anti-herói seria redundante", afirma.

A figura que começou como uma paródia de quadrinhos americanos mergulhada na realidade brasileira estreia nos cinemas brasileiros nesta quinta (22), no longa homônimo estrelado por Caco Ciocler, dirigido por Tomás Portella e produzido por Iafa Britz.

Para a cartunista, o filme deu ao personagem uma história "mais comprida", diferente das tiras "picadas" com humor absurdo e vilões caricatos, como o Capitalista Imundo e o Maníaco Flatulento. Nas telonas, Overman é um super-herói decadente que recebe uma proposta para trabalhar na Secretaria de Segurança Pública e enxerga na oportunidade uma chance de recuperar seu propósito.

Ele só faz sexo às sextas-feiras, e não consegue nem pensar em outra coisa quando chega esse dia especial. "Qualquer coisa do Overman funciona como um viés crítico, altamente não recomendável. Aquilo ali é assédio puro", explica a cartunista.

O longa é uma coprodução de Star Original Productions, FSA e RioFilme, com distribuição da Migdal Filmes e codistribuição da Elo Studios. A comunicação e a estratégia digital são da WIP. 

Se fosse criado hoje, reflete Laerte, o personagem talvez fosse mais político. Em uma tira publicada durante o governo de Jair Bolsonaro, o herói foi contratado para acabar com as manifestações contrárias ao então presidente —o que terminou em "desastres espantosos".

A distância entre o que a cartunista pretende dizer e o que o público entende também se tornou parte de sua trajetória. Presente na alfabetização das últimas gerações através da onipresença de suas tiras em livros didáticos, a quadrinista passou a ser perseguida, nos últimos anos, pelo meme "Laerte, não entendi!", que costuma vir acompanhado de um lobisomem rasgando suas roupas em agonia pela incapacidade de interpretar os quadros.

Hoje, ela entra na piada —e lançou até uma camiseta com a estampa do licantropo em parceria com a marca Chico Rei. Mas também leva a sério as dificuldades de interpretação relatadas. "Para quem está fazendo a história, as coisas estão muito claras, mas, para quem está lendo, não. Então, quando é uma falha minha, gosto de perceber onde fiz bobagem e evitar ou consertar."

"O humor é uma linguagem muito ampla. Eu não sou poeta, mas, dentro do meu trabalho de quadrinhos, gosto da ideia de aquilo ser uma linguagem poética também. E a linguagem poética comporta mecânicas e dinâmicas de narrativa que são para ser questionadas. Você não lê João Cabral de Melo Neto ou Drummond e fica se questionando, porque isso é contexto. Você entra no universo da poesia e deixa aquilo chegar até você", afirma.

O que a artista acha problemático, porém, é a ideia de que tudo precisa ser entendido e tem uma resposta correta. "A pessoa vai procurando ler com os olhos de quem lê uma fábula, de quem espera uma moral no fim da história. E aí não tem moral, ou não tem a moral que ela esperava, enfim, e a pessoa fica meio perdida. É uma atenção específica dos dias de hoje, uma atenção moral, e eu não consigo trabalhar com isso."

Ela cita, por exemplo, a música 'Gol Anulado', de João Bosco, lançada em 1976, que foi alvo de críticas por retratar um episódio de violência doméstica do ponto de vista do agressor.

"Aquela frase, 'tirei sem pensar o cinto e bati até cansar', não era nem um pouco questionada na época em que foi escrita, porque aquela história é entendida como a de uma personagem abusiva. Hoje, as pessoas param na frase. 'Como assim, tirou o cinto e bateu? Não pode, isso é criminoso!'. É claro que é criminoso", afirma.

O que a artista produz hoje, diz, também está ligado ao conhecimento do mundo, aos lugares que frequentou e às pessoas que conheceu. "Eu gosto de ter ideias lavando louça, mas, de um modo geral, trabalho com várias possibilidades de construção. Uma delas é o acaso mesmo", afirma.

"Eu tenho uma certa idade. Então, a minha experiência de vida, de coisas que eu vi, observei e tal, ocupa um espaço cada vez maior na minha cabeça. Eu nunca tive 75 anos. É a primeira vez, e é difícil manter um olhar atento, aberto, interessado em tudo", diz Laerte.

Olhando para o momento atual, Laerte considera que a mídia digital representou uma revolução para os artistas, mas vê na inteligência artificial um problema profundo, com potencial para afetar toda a sociedade. "Já vi tira feita com IA, não era ruim nem boa em si, mas é uma coisa meio assustadora. Alguém fez essa ilustração sem precisar desenhar. Você pode instruir a máquina para fazer o traço do Stan Lee, do Quino, do Ziraldo."

Para ela, Overman e seus vilões esdrúxulos continuam a dialogar com os dias de hoje. "O capitalista continua aí, tão imundo quanto. Mas o próprio termo 'Capitalista Imundo' e a criação desse personagem é um comentário não só sobre o capitalismo, mas sobre esse jargão de uma certa esquerda também. Chamar assim já o veste com uma capa moral, e eu não sei se isso é uma boa para uma análise ponderada nesse mundo que a gente vive hoje, que é complexo."

_{com DIEGO ALEJANDRO, JULLIA GOUVEIA e KARINA MATIAS}

_UOL  

Aos 75, a cartunista Laerte diz ser difícil manter um olhar atento e interessado a tudo - Eduardo Knapp/Folhapress

 

 

 

The Lucas Museum’s Architect Wants to Help You Escape From Reality

 

 

 Ma Yansong, China’s reigning starchitect, lets his buildings wrapped in nature do the shouting.

 By Sam Lubell

 At a preview this month for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, its lead architect, Ma Yansong, flashing a faint, wry smile, led a phalanx of some 20 reporters around the building. Only about four or five could hear him. Some journalists circled the group, angling to get closer. Many just gave up and watched the tour as sort of an abstract performance.

Ma doesn’t say much; and when he does it’s in phrases that often trail away. Images have always been his most forceful language. And the exuberant visions he now produces, in three dimensions, have helped him become one of the world’s most prominent architects.

Ma is the founder of the Beijing-based firm MAD Architects. Now 50, he leads a team that has completed major cultural and residential projects in 16 countries and counting. Their signature is hard-to-believe designs that do all of the shouting — etched towers churning like hula-hooping women; a museum honed like an ancient stone; an opera house resembling a mountain, bursting from the ground.

At the Lucas Museum, which opened Tuesday, they’ve crafted a curvaceous, $1 billion-plus landmark covered in swirling greenery that appears to levitate over Exposition Park, forming a bridge over a shaded plaza and then tapering down into a rolling landscape.

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The Lucas Museum’s twisting roof is planted with wildflowers, long grasses and coarse scrubs.Credit...Adam Amengual for The New York Times

MAD’s otherworldly buildings enliven and soften their surroundings. But Ma’s target is larger: the modern city itself.

“City planning is all about function, order, technology,” he told me, sitting in the conference room of MAD’s Santa Monica office, just a few blocks from the beach. “Where is the emotion?”

Inventing Worlds

By weaving nature, futuristic design and feeling into the urban core, Ma hopes to help overturn expectations for cities where boxes, grids and barriers are the norm. The heart of MAD’s approach is freedom: Freedom of movement, freedom from the humdrum, and freedom from rigid expectations of what should surround us.

“People need to mentally escape from reality,” Ma said. “Architecture can help.”

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The lobby of the Lucas Museum’s sinuous education wing sports a suspended Naboo Royal N-1 Starfighter from “Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace.” Credit...Adam Amengual for The New York Times

For Ma, escape has been an art form since he was a child, the son of two engineers in one of Beijing’s traditional hutongs — the dense alleyways packed with residential courtyards — near the Forbidden City. His family occupied a small room, built a kitchen along their courtyard and used a public toilet.

His first route out of reality was on paper. Each month he waited for Chinese magazines like Young Science and We Love Science, with their exuberant rockets and satellites rendered in atmospheric watercolors, and for comic books like “Astro Boy” and “Star Wars.” They showed him that images blurring fantasy and reality could make people believe another world was possible. A budding artist, he scribbled his own imaginary worlds: futuristic buildings and cities, strange animals.

His next goal was to become a filmmaker — what better way to transport people than the big screen? — but a professor at the Beijing Film Academy saw his drawings and suggested architecture, a profession booming as China furiously remade itself.

The Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, which was, as Ma put it, “not so systematic about education,” gave him room to tinker and teach himself. The school’s well-stocked library introduced him to Frank Gehry and other architects who treated buildings as far more than practical vessels. “I saw architecture could be art,” Ma said.

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Ma examines a model of the museum on display in a fourth-floor gallery.Credit...Sela Shiloni for The New York Times

He decided to broaden his mind, and his prospects, in America. “I wanted to see that crazy architecture in the magazines,” he said. Scholarships carried him first to the University of Arizona, then to Yale. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman and Robert A.M. Stern taught him that architecture could go in any direction — not the one line he was shown in China.

He interned briefly for both Eisenman and Stern. But it was Hadid’s work, with its untethered beauty and experimental digital forms that felt to him like natural forces in motion: “A big wave through the site,” Ma described it. “Something growing out of the place.”

After graduating in 2002, Ma spent about a year at Hadid’s London office, where he met a Japanese architect, Yosuke Hayano, who had studied at London’s avant-garde Architectural Association. Both were soon sent to Beijing, working for Hadid by day and entering competitions by night. They admired her practice but chafed at the dominance of foreign architects in China’s building frenzy, when almost anything modern was assumed to be “Western.” They wanted the future of China to be built from within.

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Evoking curvaceous bodies, the Absolute Tower (2012) in Mississauga, Ontario, was MAD’s first major international competition win. A second followed.Credit...Iwan Baan

Soon joined by Dang Qun, a Chinese architect educated at Iowa State University, whom Ma met through an email forum, they formed MAD in 2004. Ma, who remains the firm’s leader and public face, often imagines and sketches a project’s core concept. Hayano brings logic, attention to detail and technical judgment. Dang coordinates MAD’s global teams, consultants, clients and construction.

Ma adopted Hadid’s fluid, algorithmically fueled approach, but bent it in a gentler direction. Where Hadid’s work, like the architect herself, was forceful, imposing its will on its site, Ma would defer to it — more a friendly alien than a conquering one.

Jianfei Zhu, professor of East Asian Architecture at Newcastle University in England, sees a “precious lightness” to Ma’s work.

His hand-sketched spaces, translated into digital form, also allowed for intuitive and human unpredictability.

“You’re doing art, not engineering,” Ma said. “There’s some method, some logic, but there’s also something unexpected …strange.”

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The lobby of the Harbin Opera House (2016) in Heilongjiang Province, China, envelops a warm, carved-wood theater in sweeping white surfaces. They evoke the region’s snowy climate.Credit...Hufton+Crow, via MAD Architects

There was another development humming through MAD’s work: Ma’s architecture was inspired by natural forms, but he was most interested in capturing the feelings that nature created in people — how sitting under a tree canopy, or gazing at a wide horizon could induce a state of calm, or how looking down from a bluff could spark a sense of thrill and discovery.

A Breakthrough

MAD developed competition entries for two years, without success. Then in 2006 came a breakthrough: It won an international competition with a design for the 56-story residential Absolute Tower in Mississauga, Ontario, near Toronto. The design, edged with rippling balconies, shifted its floor plan slightly on every level, making the building seem to twist curvaceously. It was quickly nicknamed the Marilyn Monroe tower and sold out, prompting the developer to commission a second tower. And it became, in China, a geopolitical event: A young Beijing firm had won a major project in the West while Western architects were dominating China’s building boom.

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Early career work by MAD Architects, Chaoyang Park Plaza (2017), recalls mountain peaks rising from a shared “waterfall” atrium.Credit...Hufton+Crow, via MAD Architects

The victory gave the firm the cachet to win more work, at home and abroad. Around the same time, MAD was commissioned to design the Ordos Museum in Kangbashi, a new city in the semiarid grasslands of Inner Mongolia. The design, a tawny, aluminum-wrapped boulder concealing luminous interior caverns and some 40,000 objects of regional and cultural history, floated atop a striated, pale stone terrace. It captured the seductive, distant quality of Ma’s early work, a polished landmark evoking nature but not quite fused with it. Ma, too, cultivated what one friend called his “meta-mystery vibe.”

As MAD’s workload grew, it became known for concocting mesmerizing forms. Global architecture — nowhere more so than in China — was testing the limits of modern materials and new digital tools. The firm’s Harbin Opera House in northern China appeared to be shaped by wind and water, with a sinuous white aluminum skin. At Beijing’s Chaoyang Park Plaza, black glass towers, sculpted as peaks and valleys, were connected by a glass atrium that evoked a waterfall.

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Ma’s memories of childhood inspired the YueCheng Courtyard Kindergarten in Beijing completed in 2020. It features a colorful, undulating rooftop playground that loops around trees and historic buildings.Credit...ArchExist, via MAD Architects

Some critics called MAD’s approach superficial, exalting monumental images that were oblivious to their sites or culture. In 2017, The Guardian’s critic Oliver Wainwright called Ma China’s “homegrown conjurer of sinuous, globular forms” with a “penchant for blobs.” Others regarded the buildings as expensive selfie backgrounds, or disembodied objects hiding their engineering behind smooth facades.

Some Chinese designers initially distrusted the work because it didn’t look “particularly Chinese,” Zhu, the professor, said.

Ma, who considers his architecture neither strictly Chinese nor strictly global, doesn’t deny the importance of form and illusion in his fantastical work. But he adds that its disconnect with “context” is precisely his point — a critique of the way modern cities have lost touch with nature and feeling.

In “Shanshui City,” MAD’s manifesto introduced in 2013, Ma found an ancient Eastern context for his futuristic work: Chinese mountain-and-water inkwash paintings, known as “shanshui,” where buildings and terrain shared the same spirit. Even the hutongs that Ma despised in his youth, which were threaded among trees, lakes and historic buildings, provided inspiration for the idea of nature and habitation harmonizing.

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At Shenzhen Bay Culture Square (2026), boulder-shaped cultural buildings nestle into an artificial terrain. Ma is “trying to reconnect people and societies to things that have been lost in our relentless search for progress,” said Aric Chen, curator of a museum exhibit on the designer.Credit...Zhu Yumeng, via MAD Architects

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At Quzhou Sports Park (2026), stadiums disappear beneath a rolling green landscape, their craterlike forms resembling a chain of volcanic hills.Credit...Aogvision, via MAD Architects

An Evolution

Shortly after “Shanshui City” was introduced, Ma received an invitation from the master creator of engulfing worlds, George Lucas, to compete for his new art museum then being considered for the Chicago waterfront. Lucas had been inspired by MAD’s Ordos Museum, which touched down in a strange world “like a spaceship in the desert,” he told Ma. (The architect, in turn, remembers Ordos being vaguely inspired by the Naboo Royal Starship from “Star Wars.”) MAD won the competition but the project got bogged down in legal battles for years.

Ma’s subsequent plan for Lucas’s museum in Los Angeles helped set the stage for his firm’s evolution from singular objects to experiential topographies — “Shanshui” writ large.

The museum’s roof is planted with alpine grasses and shrubs, woven with curved pathways. Its galleries, though fairly conventional, are edged with wide glass lookouts and a 90-foot-wide oculus, transporting the eye to the sky and city. Its podium sprouts trees and gardens, then pours down into an 11-acre park by Studio-MLA over the museum’s underground parking.

Around the world, his projects have been “swallowed” by nature, he said. (Ma calls this “making architecture weaker and weaker” so that landscape and human experience can become stronger.)

At Quzhou Sports Park in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province, stadiums rise like volcanic craters from rolling greenery. At Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, buildings nestle in an artificial terrain and their roofs become public parks. In a courtyard kindergarten in Beijing, a colorful, undulating rooftop playground weaves around mature trees and historic courtyards.

Ma, now gray around the temples, has changed, too. He seems more at ease, quicker to smile and laugh. Like his newer work, he’s less aloof, more approachable. “He’s still ambitious, but I think he has achieved enough of a level of success to feel more comfortable in his skin,” said Aric Chen, director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation and curator of the exhibition, “Ma Yansong: Architecture and Emotion,” at Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut in 2024.

Ma said his focus is on creating experience rather than spectacle. “I think I’m more clear about what people need. It’s not only about me.”

With more than 30 projects ongoing, Ma constantly jets around the world from his base in Beijing, where he and his wife, Qiushi Yu, are raising their daughter. His second home is Los Angeles, where his two sons went to high school. Ma now stays at Airbnb’s here after losing his Pacific Palisades home in the 2025 fires.

Ma’s latest ambition is to extend his approach, merging architecture with landscape across neighborhoods and even cities. MAD’s Baiziwan social housing project in Beijing contains 4,000 apartments with six enclaves linked by a “floating garden.” He’s now designing an entire district outside Shanghai with towers, malls, multilevel landscapes, and walking areas.

It’s safe to assume the Shanghai project won’t look or act like the world we know, thanks to what Chen calls Ma’s “deeply ingrained rebellious streak.” But what makes Ma’s work resonate at any scale, Chen said, is its ability to tap into an exuberant vision based in feeling.

“He’s trying to reconnect people and societies to things that have been lost in our relentless search for progress,” Chen added. “We thought we could rationalize everything. Look where it’s gotten us.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES