Patrick Stewart’s Career Was a Rare and Thrilling Marriage of the Prestigious and the Populist

In the first two decades and change of Patrick Stewart’s distinguished professional career, he spent 16 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, made his Broadway debut alongside Ben Kingsley and Frances de la Tour in a legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by influential theater giant Peter Brook, and became a frequent presence on the storied stages of the prestigious Royal National Theatre.

It’s a telling insight into the hermetically sealed bubble of Hollywood that a renowned classical actor with years of notable work behind him, when cast in 1987 in the sci-fi TV spin-off Star Trek: The Next Generation, was identified in the Los Angeles Times as an “unknown British Shakespearean actor.” Stewart, who died Wednesday at 86, now runs no risk of being called unknown.

That wealth of stage experience was deeply embedded in his layered characterization as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, commander of the USS Enterprise, allowing Stewart to project steely authority without ever losing sight of the man’s kindness and compassion, his mentorship and familial protectiveness toward his crew.

While longtime friend and colleague Ian McKellen urged him not to toss away his prime Shakespeare years — the trajectory that ideally leads from Hamlet and Macbeth all the way to King Lear — Stewart took the Star Trek job. He signed the standard six-year contract despite quiet assurances from his agents and other industry associates that the show would likely last a single season, after which he could pocket his television earnings and return to his first love, the British stage.

But the spacetime continuum has a way of scrambling well-made plans. Not only did the show run for 178 episodes over seven seasons — peaking at 12 million viewers until the 1994 series finale, which was watched by more than 30 million — it also spawned four feature films, plus an additional spinoff, Star Trek: Picard, for which Stewart returned to the role for a three-season run.

The endlessly regenerative sci-fi phenomenon made Stewart a wealthy man and gave him global recognition, but by all accounts, the rigorous discipline he had acquired over all those years treading the boards was instrumental in shaping the work ethic of the entire company. As Picard, he also played a decisive role in making bald sexy.

With his crisp, cut-glass diction, stentorian delivery and regal bearing, it’s hard to believe Stewart grew up in a working-class Yorkshire family, such was his unquestionable natural command. But perhaps that upbringing in an unstable household — where he was often forced in explosions of domestic violence to get between his mother and father, a World War II veteran who suffered from undiagnosed PTSD — was part of what made Stewart such a warmly empathetic screen presence.

That quality, along with his Shakespearean gift for language and dramatic nuance, informed another defining role, that of Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men franchise, starting in the late ‘90s. Back then, the Superhero Industrial Complex was in its infancy, and casting actors of the caliber of Stewart and McKellen gave it a legitimacy that helped turn those films into pop-cultural powerhouse events.

Stewart’s Professor X, like Picard, was a stern but nurturing figure, a telepathic mutant who founded the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, providing a refuge for youths displaced or discriminated against and a safe environment for them to better understand and control their extraordinary powers. The professor’s integrity and honor shone brightly when seen alongside the Machiavellian Magneto, the supervillain on a quest to impose mutant supremacy over mankind. Making for what might be the most perfect pairing in Marvel Comics movies, McKellen took on that role.

Between 2000 and 2017, Stewart made seven X-Men features, collectively grossing $3.32 billion, in addition to appearances in two separate Marvel Cinematic Universe films.

While fans of the series will no doubt have a range of personal favorites, for me, Stewart’s best performance as Charles Xavier was his last, in James Mangold’s haunting, Western-adjacent Logan. Starring opposite Hugh Jackman as a battle-weary Wolverine, Stewart brought enormous pathos and heart to the ailing Professor X, his telepathic gifts turned glitchy by an unknown brain disease. The emotional depth and the heavy burdens of the past in both leads’ performances — but Stewart’s in particular — make Logan one of the most unexpectedly poignant MCU films, transcending the comic-book genre to become a moving character study.

I was fortunate to drink in Stewart’s magnificent stage presence in three plays on Broadway. The first was in 2008, in director Rupert Goold’s hyper-kinetic horror-movie reimagining of Macbeth. Stewart was 68 at the time, older than most actors cast in the title role, his advancing age fueling a rich current of resentment at being too long passed over for leadership roles despite his valor on the battlefield. Casting Kate Fleetwood as a ruthlessly ambitious trophy wife some three decades younger added even more tension to that famously conspiratorial spousal dynamic.

Stewart’s Macbeth was absolutely a murderous fiend, willingly goaded into action by his slinky missus, but the actor brought steadily amplified frailty, paranoia and befuddlement to the tyrant that made us see him in a different light. He didn’t go so far as to turn the character from villainous to sympathetic, but he made it impossible not to be touched by this once-great man undone by the encroaching shadows of his treachery.

He returned to Broadway in 2013, reuniting with McKellen in a blistering doublebill of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Stewart and McKellen first shared a stage in 1977 at the RSC, and their spiky interplay, more than three decades and many adversarial X-Men encounters later, was thrilling to watch.

Absurdist dramas that trace the treacherous limbo between birth and death, the companion pieces assumed the cutting double edge of tragicomic vaudeville. Humor and cruelty consistently overlapped in the actors’ portrayals of two men trapped in an unbreakable cycle of existential unease and futility.

While Stewart’s death is a sad occasion, his legacy is a robust one, demonstrating that classical training and a firm grasp of bardic poetry can enrich even the most seemingly unlikely genre material with dramatic weight, psychological complexity and emotional impact. Not bad for an “unknown British Shakespearean actor.”