I’m not sure I’ve ever shared this publicly, but I’m a bit of a Trekkie, so Patrick Stewart’s death at the age of 86 on Wednesday hit me pretty hard.
Growing up, I loved watching ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ which aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s and starred Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, the second-most famous, but undeniably the best, captain of the USS Enterprise.
Watching Stewart, a Shakespearean stage actor with a “commanding baritone voice,” deliver rousing monologues as Picard gave me chills. The clip below, from the 1996 movie ‘Star Trek: First Contact,’ is one of my favourite scenes involving Stewart.
Stewart passed away of Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia just 51 days before the U.S. release of ‘Avengers: Doomsday,’ in which the award-winning British actor reprised his other famous Hollywood sci-fi role as Professor Charles Xavier, leader of the X-Men. Stewart played Xavier, aka Professor X, in six ‘X-Men’ movies between 2000 and 2014.
I admired him not just for his acting, but for his politics too: He was a loud critic of Donald Trump, an opponent of Brexit, a lifelong socialist and a campaigner against domestic violence.
In 2003, in an interview with The Independent, Stewart said some of his fellow British actors thought he was “slumming it” for agreeing to play characters in Hollywood sci-fi shows and movies.
“What crap! What snobbery!” he said. “For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s fine.”
Indeed. Rest in power, Jean-Luc, rest in power.
And now, let’s hear from the man himself.