To some he will always be Picard; to others, Professor X.
When Patrick Stewart died on Wednesday at his Los Angeles home at age 86, he was known to his fans mainly as a star of science fiction. Nearly 40 years earlier, in 1987, Stewart had debuted on American television as the noble Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in The Next Generation, the first live-action spin-off of the original 1960s Star Trek series. “Make it so,” he said, famously.
Stewart then went on, in the 2000s, to enliven five X-Men movies as Charles Xavier, a wealthy telepath in a wheelchair who oversees other superpowered mutants.
But the reason Stewart made these otherworldly roles so memorable is because he also made them so human.
In part, it was his voice: a commanding English baritone that was somehow both regal and real. In part, it was his face, his head: stern, chiseled and iconically bald — a result of hereditary alopecia — yet also vulnerable and even hurt at times.
Above all, it was his craft. At 12, Stewart played Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; at 16, he sold furniture to save for drama school; at 17, he enrolled in the prestigious Bristol Old Vic on a full scholarship. He began working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, then spent the next two decades performing in both classical and contemporary productions — Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra — alongside fellow legends like Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren.
He also brought his own wounds. Born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, England, a small, industrial river town in West Yorkshire, Stewart endured a grim childhood: no running water, a neighborhood outhouse and a military father he later described as a resentful “weekend alcoholic” who physically attacked his mother for years.
“I knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn,” Stewart recalled in a 2009 Guardian article.
Stewart’s own marriages were rocky. The first, to choreographer Sheila Falconer, and the second, to producer Wendy Neuss, both ended, he later acknowledged, when he had affairs with younger women. “In a life chockablock with joy and success,” Stewart wrote in his memoir, “my two failed marriages are my greatest regret.”
In 2013, Stewart married Sunny Ozell, an American singer 38 years his junior, in a makeshift ceremony at a Mexican restaurant. At the time, Stewart was back on stage, starring in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. His costar and close friend Ian McKellen donned a cloak and secured a Universal Life Church license to officiate the ceremony.
