In this short excerpt from LIFE with STEWART, the aged movie star Nicholas Stewart has consented to his first interview in twenty years.  He recalls how it was that he got his start in motion pictures as the ambitious Toni Song asks the questions.

SONG

Mr. Stewart, how did you get started in motion pictures?

STEWART

My mother, she raised me by herself.  I was eight years old in 1939, scrawny little kid. I would get picked on a lot. My neighbor, Tommy Williamson, hit me one day and I ran home with a bloody nose.  I told my mother what happened, and she looked at me and grabbed me by the shoulders and said ‘Don’t back down to him.  You’ve got the strength of Cagney and Bogart’.  Of course, I didn’t know who Cagney and Bogart were.  I think my mother was secretly in love with James Cagney.  She promptly took me down to the cinema where their latest film “The Roaring Twenties” was playing.  From that day on, I was Cagney.

 SONG

And your first acting job?

STEWART

Nine years later.  I was 17.  I left home, and was delivering newspapers in Hollywood, but I spent most of my time hanging outside the Warner Brothers studio.  One day I see Cagney walking in and I yelled, ‘Hey Jimmy, you saved my life and my mother loves you.’  He comes over and asks if I want to be in pictures.  I about jumped down his throat.  He had just come back to Warner Bros and was shooting the gangster film “White Heat.”  He brought me on set and told the director to find something for me to do.   The rest is history.

SONG

Is that a true story?

STEWART

More or less.

(Note:  The premiere of LIFE with STEWART is May 23 at PenangPAC.  Nathan Guthrie plays Nicholas Stewart and Nicole Cheah plays Toni Song.)