Sir Patrick Stewart, the stage-trained actor who became Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films, has died. He was 86.
His family announced his death Thursday, Oct. 29, in a statement posted to his official Instagram account. According to the statement, Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles in the care of his wife, Sunny Ozell, following a brief illness with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. His family said he was surrounded in his final days by loved ones, live music, prayer, tears and laughter.
Born July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Stewart trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, building a reputation as one of Britain’s finest classical actors long before Hollywood came calling.
That changed in 1987, when he took command of the Enterprise-D. Over seven seasons of The Next Generation and four feature films — Generations, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis — Stewart made Picard a captain defined by diplomacy, conviction and a very particular way of saying “Make it so.” He returned to the role two decades later as the star and executive producer of Star Trek: Picard, which ran for three seasons on Paramount+.
For a second generation of fans, he was Professor X. Stewart played Charles Xavier opposite his close friend Ian McKellen’s Magneto in 2000’s X-Men, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Days of Future Past, then delivered one of the most devastating performances of his career as an ailing Xavier in 2017’s Logan. He brought the character back once more in Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).
He never left the stage behind. Stewart toured his one-man A Christmas Carol, earned acclaim for Macbeth in the West End and on Broadway, and reunited with McKellen for Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land. Animation fans also knew him as CIA Deputy Director Avery Bullock on American Dad! He was knighted in 2010 for services to drama and published his memoir, Making It So, in 2023.
Stewart married singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell in 2013, in a ceremony officiated by McKellen.
In lieu of flowers, his family has asked that memorial contributions be made to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources. Donation links are available in his Instagram bio.
Source: Statement from the family of Sir Patrick Stewart via Instagram. Top photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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