The English actor played Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier, and built a career in classical theatre. The report supplied gives no date, place or cause of death, and the death has not been confirmed from any other source.
Sir Patrick Stewart, the English actor best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films, has died aged 86, according to the report supplied. It does not say when or where he died, or what the cause was, and quotes no statement from his family or representatives. Please see the notes below before publishing.
From the stage to Star Trek
Before The Next Generation began in 1987, Stewart had spent about two decades as a mainstay of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He worked in film and television but was kept busy by more than two dozen RSC productions. They included Astrov in Uncle Vanya in 1974, Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1977, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1978 and the title role in Titus Andronicus in 1981.
He played Picard throughout the show’s 1987 to 1994 run, and in the films Star Trek: Generations, in which he appeared with William Shatner, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis. The New York Times said he made Picard “the moral center” of the series across seven seasons, helping to keep it from sliding into camp or self-parody.
X-Men and screen work
Stewart played Professor Xavier in X-Men (2000), X-Men 2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine and X-Men: Days of Future Past. In the franchise, he starred opposite his close friend Ian McKellen, who played the villain Magneto.
His other screen roles included a snooty waiter in Steve Martin’s 1991 film L.A. Story and King Richard in Mel Brooks’s 1993 comedy Robin Hood: Men in Tights. He hosted Saturday Night Live in 1994, and was praised in the 1995 comedy Jeffrey. He voiced characters in The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad, and narrated Seth MacFarlane’s Ted and its sequel. MacFarlane was also executive producer of the Starz series Blunt Talk, in which Stewart played a substance-abusing English newscaster who moves to Los Angeles to host a talk show. In 2015 he appeared in Match, as a vain, flamboyant dance instructor, and in the thriller Green Room, as the leader of a group of neo-Nazis.
The source says Stewart kept a good sense of humour about his ties to popular culture, and did not show the angst that Shatner and Leonard Nimoy each revealed at times.
Back to the theatre
Stewart carried on working on stage during The Next Generation. He played George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Young Vic in 1987, returning to the role at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2001. He also repeatedly performed a one-man version of A Christmas Carol, which he adapted himself from Dickens, in seasonal stagings in Los Angeles and on Broadway.
After the series ended, he stepped up his theatre work. He played Prospero in The Tempest on Broadway in 1996, the title role in a “photo-negative” Othello at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington in 1997, and returned to Broadway for The Ride Down Mt. Morgan in 2000. In Britain, his work in Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest and Macbeth won back critics who had written him off for going into American television. According to the New York Times, the Macbethproduction, which reached Broadway in 2008, led several British critics to call it the best they had ever seen. A 2008 profile of him in the paper carried the headline “To Boldly Go Where Shakespeare Calls”. The same year he played Claudius in Hamlet opposite David Tennant, winning the Olivier award for best supporting actor.
