Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard and Professor X, Dies at 86

Sir Patrick Stewart, the classically trained British actor who became a global star as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and Professor Charles Xavier in the "X-Men" films, died Wednesday at 86, NPR reported.

A post on his Facebook and Instagram pages said he died at home in Los Angeles after a "brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia," according to NPR. The Hollywood Reporter said the death was announced by his longtime spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak, who wrote that he had been "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."

Stewart's best-known characters were compassionate leaders who held together families of misfits and wrestled with honor, morality and courage. His own childhood in Yorkshire, England, was harsh. He remembered his father as alcoholic and abusive, NPR reported, and he found refuge in school and eventually in Shakespeare. Born July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, Yorkshire, he was the youngest of three sons. His father, a World War II veteran who was among the last men evacuated from Dunkirk, was physically abusive toward Stewart's mother, The Hollywood Reporter reported, and Stewart learned decades later that the violence likely stemmed from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. That history led him to advocate for veterans and for victims of domestic abuse.

"To stand in the middle of an empty stage in an empty theater and feel that I was at home was everything," he told NPR in 2023. "But it took a while for me to get there."

He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 and made his Broadway debut in 1970 in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." He worked alongside some of the leading Shakespeareans of his generation, including Judi Dench and Ian McKellen. He was lecturing on Shakespeare at UCLA when his name came up for the lead in a new "Star Trek" series. According to The Hollywood Reporter, producer Robert Justman saw the lecture and brought him in to audition over the objections of creator Gene Roddenberry, who doubted a bald British actor could front the show. Co-star Brent Spiner hung a sign over his dressing room reading "WARNING: Unknown British Shakespearean Actor," after the Los Angeles Times used that phrase in announcing his casting.

McKellen tried to talk him out of it. "Don't do this, Patrick," Stewart remembered his friend saying. "You're a very good stage actor. That's where you ought to be. Don't do it." His agent offered the opposite advice, assuring him the show was unlikely to last past a first season. "'Do six months' work. Make some money for the first time in your life and get well known. Get a suntan, and go home,'" Stewart recalled to NPR. "And I thought, 'Yeah, that doesn't sound too bad. I could live with that.'"

The show ran seven seasons, from 1987 to 1994, and made him a fixture of popular culture. Fans embraced Picard's taste for Earl Grey tea, his cool-headed command and his signature lines, "Engage!" and "Make it so!" NPR noted that the success came at a cost: over his career, Stewart played only a handful of Shakespeare's leading roles. He channeled some of that energy into an award-winning one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," in which he played more than 40 characters.

By the early 2000s he had re-established himself on stage while voicing numerous animated films, and in 2000 he began a second blockbuster run as Professor X, opposite his friend McKellen as Magneto. He played the role in seven more films, including "Logan" (2017), The Hollywood Reporter noted. He also drew Emmy nominations for "Moby Dick," "The Lion in Winter," a comic turn on HBO's "Extras" and the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Hamlet." NPR reported that he will appear in the role one final time in the upcoming film "Avengers: Doomsday."

He thought he was finished with Picard. But a team of producers including the novelist Michael Chabon pitched "Star Trek: Picard," which began streaming in 2020 on the CBS service now called Paramount+. "I would've been happy just shaking Patrick Stewart's hand and telling him how much I loved him on 'Star Trek,'" Chabon told NPR. "But to be able to actually write words that he will speak and act is — it's incredible." In that series, Picard is a man struggling with the psychological damage that led him to leave Starfleet, keen-eyed, haunted, weary and still joyful, as NPR described the performance.

Stewart was knighted in 2010. NPR described him as bringing Shakespearean gravitas to every role "along with a playful sense of purpose," and noted that a man raised by an abusive father became best known for playing kind, paternal leaders. Of Picard and Xavier, Stewart told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017: "I immensely admired [them] for their morality, for their kindness, for their sensitivity, for their compassion."

Stewart married three times, The Hollywood Reporter reported: to choreographer Sheila Falconer, with whom he had two children, Daniel and Sophia; to producer Wendy Neuss; and, in 2013, to jazz musician Sunny Ozell, in a ceremony officiated by McKellen. Funeral or memorial arrangements had not been announced.