Patrick Stewart Dies at 86: Star Trek’s Captain Picard and X-Men’s Professor X

Sir Patrick Stewart died Wednesday, Oct. 28, at his home in Los Angeles at age 86, after what his family called a “brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. The British actor, known worldwide as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and Professor X in the “X-Men” films, was a Royal Shakespeare Company stage veteran.

His death was announced Thursday in a statement posted on his Instagram account, the BBC reported. Tributes from Hollywood, Broadway and the British stage followed within hours.

From Mirfield to the Royal Shakespeare Company

Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, according to the Guardian’s obituary. At Mirfield secondary school, his English teacher, Cecil Dormand, spotted a potential actor and put a copy of Shakespeare in his hands. Stewart left school at 15 to work as a furniture salesman and in local journalism, spending his spare time in amateur dramatics before winning a grant to the Bristol Old Vic school in the late 1950s.

His professional stage debut came in 1958 at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln, followed by seasons in Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool in Shakespeare, Pinter and Brecht. That apprenticeship led to a long run of major roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s and 1970s. On British television in that era he played Sejanus in “I, Claudius” and a silent Soviet intelligence officer in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982).

Picard, Professor X and global fame

The role that made him a star arrived in 1987. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987-94) rebooted the 1960s series, and Stewart’s Picard became, in the Guardian’s words, “the show’s moral centre and human heart.” The Guardian reported that American audiences for the series exceeded 30 million and that the show won 19 Emmys.

After “Star Trek” moved to the movies in 1994, Stewart’s career overlapped with a second science-fiction franchise. By 2017 he had appeared in seven “X-Men” outings as Charles Xavier, the mind-reading founder and mentor of the mutant team, opposite his longtime friend Ian McKellen as Magneto. He also lampooned his own grand image in cameos on Ricky Gervais’s “Extras” (2005) and the final season of “Frasier.”

The loss comes the same week that “Star Trek” fans mourned another cast member: Walter Koenig, Chekov in the original series, died at 90.

A return to the stage

Stewart never left the theater for long. In 1991 he launched a solo performance of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” in New York, playing about 40 characters on a bare stage; it came to London’s Old Vic in 1993 and won him an Olivier award. He won a second Olivier in 2008 for playing both Claudius and the Ghost in David Tennant’s “Hamlet.” In 2009 he and McKellen played the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” a production that toured the U.K., played the Haymarket in London and reached Broadway in 2013 alongside Pinter’s “No Man’s Land.”

He was made an OBE in 2001 and knighted in 2010, and he served as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield from 2004 to 2015. The BBC noted that he won a Grammy and two Olivier Awards, though never an Oscar. Away from acting, he became an ambassador for the domestic abuse charity Refuge in 2007 after witnessing repeated violence during his childhood, the BBC reported.

He kept working into his 80s. In a July interview with TV Insider, quoted by the BBC, he said: “I can’t imagine ever officially ‘retiring.’ I’ll always and forever be an actor.”

Tributes to Patrick Stewart

McKellen, who officiated Stewart’s 2013 wedding to singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell, called him “a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love,” and described him as the “most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic,” the BBC reported. William Shatner, the original Captain Kirk, said Stewart “stood for the best of us,” and George Takei called him an “irreplaceable legend.”

Hugh Jackman, his “X-Men” co-star, called him “one of the greats.” The Royal Shakespeare Company called him a “colossus of stage and screen,” and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said he “brought a tenderness to his characters that made us feel we knew them.” Fans gathered at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Stewart is survived by his wife, Sunny, and by two children, Daniel and Sophie, from his first marriage, according to the Guardian. For more entertainment coverage, see our report on the David Bowie immersive stage show.

Sources

• The Guardian: Sir Patrick Stewart obituary
• BBC News: Sir Ian McKellen leads tributes to ‘beloved actor’ Sir Patrick Stewart after death aged 86
• Associated Press: Patrick Stewart dies at 86