Renowned British actor Patrick Stewart, a gay rights ally who was perhaps best known for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the science-fiction TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in several films in the X-Men superhero franchise, died today at the age of 86 of Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia (a progressive brain disorder) in his Los Angeles, California home. He was thrice married to women and had two children with his first wife.
Born to a poor family in Yorkshire, England, Stewart studied theater from an early age, becoming a classically trained actor and joining the Royal Shakespeare Company at the age of 26. Though his Star Trek role made him wealthy, he played 62 film roles, 48 TV roles, 37 stage roles, and 29 video game roles during his lifetime. He’s also remembered for advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusion in Star Trek and for supporting same-sex marriage.
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Stewart played a brief role as a weapons teacher in the 1984 film adaptation of the sci-fi novel Dune (which featured a queer-coded villain). While his most famous series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, didn’t feature any out LGBTQ+ characters, two of its episodes included storylines about alien civilizations that view binary gender identity as an outdated concept.
After his role in Star Trek, Stewart played a free-spirited gay character in the groundbreaking 1995 film Jeffrey, one of the few films about the AIDS epidemic that was also a romantic comedy.
Stewart was also beloved amongst gay sci-fi and comic book fans — as well as gay equality activists — for his iconic friendship with out gay actor Ian McKellen, who played enemies in the X-Men film series. The two began their friendship as actors , and it continued throughout both men’s lives.
In 2009, he acted alongside McKellen on Broadway as the lead duo in the absurdist existential comedic stage play Waiting for Godot. To promote the play, the two took playful pictures together around New York City during their days off, wearing their stage characters’ bowler hats. The images helped solidify the public’s perception of their friendship.
McKellen officiated Stewart’s wedding to singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell on September 7, 2013. McKellen got ordained just so he could officiate. In future years, the two men made headlines by publicly kissing one another.
The pair made headlines in February 2015 when Stewart kissed McKellen, his X-Men co-star, at the premiere of McKellen’s mystery drama Mr. Holmes. McKellen also kissed Stewart on the lips in 2017 upon presenting Stewart with the Empire Legend Award, a lifetime achievement award for creators in film.
In an August 2015 interview with HuffPost Live, Stewart (who identified as straight and was married to women) said, “There are places where we are taking one step forward. Gay marriage and the legalizing of gay marriage — and not only that, but the endorsement that even our [British] prime minister [David Cameron] has given to it — is fantastic.”
Stewart added, “The world is becoming increasingly a more fair, a more truly democratic place to live, and I’m proud to have campaigned a little bit with Ian on those issues.”
Stewart later told late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien, “We are very good friends, and quite intimate friends. It seemed appropriate! That is how we greet each other or say goodbye.
“But Ian isn’t the only one,” he added, saying, “I don’t want you to think I am a one-man guy!”
In the same interview, Stewart kissed O’Brien. Afterward, O’Brien said, “That was fantastic! I felt passion… you’re an iconic actor, a great man, and we kissed, and I felt like you suddenly accepted me as your better!”
Stewart’s comfort in gay culture continued to endear him to LGBTQ+ fans. He wore drag to the premiere of his comedic TV series Blunt Talk in April 2016. He also wished his social media followers “HAPPY PRIDE” in June 2016 while wearing a rainbow-colored Pride t-shirt.
In an interview with The Standard that same year, Stewart said, “I know that I’m in a love affair with Ian [McKellen].”
Stewart played a bisexual Juilliard dance teacher in the 2014 dramatic film Match.
In an interview promoting the film, Steward said, “When I look back to my early career and early experience, my ease and comfort being in the company of and intimately close with gay and lesbian colleagues and friends was always, for me, the most natural, and I might even say at times appealing aspects of the life I was living.”
“I think this is where the theater is such an appealing world, because it embraces everything and always has,” he continued. “So there was never a moment where I made an intellectual choice that I would be a supporter of gay civil rights. It was always a natural and uncomplicated choice.”
“Then later in life, as I got to know well-known activists like Ian McKellen, I was only too happy to join campaigns, march, and support in whatever way I could because it always seemed to me to be something that much too much fuss was being made about,” he added.
Stewart then played the lead character in the TV series Star Trek: Picard, which aired from 2020 to 2023.
In a 2022 video interview with transgender journalist Dawn Ennis, Stewart said he encourages LGBTQ+ representation in his acting projects.
“I will encourage it as much as I possibly can [in Star Trek: Picard], because it is in what is a very troubled world,” Stewart said. “Currently, there are elements and this being one of them, where you see we are at long last beginning to grow up and become real adults who have an open view of the world and of life.”
The show’s third and final season featured two queer women serving on the bridge of the show’s iconic spaceship, the USS Enterprise.
Stewart did experience blowback in 2015 when he said that an Irish baker should not be forced to write a message on a cake supporting marriage equality.
Viewing the issue as one about personal freedom of speech, he explained via Facebook, “I know many disagree with my sentiments, including the courts. I respect and understand their position, especially in this important climate where the tides of prejudices and inequality are (thankfully) turning.”
“What I cannot respect is that some have conflated my position on this single matter to assume I’m anti-equality or that I share the personal beliefs of the baker,” he added. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be further from the truth.”
“I have long championed the rights of the LGBT community, because equality should not only be, as the people of Ireland powerfully showed the world, universally embraced, but treasured,” he wrote.
Gay actor George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek series, paid tribute to Stewart in an Instagram.
“As Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart took the starship Enterprise to places it had never gone before, and he inspired a whole next generation of star-gazers who looked longingly ahead to a brighter future for all humanity,” Takei wrote. “Rest in the heavens, Captain.”
In his own commemoration after Stewart’s death, McKellen wrote via Instagram, “Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”
Stewart’s final role was in the Marvel superhero film Avengers: Doomsday, set for release in theaters on December 18, 2026.
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