I first met Patrick Stewart in 1998 and many times since. I was dazzled by him

October 30, 2026 — 12:56pm

Living as we do, roughly an adult human’s lifespan since the invention of modern celebrity, the daily headlines invariably include the death of someone famous. In the last few days alone, we have lost German actor Elke Sommer, American actor Susan Saint James and Star Trek actor Walter Koenig.

But fans of Star Trek have taken a double hit; Sir Patrick Stewart, who played the debonair Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, has also died. And while it’s difficult to unpick why one death affects some people more than another, that Picard’s Star Trek was technically a generation younger than Koenig’s seems to tap close to why Stewart’s death is so deeply felt.

In one sense, Stewart’s life is easily captured: a dashing science fiction hero, lent a natural elegance by his perfect British baritone voice.

He ran contrary to Hollywood convention – a bald, foreign replacement for his 1960s counterpart, the blonder, easier-on-the-eye Captain Kirk – but he had natural cinematic magnetism. He was an actor’s actor. And the camera loved him.

But the truth of Stewart’s life is so much more complex. Indeed, the depth of his accomplishments on the stage eclipse his television fame, even though the latter will always dominate discussion of his career. And his background - surviving poverty, and a shockingly violent upbringing - gave him an emotional complexity that he could never quite resolve.

Born and raised in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in England, his father was an army veteran who suffered from PTSD, and returned from combat prone to fits of violence. The difficulties of his childhood, and his inability to protect his mother, would haunt Stewart in later years. He devoted time, energy and money to domestic violence organisations. But resolution for his own feelings would elude him.

And though he came to the television screen later in his career – he was 47 when he signed on to Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987 – he seemed somehow ageless.

“Actors live in a world of make believe,” he told me, in one of our many conversations over the years. “We live in a giant nursery where we get to play very expensive games. But although they’re games, our objective is to make them appear real and truthful. So, ageing in the conventional sense, I don’t think, quite applies to us because our job is becoming other people, taking on another life.

“There are times for me when ageing, believe me, I know how it feels,” he added. “Look at these fingers, I was told by a rheumatologist the other day I have poster boy arthritic hands. I could become the poster boy for arthritis.” We both laughed. “But at times, it feels like a role that I’m playing. A lifetime’s role.”

I first met Patrick Stewart on the set of the 1988 made-for-television adaptation of Moby Dick. He was playing Captain Ahab, a man consumed by a destructive obsession with an elusive whale, whose choice brought the safety of his crew, and his self-destruction, into conflict.

Curiously, like the enduring internal pain of his powerlessness as a child in the face of paternal violence, these were characters whose characteristics he managed to twist into later performances. Captain Picard would channel Captain Ahab, in a later Star Trek film. And Stewart’s powerlessness as a child, and unspoken grief over the loss of his mother, would resurface in sequel series, Picard.

I was dazzled by him. And he, I suspect, was charmed by a journalist whose first questions were not about either Moby Dick or Star Trek, but who went straight to a beloved childhood classic, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1980), with Sir Alec Guinness, and Excalibur (1981), John Boorman’s spectacular Arthurian masterpiece, in which Stewart played Guinevere’s father, Leodegrance of Cameliard.

The most enduring role of his career, was doubtless the diplomatic and debonair Captain Picard. The Next Generation was a reboot, but its characters, and their storied lives, would build an expanded universe far more complex than their 1960s predecessors.

Actor and character aged together like a fine wine, I suggested to him once, and he agreed. “It’s a good analogy, the wine analogy,” he said. “It does feel like that. There came a point quite early in the seven years when we were shooting the series when I didn’t have to sit in my trailer and think myself into the role. I was him. So it became second nature and I didn’t have to examine, necessarily, his background to determine how to play a scene. It was spontaneous and instinctive.”

Of his upbringing, Stewart always seemed both unsentimental and deeply affected. Nor was he ever complacent about either what Hollywood offered him, or what he might achieve in it. Indeed, he began his career with the lowest of expectation.

“I think my background and what I’d learned about being a professional actor had prepared me for the fact that there was no promise, there was only possibility,” Stewart told me. “And the odds were very bad for it being a successful career. At that time, I was content to just be working.”

Graduating from drama school, he landed neither a manager, nor an agent. “I was firmly convinced that my career was over before it had begun,” he recalled. “I actually went back to my parents’ home, I had no money and I thought, ‘well, I had my shot and that was it’. It didn’t quite turn out like that, and one of the reasons it didn’t was pure good fortune and quite a lot of hard work.”

In 2001, Stewart was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). In 2010, he was made a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama.

In a richly storied career, he was nominated for Emmy, Tony and Golden Globe awards. He won a Grammy, for the spoken word album Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf. He won Olivier awards for his stage performances in Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet. And he won a Drama Desk award for his one-man stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which he wrote, and starred in.

In a curious footnote, Stewart’s relationship with Charles Dickens’ iconic work would become almost as all-consuming as his Star Trek fame. It was later staged at the Old Vic in London and the Marquis Theatre on Broadway, but in a powerful demonstration of the ties that bind, and his connection to his childhood, complex as it was, the play opened with a single performance, in the parish church of Stewart’s birthplace, Mirfield, West Yorkshire.

Acting, he later said to me, “is a job I have always loved. I’ve loved it passionately and been, and felt, lucky and very happy to be doing it under any circumstances. That I was acting at all, wherever I was, whether I was being paid well or poorly for it, didn’t matter. I was doing the work. Don’t tell the studios this, or my agent, but I would’ve done it without being paid for a long period of time.”

Stewart is survived by his wife, American singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell, whom he married in 2013, and again in 2020, and two children, a son, Daniel, and a daughter, Sophia, from his first marriage, to British theatre actor and dancer Sheila Falconer.

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