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Oh captain, our captain: Ars staff remembers Patrick Stewart
“For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard. … We created an admirable individual.”
Along with the rest of the world, we at Ars are mourning Sir Patrick Stewart—the beloved award-winning actor best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men franchise—who died yesterday at the age of 86.
A statement released by Stewart’s representatives said:
We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. He has 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 after a lifetime of devotion to us all. We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.
Through the actor’s X account, the family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, memorial contributions be made to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources.
Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1940, the acting bug bit Stewart at the age of 12, when his English teacher handed out scripts for Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and asked young Patrick to read the part of Shylock—a role the adult Stewart would later play for the Royal Shakespeare Theater (RSC), among many other parts. His signature bald head emerged early, around 19, thanks to alopecia. He briefly worked as a cub reporter and a furniture salesman before winning a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theater School, and he landed his first professional role in 1959, playing a marooned pirate in a production of Treasure Island for the Lincoln Repertory Company.
Stewart worked regularly in theater and on British television, and his big break came in his late 40s. The actor was conducting master classes on Shakespeare at the University of California, Los Angeles, when a TV producer developing TNG heard him lecture and thought he would make a perfect captain for the Enterprise-D. Creator Gene Roddenberry wasn’t initially keen on the choice, but Stewart’s audition changed his mind. The rest is television history.
On Instagram, fellow thespian Sir Ian McKellen—who first met Stewart when both were young actors with the RSC and co-starred as Magneto in the X-Men films—recalled the day Stewart told him about the Star Trek offer.
“’But Patrick, think of your stage career in the UK,'” McKellen recalled saying. “‘Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?’ Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did.”
Stewart himself never expressed anything but pride in the role. “For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s fine,” he told The Independent in 2003. “I really believe we created an admirable individual.”