Sir Patrick Stewart: Actor who moved effortlessly between Star Trek and Shakespeare

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Sir Patrick Stewart, who has died at the age of 86, was a stage and screen great who balanced Hollywood stardom with an equally stellar career in classical theatre.

While many actors are typecast, he moved effortlessly from Shakespeare and Dickens to the command of the USS Enterprise and his famous wheelchair in X-Men.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Sir Patrick received multiple awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II.

One of the world’s most versatile actors, he mastered both comedy and tragedy, science-fiction and historical drama – despite the entertainment industry’s traditional dislike of bald heads.

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Sir Patrick Stewart received his knighthood in 2010

Patrick Hewes Stewart was born in Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 13 July 1940.

His mother Gladys was a textile worker. She was active in amateur dramatics and encouraged her three sons to take part.

His father was a former Sergeant Major in the Parachute Regiment whose experience during the wartime evacuation of Dunkirk had shredded his mental health.

“My father was a very potent individual,” Stewart later recalled. “It was said that when he strode on to the parade ground, birds stopped singing.”

But Alfred Stewart had become a quick-tempered man, suffering from what would now be called post traumatic stress.

He was prone to drink and often took out his frustrations on his family – although Patrick himself was never the target of his fists.

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Patrick Stewart in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1970 production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Young Patrick’s love of drama developed at school when one of his teachers introduced him to Shakespeare and encouraged him to perform.

His first public performance was in a local church production of Cinderella.

He found the predictability of dramatic performances a welcome change form the turmoil of his home life.

He left school at 15 and eventually got a job as a journalist and obituary writer on the Dewsbury Reporter.

He also threw himself enthusiastically into the flourishing local theatre. “I used to recite Shakespeare from memory,” he said. “I just learned all these big speeches.”

He played a conspiratorial Roman soldier in the BBC’s I, Claudius in 1976

But he found it impossible to concentrate on both his job and his acting. Eventually his editor told him to choose between journalism and the “foolhardy” acting.

Stewart picked up his typewriter and walked out.

At the age of 18, he had the traumatic experience of losing all his hair, a huge blow to an aspiring actor and self-conscious teenager – who worried that girls would no longer find him attractive.

He won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic and later joined the Royal Shakespeare Company – playing a variety of roles across the company’s repertoire.

And when not appearing as Oberon or Enobarbus, he made his TV debut as a fireman in a 1967 episode of soap opera Coronation Street.

Patrick Stewart as a Russian spy in 1982 BBC series Smiley’s People

His Broadway debut came in 1970 as Snout in Peter Brook’s critically acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Over the next two decades, Stewart appeared in a variety of television roles without threatening to become a major star.

In 1974, he played Lenin in the BBC’s 13-part drama series The Fall of Eagles.

He was a conspiratorial Roman soldier in the hugely popular I, Claudius and a Soviet spy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People.

In 1984, Stewart left the RSC and moved to the National Theatre. Now in his mid-40s, he had only ever been unemployed for three weeks, but was rarely cast as a main character.

He’d landed a number of minor film roles: including playing Guinevere’s father in Excalibur, a minstrel in Dune, and a riding instructor in Little Lord Fauntleroy.

And he was the voice of a small character in the animated film of Richard Adams’ novel The Plague Dogs.

But even he described the first half of his career as “sound but never spectacular”.

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His career really took off aboard the USS Enterprise as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation

Then came the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

A producer named Robert L Justman was intent on reviving the Star Trek franchise, and was looking for a successor to William Shatner’s legendary James T Kirk.

He had hoped to find a sexy, hirsute Frenchman to play the role – but chanced upon Stewart giving a lecture to his wife’s Shakespeare class in Los Angeles.

Justman turned to his wife. “I said I think I’ve found our new captain,” he said.

He knew nothing about the original Star Trek and his great friend Sir Ian McKellen, told him not to throw his stage career away on a wild goose chase into space.

But in need of a boost to his finances, Stewart signed a six-year contract, firmly believing the show wouldn’t last and he’d be back on the boards before long.

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Patrick Stewart and the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation

“Everybody told me it would be a flop,” he recalled. “A friend of mine said, ‘Get a suntan, make some money, go home.'”

He was, however, pleased that the producers didn’t mind his baldness.

He’d tried wearing a wig in early screen tests, but it looked ratty and – in the end – Star Trek’s founder Gene Roddenberry told him to ditch it.

“In the 24th Century, they wouldn’t care if Picard was bald,” he said.

Stewart, who was billed by the New York Times as “an unknown British Shakespearean actor”, found it hard adapting to his new job.

After his stage experiences, he found the 20 hours a day on set tiring, and he also struggled to work with a fairly laid-back and fun-loving US cast.

His decision to call his fellow actors together and give them a lecture about behaving more seriously failed to gain him popularity.

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Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart were the best of friends as well as co-stars

“It was really awful, being dressed down by the captain,” said Brent Spiner, who played Data, the android. “We really thought, ‘Well, please, get over it’.”

Eventually Stewart softened, insisting that every member of the cast told at least one joke a day.

Despite his initial scepticism, Star Trek: The Next Generation both survived and prospered – making its star a very wealthy man.

Captain Picard was supposed to be French, but displayed a surprisingly English regard for both Shakespeare and Earl Grey tea.

And, after playing all those Shakespearean princes and dukes on the London stage, Stewart became fiercely proud of him, and of the show’s ability to connect with younger audiences.

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Sir Patrick starred as the telepathic Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film franchise

In addition to the television series, Stewart played Picard in four Star Trek films. But while commanding the Enterprise, he managed not neglect the theatre.

With his new-found celebrity, the parts he was offered improved greatly.

For years, he performed a one-man version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on Broadway – playing all 40 characters.

In 1995, he appeared as Prospero in a memorable performance of The Tempest and, two years later, he starred as Othello – who he presented as a white mercenary in a black African nation.

But his Star Trek success limited the roles that Hollywood was prepared to offer him.

“No director wanted to cast this grand, deep-voiced, bald English guy,” he told the Times. “Because everybody knew he was Picard and couldn’t possibly be anybody else.”

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Sir Ian and Sir Patrick appeared together in Waiting for Godot

Eventually, he took the role of Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film franchise, essentially playing a telepathic Picard in a wheelchair.

His co-star was Sir Ian McKellen – the friend who’d warned him to avoid Hollywood – in the metal-bending role of Magneto.

Alongside his work in America, he won critical acclaim opposite Harriet Walter in Antony and Cleopatra in 2007.

And, in the same year, he played Macbeth for the first time – despite a 30-year age gap between him and Kate Fleetwood, playing Lady Macbeth.

But the critics refused to complain.

Critic Nicholas de Jongh decided it was “the best Macbeth I have ever seen”, and hailed him as “one of our finest Shakespearean actors”.

In 2010, Stewart was awarded a knighthood for his services to drama.

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Sir Patrick watching his beloved Huddersfield Town play Leicester City in 2018

In 2009, he teamed up with Sir Ian again in Waiting For Godot.

It was a moment of personal fulfilment for Sir Patrick who, as an awed teenager, remembered watching Peter O’Toole in the play at the Bristol Old Vic.

His deep and authoritative voice made him much in demand for voice-over roles – including a reprise of his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek video games.

One female interviewer once gushed that “just hearing him order breakfast is rather thrilling”.

He also voiced a host of TV commercials both in Britain and the USA.

Away from acting, he was a passionate political activist and a long-time supporter of the Labour Party, as well as a campaigner for victims of domestic abuse.

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Sir Patrick Stewart and his wife Sunny Ozell photographed in 2024

In 2013, he married his third wife – singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell – in Nevada.

Sir Ian McKellen officiated at the ceremony, which had to be restaged at a Los Angeles restaurant when someone discovered that his legal power to do so did not extend to the Silver State.

A year later, the two knights took their talents to Broadway, alternating performances of Waiting for Godot with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land.

Sir Patrick made a video for Amnesty International on the subject of domestic violence, referencing his father’s brutality towards his mother.

Once named the third greatest Yorkshireman after Michael Palin and Sean Bean, he never lost touch with his roots – keeping a house in God’s Own Country, and remaining a lifelong supporter of Huddersfield Town football club.

Forthcoming projects had included a final performance as Professor Charles Xavier in Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, which will be released this Christmas.

And, if millions remember him only as the somewhat taciturn commander of the USS Enterprise, that prospect was not something that worried him.

“For huge numbers of people I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s fine,” he said. “I really believe we created an admirable individual.”

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Legendary Star Trek actor Sir Patrick Stewart dies aged 86

Star Trek actor Sir Patrick Stewart dies aged 86