Patrick Stewart — a commanding stage performer with a singular voice

The theatre legend, known for his command of Shakespeare, as well as screen roles in Star Trek and X-Men, has passed away at the age of 86.

Summary

• Patrick Stewart, known for his roles in X-Men and Star Trek, has passed away at the age of 86
• He has performed on stage in the West End and on Broadway, in shows such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Waiting for Godot
• His later stage projects included collaborations with Ian McKellen

Patrick Stewart, who has died age 86, remains known the world over as Capt. Picard in the Star Trek franchise and Charles Xavier (Professor X) in the X-Men movies, which co-starred his dear friend, and stage colleague, Ian McKellen, one year Stewart’s senior.

But I for one shall always remember the Yorkshire-born performer’s inimitable theatrical presence, not least a singular voice that seemed to originate somewhere below the stage floor, captivating audiences with its timbre and sonority.

I first experienced Stewart live in a London revival of an American classic: a 1987 production at the Young Vic of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (currently playing in London with Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup), with Stewart as the dryly incisive, waspish George and the great Beckett actress Billie Whitelaw as his bellicose wife, Martha.

I didn’t realise then that the American repertoire would prove so important to an actor classically trained at the Bristol Old Vic. A regular visitor to Broadway, his theatre credits there included the New York premiere of Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mt Morgan (seen previously in the West End with Tom Conti) and a short-lived revival of the David Mamet two-hander A Life in the Theatre, which takes a self-reflective look at the very profession to which Stewart had devoted his career.

Back in the UK, most of his stage work post-Albee was devoted to Shakespeare and the Anglo-Irish theatrical canon. As someone who worked his way up through the company ranks in a way one doesn’t encounter anymore, Stewart wasn’t afraid to combine leading parts with others that allowed for powerful support. That meant savouring his shamanistic Prospero (a part he had played in a separate production in New York’s Central Park and then on Broadway) and military-minded Mark Antony, whilst also conjoining Claudius and the Ghost in the 2008 David Tennant Hamlet: two men who in very different ways come to preoccupy the Danish prince.

His Macbeth for the director Rupert Goold was notable for the third-act banquet scene being performed twice, either side of the intermission. That conceit allowed the first time round for a literal representation of Banquo’s ghost, who then goes unseen the second go-round – Macbeth by then lost in his own psychic meltdown. Stewart received a 2008 Tony nomination for the production’s Broadway transfer in which he seemed to live fearsomely inside the gathering pathology of the title role.

I travelled to Chichester in 2007 to see Stewart as a propriety-obsessed Malvolio in Philip Franks’s revival of Twelfth Night, and watched him scale the fearsome heights of Ibsen – a rare foray into the European repertoire – in The Master Builder. His co-star on that one was a then-fledgling Lisa Dillon, Stewart’s partner for a time.

When Stewart warmed to a part, he returned to it. He did three Broadway runs across four years in his own adaptation of A Christmas Carol, shuttling between Dickens’s characters with a sustained virtuosity that avoided any whiff of the show-off. An Olivier Award winner in London for the same thespian feat, Stewart seemed to animate the spectral presence of Dickens himself, not to mention a giddy array of characters realised via a mere shift in inflection, his voice shifting registers with ease.

But his last two assignments, entered into with McKellen on both sides of the Atlantic (albeit with different supporting players), are the ones I take with me to this day. As the heavy-drinking Hirst in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, Stewart played the initially indrawn sparring partner to McKellen’s more garrulous Spooner, these two actor-knights following in the illustrious footsteps of the roles’ legendary creators, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud.

The duo paired up once again as Vladimir (Stewart) and Estragon (McKellen) in Waiting for Godot, Stewart’s crisp vocals every bit the match of his plummier stage partner. The production's subtext was clearly the two men’s shared delight in occupying a stage to such mutually satisfying late-career effect.

It’s with his natural authority in mind that I find it hard to imagine this robust talent brought low by Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia: a cruel fate if ever there was one. “What a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” Ophelia remarks in Hamlet, a play Stewart knew well. (He played the part in a brilliant comic sketch on Sesame Street, of all unexpected places.) But his lustre lives on, alongside that magnificent voice whose resonance defies – indeed transcends – time.

Patrick Stewart: 13 July 1940 - 28 October 2026

Photo credit: Stewart with Shuler Hensley, Billy Crudup and Ian McKellen in the pre-Broadway engagement of No Man's Land. (Courtesy of production)