Patrick Stewart, Star Trek's Captain Picard, dies at 86

Sir Patrick Stewart, the stage legend who became Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. His family said he died after a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia, with his wife, Sunny, at his side.

From Yorkshire to the stage

Stewart was born July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, Yorkshire. He left school at 15 and worked as a newspaper reporter and a furniture salesman before enrolling in drama school in 1957. He made his professional stage debut in 1959 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, where he spent years working through the Shakespeare canon, from Claudius to Macbeth.

The captain

In the mid-1980s he moved to Los Angeles, and in 1987 a classically trained British stage actor took the center seat of the Enterprise. Plenty of fans doubted a bald Shakespearean could follow William Shatner. He made them believers. Stewart played Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 to 1994, then in the films Generations (1994), First Contact (1996), Insurrection (1998) and Nemesis (2002), and came back years later for Star Trek: Picard, which premiered in 2020.

Professor X and beyond

He also played Professor Charles Xavier across several X-Men movies, and he will appear posthumously in Avengers: Doomsday. He racked up more than 160 acting credits, including a long run voicing Avery Bullock on American Dad! On stage he played Broadway and the West End in Waiting for Godot and No Man's Land alongside his close friend Ian McKellen, and toured a one-man A Christmas Carol. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010 and wrote a memoir, Making It So.

Off screen he supported survivors of domestic violence, refugees, veterans' mental health services and animal welfare, including fostering puppies. His family called him a knight, a chancellor, a motor sport enthusiast and a lifelong Huddersfield football fan. Hugh Jackman, his X-Men co-star, called him "a tremendous friend and man."

The Radazoid take

Picard was the dad a lot of us wished we had: calm, principled, the smartest guy in the room who never had to prove it, and the first one to stand up when something was wrong. No yelling, no swagger, just a captain who led by example. If you grew up watching TNG on a weeknight with your old man, you know exactly what we lost.

He also made being bald look like a superpower decades before it was cool, and an entire generation of men owes him for that. Tonight, pour an Earl Grey, hot, and put on "The Best of Both Worlds." Engage.