Patrick Stewart, Star Trek's Captain Picard, dies at 86

Patrick Stewart, the Shakespearean stage actor who became Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor X in the X-Men films, died on October 28 at his home in Los Angeles following Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia. He was 86.

The death was announced in a statement posted to Stewart's social media accounts by his longtime spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak. It said he was in the care of his wife, Sunny, and surrounded by family and friends. When he was diagnosed has not been disclosed.

Seven seasons on the Enterprise

Stewart took the part in 1987, with some trepidation about what an American television series would do to his stage career, Deadline reported. He played the Enterprise captain for seven seasons, through 1994, and carried the character into feature films, beginning with Star Trek Generations that year and Star Trek: First Contact in 1996.

He returned to the character in 2020 in Star Trek: Picard, the Paramount+ series that ran three seasons and ended in April 2023. Consequence described the show as a study of Picard at an advanced age, built around loss and time, and drawing on Stewart's own experience.

The job offer had come from Robert H. Justman, and Stewart accepted it knowing almost nothing about the franchise, Consequence reported. He knew little of the original series, and his advisers assured him the revival would earn him some money and then be cancelled.

Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek, did not want him in the part. Stewart later told the Hollywood Reporter that Roddenberry took a dislike to him almost immediately and did not want "a bald, middle-aged Englishman" in the role, RTE reported. He also said the series' success worked against him for a time, because directors would not cast the captain of the Starship Enterprise in their films.

Stewart had been dismissive of the genre before Trek, asking the Doctor Who actor Lalla Ward in 1980 why she did television rather than theatre and telling her he would not want to do science fiction, Consequence reported.

From Mirfield to the stage

Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the son of an army sergeant major who he later said beat his mother repeatedly, RTE reported. At 12 he enrolled in an eight-day drama course.

He quit school at 15 to work as a cub reporter on a local paper and walked out the day the editor told him to choose between acting and journalism. He sold furniture before winning a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school at 17. Losing his hair early, he wore a toupee to auditions and promised two actors for the price of one.

His first professional stage appearance came in 1959 at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in Cyrano de Bergerac, Deadline reported. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 and stayed until 1982. His television debut came on Coronation Street in 1967, and he reached Broadway in 1971 as Snout in Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I'd been playing leading Shakespearean roles for a number of years, and now I was getting leading roles on television, and I was being offered transfers into the West End and transfers to Broadway. And the idea that I would have to shut that down for six years was horrifying.

Before Picard, Stewart had worked steadily on British television, appearing in I, Claudius and Smiley's People and playing Lenin in Fall of Eagles, RTE reported. Consequence also placed him in David Lynch's Dune.

Stewart won three Olivier Awards: best supporting actor for Antony and Cleopatra in 1979 and for Hamlet in 2009, and best entertainment for his one-man A Christmas Carol in 1994. He was a Tony nominee for Macbeth, and in 1996 won a Grammy for the spoken-word children's album Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf. His four Emmy nominations fell in four different categories.

Professor X and the X-Men films

Stewart originated Charles Xavier, the X-Men's telepathic leader, in the 2000 film X-Men and stayed with the character through the sequels, including Logan in 2017 opposite Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Deadline reported. He played Xavier, as he had played Picard, as a commanding and introspective presence.

He returned as Xavier in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022, and Consequence described the coming Avengers: Doomsday as his last turn in the role. Deadline said the film is set for release on December 18.

Doomsday will be his ninth film as Xavier.

He played Captain Ahab in the 1998 miniseries Moby Dick, one of three performances that brought Emmy nominations. Consequence noted his Scrooge in TNT's 1999 production of A Christmas Carol, and RTE listed 1990s film work including the musical Let It Be Me and the romantic comedy Jeffrey.

Tributes from co-stars and executives

Tributes came from Kevin Feige, Ian McKellen, William Shatner, Seth MacFarlane, Hugh Jackman, Minnie Driver and Lea Thompson, in posts and statements gathered by the Hollywood Reporter. Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, said he first saw Stewart on the set of the first X-Men and was in awe of an actor he had known until then as Picard.

It was a true privilege to know him and to work with him. His legacy lives on not only in decades of extraordinary work, but in the many, many people he mentored. He will be deeply missed.

Shatner, who played James T. Kirk opposite Stewart in 1994's Star Trek: Generations, wrote on X that Stewart had brought intelligence and grace to everything he did, from the stage to the bridge of the Enterprise. "Captain Picard stood for the best of us, and so did the man who played him," Shatner wrote.

McKellen, who played Magneto opposite Stewart in the X-Men films, wrote on X that his friend was defined before anything else by Yorkshire. Stewart "wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love," he wrote.

In the final episode of Star Trek: Picard, in 2023, the character read a passage from Julius Caesar to the crew of the Enterprise, Consequence reported. He told Vanity Fair that year that he had been looking at a lot of Shakespeare, which he called, with Star Trek, the most important creative force in his life.

He published Making It So: A Memoir in 2023, and Deadline described him as a New York Times best-selling author whose career ran more than six decades.

A knighthood and a memoir

Queen Elizabeth II appointed Stewart an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2001 New Year Honours and knighted him in 2010 for services to drama, Deadline reported. The statement listed his work for human rights, survivors of domestic violence, refugees, veterans' mental health services and animal welfare. It also called him a Knight, Chancellor, motor sport enthusiast and lifelong Huddersfield Football fan.

Without intending to, Picard came closer and closer and closer to me, to Patrick. After a while, there was no place that I could identify where Jean-Luc left off and Patrick Stewart began.

The statement ended by quoting that memoir, in which Stewart wrote that Jean-Luc Picard had gone far beyond the bounds of normal human experience but stayed true to his earthbound roots, and in the end felt the call of home. Anyone affected by domestic violence can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.