Patrick Stewart Dies at 86: The Shakespeare Actor Who Was Told Star Trek Would Fail

Sir Patrick Stewart, the Shakespearean actor who became Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier for millions of fans, 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.

He was a stage actor first and always.

But it was what he brought from the stage to science fiction and superhero films that made him one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.

From Yorkshire to the Royal Shakespeare Company

Stewart was raised in Mirfield, a working class corner of Yorkshire in northern England, in a house without a bathroom. He joined an amateur drama group at 12 and memorized Shakespeare for fun as a teenager.

A scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School launched his career as a character actor. He was bald by 19, as alopecia runs in his family.

He spent 14 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing everything from Mark Antony to Henry IV to Shylock to Oberon. Friends outside the company would tell him to move on, but he couldn’t see what else he would do. Television wasn’t exactly tempting.

The show he was told would fail

Stewart eventually left the company looking for more varied work, including the 1981 film “Excalibur.” In 1987, fresh off a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, he ended up in Hollywood shooting a syndicated science fiction series that he was told wouldn’t last.

It did.

Star Trek: The Next Generation ran for seven years and 178 episodes, then produced four feature films. His rich baritone and noble bearing made Picard the anchor of the franchise, and “Make it so” became his catchphrase.

Playing Picard like Shakespeare

Stewart didn’t treat the role as a step down from the classics. He treated it as one of them.

In his memoir, “Making It So,” he wrote that the formal way the Starfleet characters spoke and carried themselves reminded him of the Shakespeare plays he’d done onstage. He decided to play Picard as if he were a character in “Henry IV.”

Even on set, he made room for the Bard. He set up the Paramount Shakespeare Company, a weekend morning workshop open to any actor who wanted to join.

The success of the show opened doors to films like “L.A. Story” and “Conspiracy Theory.” Decades later, he returned to the role in the series Star Trek: Picard.

Professor X and the superhero era

In 2000, Stewart stepped into another role that would define a generation of moviegoers: Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men.

He played the leader of the X-Men in three films between 2000 and 2006, then returned for four more, ending with Professor X’s death in 2017’s Logan. He made one more appearance as the character in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022.

Across two of the biggest franchises in film and television, Stewart brought the same thing: a classically trained actor’s weight to stories that could easily have been played for camp. It’s a big reason both characters still hold up.

He never left the stage

Hollywood fame never pulled Stewart away from theatre.

On Broadway he starred in “The Tempest,” “The Caretaker” and David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater.” He often performed a one-man version 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” alongside his friend Ian McKellen.

Some of the best reviews of his career came when he finally played Macbeth. The production, directed by Rupert Goold, opened in May 2007 at England’s Chichester Festival Theatre, moved to London’s West End and then the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and transferred to Broadway in 2008.

It earned him his only Tony Award nomination, and critics at The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph and The New York Times all praised the performance.

He had waited nearly 50 years for that role. Stewart learned the play at 14 and memorized every soliloquy simply because he loved them, which meant that decades later, those were the parts he didn’t have to learn.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in June 2010.

A sense of humour to match

Stewart was happy to send up his own serious image. He starred in two seasons of Seth MacFarlane’s Starz comedy “Blunt Talk,” voiced Poop in “The Emoji Movie,” and turned up on “Robot Chicken,” “Futurama” and “The Simpsons,” where he tells a newly bald Homer that it’s great to be bald.

In July 1992, TV Guide readers voted him onto the cover of its “Top Turn-Ons” issue alongside supermodel Cindy Crawford. He later called the whole thing absurd.

Later in life he found a whole new audience online, posing in a bath in a lobster suit and setting off memes with a photo of himself picking apples.

His life off screen

Stewart was a patron of Refuge, an organization that provides shelter for domestic abuse victims, and an ambassador for the International Rescue Committee.

He married Brooklyn songwriter and singer Sunny Ozell in 2013, with McKellen officiating. He is also survived by his daughter, Sophia, and his son, Daniel.