In March 2020, with the world shut indoors and scared, Sir Patrick Stewart sat down in front of his phone and read a love poem. It was Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. He read it the way he read everything, slowly, as if the words had been written that morning for whoever was listening. The next day he read another one. Then another. He kept going until he had read all 154, and he joked that a sonnet a day keeps the doctor away, his twist on the old line his mother used to say about apples. That was what he did his whole life. He took the grandest words ever written and handed them to the rest of us as if they had always been ours. Sir Patrick died on Wednesday, October 28, at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
His family shared the news the next day, with great sorrow, on the same social channels where he had read those sonnets to the world. He died in the care of his wife, Sunny. They called it “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, and they said his last days were spent with family and friends all around him, with live music and prayer, tears and laughter. What they will hold onto, they wrote, is the peace on his face, “an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.”
That grace started in a small house in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where he was born on July 13, 1940. There was no hot water. There was no indoor toilet. His father, Alfred, came home from the war with what people then called shell shock. Some nights he came back from the pub and beat Patrick’s mother, Gladys, and Patrick and his brother tried to stop him. The stage was where the boy could get away from all of it. He left school at fifteen and worked on the local paper for a while as a reporter, and at seventeen he went off to Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
He was already losing his hair when he got to Bristol, and by nineteen it was gone. For a young actor who wanted to play romantic leads, that could have been the end of it. It wasn’t. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 and became one of its great company actors, the one directors trusted with the hardest speeches. He won an Olivier in 1979 for his Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra. Thirty years later he won another, as Claudius, opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet.
And the bald head that worried him so much at nineteen is what made him a star. In 1987 Paramount was casting a new captain for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the executives wanted him to audition in a hairpiece. His wife at the time, Sheila Falconer, had one shipped over from London. Then they saw him without it, and they liked him better. Gene Roddenberry had his doubts. It didn’t matter. Captain Jean-Luc Picard ran for seven seasons and four films, and he became the kind of leader a lot of us still measure everyone else against. He was calm and curious. He listened first and fired last. He quoted Shakespeare and took his tea Earl Grey, hot, and “Make it so” and “Engage” passed into the language.
Thirteen years after he first sat in the captain’s chair, he rolled onto the screen as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men. His dear friend Ian McKellen played Magneto. They were two old friends playing two old friends who couldn’t agree on how to save the world. He played Xavier on and off for more than twenty years, and in Logan, in 2017, he let him grow old and frail and still tender, with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine looking after him. It is one of the most moving things he ever did.
Off screen, he and McKellen were just as close, and the stage kept pulling them back together. They did Waiting for Godot together in the West End in 2009, and again on Broadway in 2013, alongside Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. During that New York run they wandered the city in bowler hats and posed for photos like two schoolboys on a day out. The Queen had knighted him in 2010 for services to drama. He wore it lightly.
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Sir Patrick and Sir Ian on their bromance
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Even in his eighties, he kept saying yes to the people who loved Picard as much as he did. He went back to the bridge for Star Trek: Picard, which ran from 2020 to 2023 and ended by bringing the whole Next Generation crew home. He came back as Xavier in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. In 2023 he told his own story in his memoir, Making It So. He had married the singer Sunny Ozell in 2013, and he was a father to Daniel and Sophia from his first marriage.
And all that time, he was using his fame for the boy he had been in Mirfield. He became a patron of Refuge, the domestic abuse charity, for his mother. He became an ambassador for Combat Stress, which helps veterans with their mental health, for his father. It took him most of his life to understand that Alfred had been living with what we now call PTSD. That didn’t undo what happened in that house. But it meant he could speak up for both of them. He talked openly about still being in therapy at 80, which is not something many men of his generation would ever say out loud. He spoke up for human rights and for refugees, too. And he fostered pit bulls, the dogs he loved, the ones so many people give up on.
For all the far-off worlds he visited, part of him never left Yorkshire. He was Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield for eleven years. He cheered for Huddersfield Town his whole life, from wherever in the world he was. He loved motor sport like a boy hanging on the fence. His family put it simply. He was a Knight, a Chancellor and a lifelong Huddersfield fan, and they said he will be remembered for the dignity, compassion and humanity he brought to every role, in his art and in his life.
Audiences will get to hear that voice in a cinema one more time before the year is out, when Avengers: Doomsday opens in December with Sir Patrick back as Charles Xavier. It will be hard to sit through, and nobody will want to miss it. In place of flowers, his family has asked for gifts to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and to the caregiver programs of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. They ended their message with his own words. He wrote them about the captain who made him famous, but really, he was writing about himself.
“Like me, Jean-Luc has lived an unusual life that has taken him far beyond the bounds of normal human experience. But he is also someone who has remained true to his earthbound roots, for they are what gave him his identity. In the end, he feels the call of home, as do I.”
Patrick Stewart, Making It So: A Memoir
He went a long way from that little house in Mirfield, out to the far reaches of space and back again, and he carried home with him the whole way. Now it’s our turn to carry him. Somewhere tonight, someone will put on an old episode, hear him say “Engage,” and feel for a second that someone steady is in charge. Somewhere else, someone will find one of his sonnet videos from 2020 and let him read to them, the way he read to all of us when we were scared. Shakespeare wrote that the people we love live on in the lines written for them. Nobody ever gave those lines a warmer voice than he did, and every time we press play, Sonnet 18 keeps its promise.
“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”