Patrick Stewart, the Voice That Made Everyone Sit Up Straighter
Some actors play authority. Patrick Stewart simply had it, and for nearly four decades audiences on every continent trusted him to tell them what kind of people they could be. He died on Wednesday, October 28, at his home in Los Angeles, aged 86. His family announced the news on his Instagram account the following day, writing that he died in the care of his wife, Sunny Ozell, after "a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia."
The statement said he spent his last days surrounded by live music, prayer, tears and laughter. That sounds right. Stewart was the rare star whose gravity never curdled into solemnity, a classical actor who could hold a theatre silent with a single line of verse and then turn up as a deadpan CIA boss in American Dad!.
From Mirfield to Stratford
He was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Alfred, was a regimental sergeant major, and the house Stewart grew up in was not a gentle one. Much later he would write and speak openly about the violence he witnessed at home as a boy, and about how long it took him to understand what it had done to him. He turned that into advocacy for survivors of domestic violence, one of several causes his family named in their statement, alongside refugees, veterans' mental health and the rescue dogs he adored.
Theatre was the way out. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 and stayed until 1982, won an Olivier Award in 1979 for Antony and Cleopatra, and made his Broadway debut as Snout in Peter Brook's famous A Midsummer Night's Dream. On television he was already a face British viewers knew from I, Claudius and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Nobody, least of all Stewart, expected Hollywood to come for a bald Shakespearean in his forties.
Make it so
It did anyway. When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered on September 28, 1987, Stewart was 47 and playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard, a diplomat and a reader who preferred to talk an enemy down rather than shoot it. Seven seasons and four films later, the role had made him one of the most recognisable actors on the planet. He came back to it, older and more bruised, in Star Trek: Picard from 2020 to 2023.
In 2000 he took on a second icon. As Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men, opposite his great friend Ian McKellen as Magneto, he gave the superhero boom its conscience. He played Xavier on and off until Logan in 2017, and Guinness World Records credited him and Hugh Jackman with the longest careers as live-action Marvel characters. He played Xavier once more, in another universe, in 2022.
The stage never let him go
Stardom never pulled him away from the theatre for long. His one-man A Christmas Carol, in which he played every role himself, opened on Broadway in 1991 and won him another Olivier, and he later made a full-cast A Christmas Carol for television in 1999. He was a ferocious Macbeth in the West End in 2007, a chilling Claudius to David Tennant's Hamlet, which won him another Olivier in 2008, and Vladimir to McKellen's Estragon in Waiting for Godot. He was knighted in 2010. When McKellen officiated at his wedding to Sunny Ozell in 2013, it felt like the most natural casting in the world.
In March 2020, with theatres dark and much of the world stuck indoors, he sat down with a Shakespeare volume and posted a reading of Sonnet 116 online. It became a daily habit he called A Sonnet a Day, and for a lot of lonely people it was the best thing on the internet. In 2023 he published his memoir, Making It So, which read the way he spoke: generous, funny and frank about the parts of his life that hurt.
Where to start tonight
If you want one evening with him, watch "The Inner Light," the fifth-season episode of The Next Generation in which Picard lives out an entire other life in the space of a single episode. Then watch Logan, where the man who once ran a school for gifted youngsters needs looking after himself. Between them they hold almost everything he did best: authority, tenderness and the courage to look frail on screen.
His family asked that, in lieu of flowers, memorial contributions go to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Fund and the Alzheimer's Foundation of America's caregiver resources. The rest of this special edition is our attempt to help you spend some time with the work he left behind: where to begin with Picard, the friendship that nearly kept him off the Enterprise, and the order to watch Charles Xavier in before he appears one last time in December.
