Sir Patrick Stewart, the boy from Mirfield who took Shakespeare to the stars and gave the captain’s chair of the Enterprise-D its finest occupant, has died at the age of 86. His family said he died on Wednesday 28 October at his home in Los Angeles, cared for by his wife, the singer Sunny Ozell, after a brief illness with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. The news broke today, and fandom seems to have gone very quiet all at once.
He was born in July 1940 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a poor household darkened by his father’s violence, a childhood he later spoke about with unflinching honesty. He left school at 15, worked on a local newspaper, trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. He appeared in more than 60 productions there, and his Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra won him the first of his Olivier Awards. For the best part of two decades he was the sort of actor directors call reliable and audiences call unforgettable.
Genre fans had been quietly collecting him long before Starfleet came calling. He was the scheming Sejanus in I, Claudius, Leondegrance in John Boorman’s Excalibur and Gurney Halleck in David Lynch’s Dune, where he charged into battle clutching a pug, which remains one of the stranger images in 1980s cinema – no small feat in a film featuring a Guild Navigator. He even emerged from Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, the naked-space-vampire epic, with his dignity entirely intact, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man’s gifts.
Then came 1987. Gene Roddenberry was reportedly unconvinced that a bald, middle-aged English classical actor should command a starship under a French name, and Stewart himself assumed Star Trek: The Next Generation would be cancelled before he’d finished unpacking. It ran for seven seasons and four films, from Generations to Nemesis. What he gave Picard was something the franchise had never quite had: a captain who would rather talk than shoot, who read Shakespeare, drank Earl Grey and could be profoundly disappointed in you without raising his voice. Hearing him deliver technobabble with full RSC conviction was a pleasure in itself. Watching him in ‘The Inner Light’, ‘Chain of Command’ or ‘The Measure of a Man’ was something else entirely, and his turn as Locutus of Borg left viewers on one of television’s most agonising cliffhangers.
Hollywood, having noticed he could make almost anything sound like scripture, cast him as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men in 2000. He returned to the role across the franchise and closed it magnificently in James Mangold’s Logan, where his frail, frightened Xavier stands among the best screen work of his career. Then, against all sensible expectation, he went back to Picard at nearly 80 for Star Trek: Picard, whose third and final season sat the old Enterprise crew down together one last time.
He never stayed away from the stage for long. His Stalinist-bunker Macbeth earned a Tony nomination, and his Claudius opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet at the RSC won him another Olivier, giving Stratford a Starfleet captain and a Time Lord on the same bill. With Ian McKellen, Magneto to his Xavier and his great friend off screen, he played Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s No Man’s Land; McKellen officiated at his wedding to Ozell in 2013. He was knighted in 2010 for services to drama.
Away from the cameras he campaigned against domestic violence and for veterans’ mental health, causes rooted in his own family history. His 2023 memoir, Making It So, was warm, funny and candid, and here at SFcrowsnest we were lucky enough to talk to him when Picard returned to our screens. His family’s announcement borrowed a line from that memoir about Jean-Luc’s earthbound roots: “In the end, he feels the call of home, as do I.”
He is survived by Sunny Ozell and his two children. In place of flowers, the family has asked for donations to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s caregiver resources.
The Next Generation ended with Picard finally joining his officers’ poker game after seven years of declining the invitation, and remarking that the sky was the limit. Patrick Stewart spent sixty years proving it.
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