Tributes Pour In for Patrick Stewart: the Star Trek and X-Men Star Dies at 86
Hugh Jackman, William Shatner and Famke Janssen were among the first to honor him publicly on Thursday, as the two franchises he anchored - and the Shakespearean stage that raised him - absorbed the loss of the actor his family said died at home in Los Angeles, in his wife's loving care.
LOS ANGELES - The farewells began arriving within hours of the family's announcement on Thursday. Hugh Jackman, who shared the screen with Sir Patrick Stewart across the X-Men films, was among the colleagues who posted tributes to him, as were William Shatner, Star Trek's original captain, and Famke Janssen, Stewart's X-Men co-star - the two fictional universes Stewart held together for decades both answering, on the same day, the news that he was gone. Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, the family said. He was 86.
The announcement came in a family statement posted to his social media on Thursday, shared through his spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak. Stewart died "in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny," the statement said, following "a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia." Neither diagnosis had been publicly disclosed before the statement, which recast the tributes that followed it: the colleagues posting in his honor on Thursday were learning, along with everyone else, what his final period had quietly involved. In place of flowers, the family asked for donations to the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Fund and the Alzheimer's Foundation of America - a request that gave the day's mourning a practical direction, toward the two diseases the statement named.
The career being honored Thursday began far from any starship. Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, the son of a textile worker and a soldier, and he built his name first on the Shakespearean stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company before the screen claimed him. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2010 for services to drama. To the wider world he became Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the measured commander he played in Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 to 1994 and again, in his eighties, in Star Trek: Picard from 2020 to 2023 - the role behind Shatner's place in Thursday's tributes, one captain saluting another. A second audience knew him as Professor Charles Xavier, the moral center of the X-Men films and Jackman's longtime opposite number, which is why so much of Thursday's reaction came from that cast as well.
Audiences have not seen the last of him. Stewart's final screen role is a return as Xavier in Avengers: Doomsday, which reaches theaters on December 18, 2026 - one last appearance, already filmed, from an actor whose two defining parts were both men who led by conscience. He is survived by his wife, the singer Sunny Ozell, whom he married in 2013, and by his two children, Daniel and Sophie.
