Sir Patrick Stewart: Shakespearean actor who brought gravitas to every role

If Patrick Stewart’s efforts had been successful, he might never have developed the look that made him an icon of stage and screen. He was just 17, still a young man finding his way in West Yorkshire, when he first began to lose his hair. As he recalled in his 2023 memoir Making It So, Stewart found work as a bricklayer and poured all of his earnings into treatment at a clinic in Bristol that involved having electrodes attached to his head. “But it was hopeless,” wrote Stewart. “By the age of 19, I was as bald on top as I am now.”

If Stewart — who has died at the age of 86 — feared his alopecia would harm his chances at building an acting career, he need not have worried. An interviewer once described him as having “the most famous cranium in the world.” His striking appearance helped him secure a string of signature roles, notably Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film series, but there was always more to Stewart than his looks.

He was a deeply gifted and classically trained actor who could take fanciful material and ground it. While he will be fondly remembered for his blockbuster film roles, his first love always remained his long association with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Born in Mirfield, West Riding on July 13, 1940, Stewart was the youngest of three sons born to a textile worker mother and a father who had served as a regimental sergeant major in the British Army during World War II. Later in life, Stewart opened up about the domestic violence he and his family had suffered at his father’s hands.

“He was a very charming, charismatic man, and a great storyteller,” Stewart told The Independent in 2009 about his father. “But I have only recently come to understand that after I left home, the abuse continued for a long time, and I wasn't aware of it. One carries a certain amount of guilt and remorse for that, for not knowing, and not having done something about it at the time.”

From a young age, Stewart felt the pull of acting. He later credited Cecil Dormand, his English teacher at Crowlees Junior and Infant School, for putting a copy of a Shakespeare play in his hand and encouraging him to act. He made his professional debut at the age of 18, appearing in a 1959 production of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Theatre Royal in Bristol.

In 1966, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and remained with them until 1982, appearing in a string of productions while making a handful of minor television appearances. However, it wasn’t until he was cast in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987 that he received mainstream attention. A casting announcement in the Los Angeles Times referred to him at the time as an “unknown British Shakespearean actor.” To land the part, he had to win over Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who initially doubted he would be a fit for the series.

In the end, Stewart’s Picard became one of the franchise’s defining figures. He played the character in four spin-off films, as well as the standalone series Star Trek: Picard that ran from 2020 to 2023. If anything, the character became so successful that it hampered Stewart’s hopes of building a varied film career. “I had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role,” he told The Independent. “And I was – because I had graphic instances of it – handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say, ‘I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie’ – and this was compounded by X-Men as well.”

In 2000, Stewart found his next signature role in the form of the telepathic Professor Charles Xavier. He went on to play the character in seven X-Men movies, during which he forged a lifelong friendship with Ian McKellen, who played the supervillain Magneto.

Even as his Hollywood roles made him wealthy and famous around the world, Stewart continued to dream of England, and specifically the countryside near Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon. “My fantasy had always been that I would end up with a nice little house somewhere in the Cotswolds,” he confessed to The Independent. “And I would literally put myself to sleep at night in Los Angeles, by creating a virtual imagined home. Where would I live? What part of the Cotswolds? What sort of house would it be? And added to that, I would drive from my house to Stratford every day where I'd have some nice parts to play.”

In his later years, Stewart used the attention that his global fame had brought him to shine a spotlight on the plays he loved the most. On Broadway, he performed in about a dozen productions, making his debut in a 1971 revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 2007, he starred in a production of Macbeth that was later filmed for television. In 2013, he and McKellen performed Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in repertory with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Those would turn out to be Stewart’s final Broadway bows.

He was married three times, to Sheila Falconer from 1966 to 1990, to Wendy Neuss from 2000 to 2003, and to Sunny Ozell from 2013 until his death. He had two children, Daniel and Sophie, with Falconer, and later expressed regret for not spending more time with them. “I could've done better as a parent, when my kids were little,” he said. “I was just obsessed with my work and everything else took second place. I’m trying to correct that now wherever possible with my grandchildren. And my own children seem to have forgiven me.”

He also poured himself into charitable work, notably becoming a patron of the women’s Refuge, a British charity for abused women, in memory of his mother. “There are women just like my mother who can now take an initiative to protect themselves or to remove themselves from these situations, which my mother couldn’t,” he said. “And that makes it worthwhile.”

Until the very end of his life, he was illuminated by a passion for sharing Shakespeare with the world. His final appearance on camera came in a video posted to social media in which he recited the Bard’s Sonnet 116. “I hope it has brought pleasure and curiosity,” said Stewart. “But more than anything else, I want it to have communicated all the multiple features that love might have.”

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