Patrick Stewart, master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and more, has died

Patrick Stewart, who overcame a bleak childhood in England’s coal-mining country to find acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before making an unlikely career pivot in middle age that would bring him his greatest fame, playing a noble starship captain on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86

The death, from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, was announced on social media.

With a commanding baritone voice, Stewart was by his late 40s an eloquent, statesmanlike presence on the British stage. But to many American television viewers, Stewart was a new face when he made his debut in 1987 as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “The Next Generation,” the first live-action spinoff of the original “Star Trek” series of the late 1960s.

Over the show’s seven seasons, Picard became known for his preternatural calm and his trademark directives “Engage!” and “Make it so.” (Stewart titled a 2023 memoir “Making It So.”)

Stewart went on to star in four feature-film spinoffs before returning to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in 2020 in a TV sequel that he could call his own, “Star Trek: Picard,” which ran for three seasons.

The Enterprise was neither Stewart’s first science-fiction home nor his last. He appeared in David Lynch’s original film version of “Dune” (1984) as weapons teacher Gurney Halleck. Years later, he was Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, in five “X-Men” movies, playing a wealthy telepath in a wheelchair who leads other mutants with superpowers. Those films, some of which also starred Stewart’s close friend Ian McKellen, included “X-Men” (2000), “X2: X-Men United” (2003) and “Logan” (2017).

By the time he became a screen star, Stewart was a lauded stage veteran in Britain, where he began working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. After making his first public stage appearance at 19, he performed in classical and contemporary works alongside fellow up-and-coming actors such as Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Glenda Jackson.

In 1986, he won the London Fringe Theater best actor award for his role as the humiliated husband, George, in the Young Vic’s production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He also won Olivier Awards (Britain’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony) for playing Enobarbus, Mark Antony’s best friend, in William Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (1979) and Claudius, opposite David Tennant’s Danish prince, in “Hamlet” (2009).

Stewart was born July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, England, a small, industrial river town in West Yorkshire. His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in the British army, and his mother, Gladys (Barrowclough) Stewart, was a weaver at a textile factory. Stewart was the youngest of their three sons.

Much later in life, Stewart wrote and spoke about the domestic violence that had shattered his childhood. His father was reduced to working as a semiskilled laborer after his military career, and became what Stewart described as a resentful “weekend alcoholic” who physically attacked his mother for years, sometimes in Stewart’s presence.

Stewart was 12 when an English teacher handed out scripts for “The Merchant of Venice” and instructed him to read the part of Shylock. Stewart went on to work with local drama groups.

Graduating from secondary school at 15, he took a job as a junior reporter with the local newspaper but quit after a year; his editor had complained that he was spending too much time on his theater avocation. After that, he worked for a year as a furniture salesperson to save money for drama school, though a local arts council ended up giving him a full scholarship so that he could enroll in the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theater School, which accepted him in 1957, when he was 17.

Two years later, he made his professional acting debut, as marooned pirate Tom Morgan in “Treasure Island,” with the Lincoln Repertory Company in Lincoln, England.

Stewart was largely considered an unknown when the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in a program that was open to the public.

A TV producer who was involved in developing a new “Star Trek” series happened to attend and soon persuaded Stewart to audition — even though, as Stewart later wrote, he knew “next to nothing” about the franchise.

Stewart expected the project to be a short-term commitment. How, he remembered thinking, could the show possibly succeed with a middle-aged pacifist captain with a French name and a British accent?

After its run ended, Stewart continued his stage and television career, now with the power of Hollywood fame behind him. Between 1995 and 2013, he starred in a handful of Broadway productions, two of them Shakespearean: He was Prospero in “The Tempest” in 1995 and, in 2008, the title character in “Macbeth,” for which he was nominated for a Tony.

On American television, he portrayed a restless 17th-century spirit in “The Canterville Ghost” (1996); Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick” (1998); Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” (1999); a wealthy rancher pointedly named Lear in “King of Texas” (2002); and Henry II, opposite Glenn Close, in “The Lion in Winter” (2003).

Though his rock-steady Picard only rarely seemed to lighten up, Stewart was, in fact, no stranger to comedy.

He “got rather good at being silly,” The Sydney Morning Herald wrote. He played King Richard in Mel Brooks’ 1993 film spoof “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” parodying Sean Connery with a thick Scottish accent. He appeared in about 120 episodes of the animated series “American Dad!” as Avery Bullock, a CIA deputy director with too many character flaws to count.

After hundreds of screen and stage roles, Stewart — Sir Patrick since his 2010 knighthood — gave one of his final performances in “The Sheep Detectives” (2026), in which he was the voice of Sir Ritchfield, a wise old Boreray Blackface ram in a flock of crime solvers.

Stewart and Sheila Falconer, a choreographer, married in 1966, had two children, and divorced, almost a quarter-century later, in 1990. His marriage to Wendy Neuss, an American producer, also ended in divorce. The trigger in each divorce, he acknowledged in his memoir, was an affair with a younger woman. “In a life chockablock with joy and success,” he wrote, “my two failed marriages are my greatest regret.”

In 2013, he married Sunny Ozell, an American singer 38 years his junior.

Stewart’s survivors include Ozell; his son, Daniel, who is also an actor; and his daughter, Sophie.