Patrick Stewart, the Shakespearean-trained actor who became a sci-fi icon through his roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men franchise, has died. He was 86.
Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles following what his longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak described as “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.” In a statement, Bush Novak said Stewart was “held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all.”
Born July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, Stewart grew up in a difficult household; his father, a World War II veteran among the last men evacuated from Dunkirk, was physically abusive toward his mother, a pattern Stewart later attributed to his father’s likely undiagnosed PTSD. He found refuge in acting as a teenager, eventually winning a scholarship to Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at 18 and becoming a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company at 26, spending much of the 1960s there and with the National Theatre.
Stewart was a largely unknown classical stage actor in America when producer Robert Justman spotted him delivering a Shakespeare reading at a UCLA lecture and brought him in to audition for Star Trek: The Next Generation, over the objections of creator Gene Roddenberry, who doubted a bald British actor could lead the new series. Stewart won the role and signed a six-year contract, assuming the show wouldn’t last that long. The Next Generation premiered in 1987 and ran seven seasons, with Stewart’s Picard becoming central to some of the franchise’s most acclaimed episodes, including the Borg-assimilation cliffhanger “The Best of Both Worlds” and the time-skipping “The Inner Light.” He reprised the role in four feature films and returned to it again in 2020’s Star Trek: Picard after 17 years away.
In 2000, Stewart took on a second iconic role as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men, working alongside longtime friend Ian McKellen as Magneto. He played Xavier across seven films total, including Logan in 2017, and was set to reprise the role once more in Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, due in theaters December 18. Reflecting on both signature characters in a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stewart said he admired Picard and Xavier “for their morality, for their kindness, for their sensitivity, for their compassion.”
Stewart continued working steadily into his mid-80s, recently voicing roles in Amazon’s The Sheep Detectives and Riz Ahmed’s series Bait, and was attached to Netflix’s animated series Barbaric. Just months before his death, he’d pushed back on retirement rumors tied to Avengers: Doomsday, telling TV Insider, “I can’t imagine ever officially ‘retiring.’ I’ll always and forever be an actor.” Over his career, Stewart won two Olivier Awards, a Grammy, a Tony, three Golden Globes, four Emmys, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.
In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that memorial contributions be made to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund.