Star Trek and X-Men star Patrick Stewart dies at 86
Mark Kennedy |
Patrick Stewart, the classically trained stage actor who scaled the Shakespearean canon and added gravitas to a Star Trek franchise and the X-Men films, has died at age 86.
Stewart died on Wednesday in Los Angeles, following “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said.
“We lost one of the greats of stage and screen today,” Hugh Jackman, a frequent Stewart co-star in the X-Men universe, said on social media.
“And, in my book, a tremendous friend and man. I learned so much from him. I will miss you, Patrick Stewart, all of my days.”
While best known as Professor Charles Xavier and Captain Jean-Luc Picard from the X-Men and Star Trek: The Next Generation series and films, respectively, Stewart spent more of his career onstage than in the X-Mansion or on the USS Enterprise.
Besides playing everyone from Claudius to Macbeth, he often performed a one-man rendition of A Christmas Carol and did West End and Broadway runs of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in repertory with longtime buddy Ian McKellen.
“He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love,” McKellen posted on social media.
He won three Olivier Awards, including one for playing Claudius in Hamlet opposite David Tennant.
And he had a Grammy – in 1996 for best spoken word album for his recording of Peter and the Wolf.
He achieved some of the best reviews of his career when he finally tackled Macbeth for the first time.
The production, under the direction of Rupert Goold, made its debut in 2007 at England’s Chichester Festival Theatre, switched to London’s West End and then moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music before transferring to Broadway in 2008.
Stewart’s performance earned him his sole Tony Award nomination.
Raised in Mirfield in Yorkshire, a working-class corner of northern England, the future 24th-century commander of a starship grew up without a bathroom in his house.
Stewart joined an amateur drama group at 12 and memorised Shakespeare for fun as a teen.
He won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, launching a career as a character actor.
He had been bald since he was 19 – alopecia runs in his family.
His father, a former regimental sergeant major in the British Army, was prone to outbursts of “repeated violence against my mother”, as Stewart wrote in a newspaper piece.
“Violence is always a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.”
In his memoir, Making It So, Stewart wrote about how he and his older brother Trevor braced for the nights when their dad came home drunk and angry, and attacked their mother.
“The stage would prove to be a safe space, a refuge from real life in which I could inhabit another person, living in another place and time,” he would write.
Stewart was accepted into the Royal Shakespeare Company and stayed for 14 years, playing everything from Mark Antony to Henry IV to Shylock to Oberon.
“People who were not in the company would say to me, ‘Give it a break. Why don’t you go somewhere else?’ And I would say, ‘To do what?'” he told the AP. “Telly?”
Stewart eventually left to look for more varied work, including the 1981 film Excalibur.
He had just done a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1987 when an interesting offer came along.
“I found myself in Hollywood shooting a syndicated science fiction series, which I was assured would fail.”
It didn’t, of course. Thanks to Stewart’s rich baritone and noble bearing, the Star Trek franchise ran for seven years, 178 episodes and produced four feature films.
He was known for his slogan “Make it so”.
His adoration for Shakespeare would serve him well when he began to play Jean-Luc Picard, a 24th-century starship commander.
“There is a formality to the way they speak and comport themselves that remind me of numerous Shakespearean situations I’d been in onstage. I should play Jean Luc, I realised, as if he were a character in Henry IV, which is about brave men,” Stewart wrote in his memoir.
Stewart revisited Picard in the TV series Star Trek: Picard.
Star Trek led to more work, including roles in the films Conspiracy Theory, LA Story and on Broadway, where he starred in The Tempest, The Caretaker and David Mamet’s A Life in the Theater.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010.
Stewart was first introduced as the character Xavier in the original X-Men trilogy, appearing in three films from 2000 to 2006.
He later returned in four more movies before Professor X’s death in 2017’s Logan.
He reappeared in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022 and reprised the role in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.
He also showed off his comedic chops on Seth MacFarlane’s American Dad!, and made appearances on Robot Chicken, Futurama and The Simpsons.
One of his last credits was with Jackman in 2026’s The Sheep Detectives.
He married Brooklyn songwriter and singer Sunny Ozell in 2013, with the actor’s X-Men co-star McKellen officiating.
He is also survived by two children, a daughter, Sophia, and a son, Daniel.
with Reuters
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