Patrick Stewart dies at 86: the Shakespeare career alongside Picard

Patrick Stewart, known to Star Trek audiences as Captain Jean-Luc Picard and to X-Men viewers as Professor Charles Xavier, has died at 86. His representative announced his death on October 29, ABC News reported.

He died October 28 in Los Angeles, according to the Associated Press, in a report republished by KPBS, citing spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak. Novak said he had Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

For viewers who first encountered Stewart commanding a starship, his Shakespeare work offers another way to understand that familiar authority. Stewart himself made the connection: in his memoir, Making It So, as quoted by AP, he recalled recognizing Shakespearean situations in Picard’s formal speech and conduct. He approached the captain as though he belonged in Henry IV.

Stewart joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, according to the company’s account of his roles. His casting in Star Trek: The Next Generation came in 1987; the series ran through 1994. He began playing Xavier in 2000. Recalling his initial apprehension about Star Trek, Stewart said a lengthy television commitment had seemed threatening to a theatre career that was gathering momentum, ABC reported, quoting his 2022 NPR interview.

The later theatre record shows how those careers continued together. The RSC lists Stewart as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra and Prospero in The Tempest in 2006, followed by Claudius in Hamlet in 2008 and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 2011. Those dates place major Shakespeare roles well into the years when screen audiences already knew him as Picard and Professor X.

His Macbeth, directed by Rupert Goold and originating at Chichester Festival Theatre, provides a particularly clear route into that work. Stewart played the ambitious general opposite Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth. The Broadway League’s IBDB production record describes the setting as an underground kitchen serving as a military hospital: a concrete, enclosed place for a story about the pursuit of power.

Its journey from theatre to television unfolded over several years:

• 2007: The production began at Chichester and moved to London’s West End, as described in AP’s account.
• 2008: It reached the Brooklyn Academy of Music before transferring to Broadway. IBDB records the Lyceum Theatre run from April 8 to May 24 and Stewart’s Tony nomination for best actor in a play.
• Late 2009: Goold’s television adaptation was filmed on location at Welbeck Abbey in Britain, with Stewart and Fleetwood returning, according to PBS’s production account.
• October 6, 2010: PBS presented the film as part of Great Performances.

The television version developed the stage production into a work made for the camera. PBS describes Goold retaining its nameless, militarized 20th-century setting while rethinking it for film. The separate location shoot explains why a performance associated with the 2007–08 theatre seasons also appears as a 2010 television film.

Critic Adam Sweeting’s review for theartsdesk describes tiled bunkers and tunnels, with the witches appearing as hospital nurses. He praised Stewart for keeping Macbeth’s earlier courage and honour visible as ambition and guilt overtook him, while finding some supporting characterizations less convincing. Sweeting’s reading offers Picard audiences a different perspective on Stewart’s commanding presence: a leader whose capacity for authority survives even as his judgment unravels.

Stewart is survived by his wife, Sunny Ozell, and two children, ABC reported.