Patrick Stewart, Star Trek's Captain Picard and X-Men actor, dies at 86

Patrick Stewart, the British actor who commanded the starship Enterprise as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek" and led the X-Men as Professor Charles Xavier, has died at 86. He died on Wednesday in Los Angeles, spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said in a statement on Thursday, describing a "brief and poignant journey" with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia.

A career rooted in the theatre

Although he became one of the most recognisable faces in science fiction, Stewart spent much of his career onstage, performing Shakespeare and other classics. His roles included Claudius and Macbeth, a one-man adaptation of "A Christmas Carol", and West End and Broadway runs of Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land" and Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" alongside his longtime friend Ian McKellen.

His 2007 Macbeth drew some of the best reviews of his career and his only Tony Award nomination. The Times of London called it "an enthralling creation of frailty, appetite, egotism and grim humour".

Stewart told the Associated Press in 2008 that he had waited nearly 50 years for the part, having memorised its soliloquies as a 14-year-old. Learning lines, he said, had since become "the one curse of this job".

From Yorkshire to the starship

Raised in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, a working-class corner of northern England, Stewart grew up in a house without a bathroom. He joined an amateur drama group at 12 and won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Bald since the age of 19 because of alopecia, he spent 14 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Mark Antony, Henry IV, Shylock and Oberon, among others.

He later moved into screen work, appearing in the 1981 film "Excalibur". In 1987, shortly after performing in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", he was offered a role in a science fiction series he was told would fail. "Star Trek: The Next Generation" instead ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes, and Picard's command "Make it so" became one of its best-known lines.

X-Men and later work

Stewart played Professor Charles Xavier from the 2000 film "X-Men" onwards, returning to the role in several sequels including 2017's "Logan", opposite Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

He also wrote publicly about a childhood marked by domestic violence, saying his father, a former regimental sergeant major in the British Army, was prone to repeated violence against his mother, and that "violence is always a choice a man makes". He later became a patron of Refuge, a charity supporting survivors of domestic abuse. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in June 2010, and he served as an ambassador for the International Rescue Committee.

His death came days after that of Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in the original "Star Trek" series, which aired from 1966 to 1969.

Source: Al Jazeera.