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Patrick Stewart, legendary actor of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘X-Men,’ dies at 86
Patrick Stewart, the classically trained actor who added Shakespearean gravitas to the “Star Trek” and “X-Men” franchises, has died. He was 86.
Stewart died Wednesday in Los Angeles, following “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy Body Dementia, spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said. Stewart’s diagnoses had not been previously disclosed.
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.”
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 buddy Ian McKellen.
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 memorized 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.”
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?”
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 realized, as if he were a character in ‘Henry IV,’ which is about brave men,” Stewart wrote in his memoir.
Stewart died just a few days after Walter Koenig, another “Star Trek” icon, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov on the original NBC TV show from 1966 to 1969.
“What a heartbreaking week it has been,” William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the franchise, wrote on Instagram. “Sir Patrick Stewart was a friend, a colleague, and a magnificent actor. From the stage to the bridge of the Enterprise, he brought intelligence, grace, and a deep sense of humanity to everything he did.”
In July 1992, he and supermodel Cindy Crawford were on the cover of TV Guide’s “Top Turn-Ons,” based on a readers’ poll. In his memoir, Stewart wrote: “Absurd.”
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 aboard Seth MacFarlane’s Starz show “Blunt Talk” for two series and voiced Poop in “The Emoji Movie.” He made appearances on “Robot Chicken,” “Futurama” and “The Simpsons” (in one episode, Homer loses his hair, and Stewart tells him it’s great to be bald.) One of his last credits was with Jackman in 2026’s “The Sheep Detectives.”
(Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File)
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