Patrick Stewart’s Lesson In Boldly Going

My first encounter with Patrick Stewart’s effortless gravitas came courtesy of a minor role in Mel Brooks’ 1993 medieval swashbuckler spoof, “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” in which he played King Richard. Appearing late in an already star-studded film, Stewart promptly stole the show. He displayed an uncanny knack for comedic timing and a naturally regal bearing (even while doing a cheeky Sean Connery impression), without a trace of aristocratic snobbery. He was that rare thing: a royal everyman.

Sir Patrick Stewart died on October 28, 2026, at the age of 86. He is survived by his wife, singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell, and his two children, Daniel and Sophie, from his first marriage to Sheila Falconer.

Stewart cultivated an effortless command over decades on the stage. Born into a working-class family in Yorkshire, England, Stewart trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, where he spent many years inhabiting the Bard’s kings, villains, and tragic heroes.

His theatrical repertoire was formidable, spanning Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” and “The Tempest,” and later acclaimed productions of “Macbeth,” a role he undertook at 66, considerably older than its customary interpreters. Stewart leveraged his maturity to his advantage, reimagining the Scottish tragedy against the backdrop of a Stalinist dictatorship, portraying a grizzled military commander whose descent into paranoia and murderous tyranny evoked the Soviet despot himself. His performance was chilling in its restraint, the transformation from seasoned soldier to bloodthirsty tyrant unfolding with a disarming self-possession.

He pushed his theatrical gifts to almost absurd lengths with his one-man adaptation of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” in which he single-handedly portrayed more than 40 characters, from Ebenezer Scrooge to Tiny Tim, with scarcely a prop in sight. I cannot conceive a more exacting exhibition of an actor’s craft, requiring the vocal dexterity, theatrical imagination, and sheer command of an audience that Stewart possessed in such abundance.

The greatest triumph of Stewart’s career, however, was his ability to inhabit the conventionally lowbrow world of science-fiction television with the same conviction and dedication he brought to the hallowed stages of Shakespearean theater. Where theatrical purists might have sneered at the indignity of trading the Bard for starships (and later the comic book world of the X-Men), Stewart approached both with equal seriousness.

When “Star Trek: The Next Generation” premiered in 1987, Stewart was 47, an unlikely leading man for a science-fiction franchise previously defined by William Shatner’s suave and swaggering Captain Kirk. Age, as Stewart repeatedly demonstrated throughout his career, was hardly an impediment to his ambitions. His Jean-Luc Picard was a different breed of hero: erudite, diplomatic, and pensive, and he donned a countenance that naturally exuded his moral authority.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of watching “Star Trek” reruns, an experience that helped shape my appreciation for the freedoms and ideals of Western civilization. “Star Trek” was, in many ways, a grand exercise in projecting Western liberalism and Enlightenment ideals onto a galactic canvas. The Enterprise traversed the cosmos as an ambassador of those ideals, carrying the philosophical inheritance of the West — individual liberty, scientific inquiry, and peaceful coexistence — to the farthest reaches of the universe.

Its imagined future was one in which humanity had largely transcended the petty divisions of race or class, united by a shared commitment to progress and the pursuit of knowledge. The United Federation of Planets represented an almost boundless faith in the universality of these principles, and in mankind’s capacity to build a better civilization upon them. It was a wonderfully optimistic conception of humanity’s future, occasionally naive (and sometimes self-righteous) but animated by a profound conviction in the possibilities of civilization. Much of that optimism owed its persuasive force to Stewart, whose candor made even the Federation’s loftiest moral pronouncements sound like plain common sense.

There are perennial arguments among science-fiction devotees over the superiority of “Star Trek” or “Star Wars,” and among Trekkies over Kirk or Picard. I grew up with “Star Wars” before being introduced to Stewart’s galactic adventures, but his career makes a persuasive case against such rigid artistic loyalties. We can appreciate both Beethoven and the Beatles, Shakespearean theater and science fiction, “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.” Indeed, Stewart himself demonstrated just how much these disparate worlds have to offer one another.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from Stewart’s life and career, it is the virtue of approaching the unfamiliar with an open mind and a healthy disregard for snobbery. If an accomplished star of Britain’s classical stage could trade the Bard for a starship, approach it with the same conviction he brought to Shakespeare, and emerge as one of television’s most beloved captains, perhaps the rest of us ought to be a little less precious about what we consider beneath us. His life was a testament to the rewards of curiosity, the pleasures of embracing the unexpected, and the extraordinary places a willingness to boldly go can take us. How fortunate that Stewart never considered the Enterprise beneath his dignity. He was, as I first discovered in Sherwood Forest, that rare thing: a royal everyman. We cannot all be kings, but we could all stand to be a little more like the man beneath the crown.

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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.

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