Patrick Stewart, Star Trek actor and acclaimed thespian, dies aged 86
Patrick Stewart, the acclaimed British stage and screen actor renowned for both Shakespeare and sci-fi, has died. He was 86.
The Star Trek: the Next Generation and X-Men star died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia”, said Kelly Bush Novak, his longtime spokesperson, to the Hollywood Reporter.
“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,” she wrote. “We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.”
With his authoritative baritone voice and commanding visage, Stewart was already a staple of the British stage by the late 1980s when, at 47, he was cast as a graying Capt Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation, the first live-action spin-off of the groundbreaking 1960s TV series. Over seven seasons onboard the Starship Enterprise, Stewart’s even-keeled performance and steely directives – “engage!” and “make it so” – turned him into a global star.
Stewart reprised his role in four feature film spin-offs – Star Trek Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) – as well as the TV series Star Trek: Picard, which ran from 2020 until 2023.
His longtime friend, fellow Shakespearean actor and X-Men co-star Ian McKellen called him “the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic”.
“Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end,” he wrote on social media. “You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”
Just a few days after we also lost Walter Koenig, too, and on top of all the other good and useful people we’ve lost this year. Honestly, I was over 2026 a long time ago, but now I’m done with it.
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