Sir Patrick Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
The news came a day later, in a statement on his official X account. It names Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia and calls the illness brief. Ozell, his wife, was there, along with family and friends, and the statement says the room had live music, prayer, tears and a lot of laughter in it. Hard to imagine a nicer way to put it.
The same post spends a good chunk of space on what he cared about away from cameras: refugees, survivors of domestic violence, veterans' mental health, animal welfare. His foster puppies get a mention. It also calls him a Knight, a Chancellor, a motor sport nut and a lifelong Huddersfield Town fan, which tells you something about how he wanted to be remembered. Not mainly as a captain.
Stewart was born July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, West Yorkshire. He quit school at 15 and went to work as a reporter on a local paper, then sold furniture, then enrolled in drama school in 1957. A professional stage debut followed in 1959. By 1966 he was with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he stayed as a core member for 16 years and returned to again and again, ending up in more than 30 productions.
The company said Thursday that he was one of the finest classical Shakespearean actors of his generation. For a lot of British theatre people that's still the main thing he was.
Then Hollywood. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran from 1987 to 1994. When the show launched, the Los Angeles Times described him as an unknown British Shakespearean actor, and somewhere in the first season or two that stopped being true.
Four films followed, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis, and in the 2020s he came back to the role once more for Star Trek: Picard. All told he was tied to the franchise for more than 35 years.
Shatner, the original Enterprise captain, wrote on Instagram that Picard stood for the best of us and so did the man who played him. George Takei, Wil Wheaton and Jeri Ryan posted too. Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher, kept it to a photo and two words: "Godspeed, Captain."
Stewart played Professor Charles Xavier in several X-Men movies and again in Logan. Marvel Studios called him a singular talent and a true gentleman. Hugh Jackman, who played Wolverine opposite him, said he learned a great deal from Stewart and would miss him every day. The two also made a murder mystery earlier this year, The Sheep Detectives.
IMDb counts more than 160 credits, and plenty of them are not what you'd expect from a man with his résumé. He was the voice of Avery Bullock on American Dad! for years. He narrated Ted and its sequel. He did a scene in Ricky Gervais's Extras where he spends the whole time pitching a very silly screenplay, and Gervais said Thursday that Stewart never minded when he ruined takes. There's also a Sesame Street clip going around, Stewart doing a Hamlet-style speech about the letter B with a completely straight face. Seth MacFarlane said Stewart could elevate any line you handed him.
Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2010. From 2004 to 2015 he was chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, near where he grew up, and the school later named a building for him.
The tribute getting the most attention is Ian McKellen's. The two met at the RSC in the 1970s, got closer through X-Men, and McKellen officiated Stewart's 2013 wedding to Ozell. In a long Instagram post he said Stewart was Yorkshire to the bone, honest to the point of bluntness, and a man to rely on and, in his own case, to love.
McKellen also told an old story. When Stewart was weighing the Star Trek job, McKellen tried to talk him out of it on a London street, worried about what it might do to his stage career. Stewart took it anyway. "Thank goodness," McKellen wrote.
He called Stewart's proudest achievement the Huddersfield chancellorship. And he ended by pointing at what's still to come: a farewell performance that audiences haven't seen yet.
That would be Avengers: Doomsday, where Stewart is due to appear as Professor X. It's in theaters December 18.
Zelda Williams also posted a tribute. She pointed out that Lewy body dementia is the condition her father, Robin Williams, had before he died in 2014.
Stewart's representatives are asking people to give to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Fund or the Alzheimer's Foundation of America's caregiver resources. No funeral details had been announced in the coverage reviewed for this story.
