NASA

Sir Patrick Stewart... the Shakespearean who became Picard 🖖😭 Sir Patrick Stewart died on Wednesday at home in LA, aged 86. He was 47 and a Royal Shakespeare Company actor when Star Trek found him. TNG producer Bob Justman saw him at a literary reading at UCLA and pushed for him... a bald Yorkshireman playing a French captain. It worked because he played Picard like a Shakespeare lead. Every speech landed, even the technobabble. The episodes I keep coming back to: - The Measure of a Man... Picard defending Data's right to choose, in a courtroom, with nothing but an argument - The Best of Both Worlds... Picard taken by the Borg as Locutus, the cliffhanger between seasons three and four - Darmok... a captain learning a language built on stories, because talking was the only way out - Chain of Command... "There are four lights!" Tortured, and still refusing to say what he didn't see - Tapestry... Q shows him the safe life he'd have had without his mistakes, and it's worse - All Good Things... the finale, ending on him finally sitting down to play poker with his crew And The Inner Light. A probe knocks him out on the bridge and he wakes up as Kamin on the dying planet Kataan. He lives a whole life there... a wife, children, grandchildren, learning the Ressikan flute... and back on the Enterprise only about 25 minutes have passed. His own son Daniel played Kamin's son Batai. It won the Hugo in 1993. It's still my absolute favourite of all Star Trek... and that last scene, alone in his quarters with the flute 😭 What Picard meant to me... a captain who talked first, read books, listened to his crew and reasoned his way through moral problems out loud. And that stage presence of his made all of it believable. Then he did it all again as Professor X 😮 Charles Xavier for 17 years, from X-Men (2000) to Logan (2017), right alongside Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. In Logan Xavier is old and failing and Logan is looking after him... Stewart called it "the final time and maybe our best time". Hugh Jackman's tribute: "I learned so much from him. I will miss you, Patrick Stewart, all of my days." And there's still one more to come... his last performance is Xavier again, next to McKellen's Magneto, in Avengers: Doomsday on 18 December. The rest of his career was huge too: - 16 years with the RSC, two Olivier awards, Macbeth, Prospero, Claudius opposite David Tennant's Hamlet - Waiting for Godot and No Man's Land with his great mate Ian McKellen, who also married him to Sunny Ozell - Knighted in 2010 for services to drama - Back as Picard in Star Trek: Picard (2020-23), and his memoir Making It So in 2023 He grew up with domestic violence at home and became a patron of Refuge because of it. He also backed Combat Stress after learning his dad's war service had left him with what we'd now call PTSD. He talked about both openly, which takes guts. Thank you Sir Patrick. Kamin's words fit: "Seize the time, Meribor. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again." (The Inner Light) Engage... 🖖 Photos: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0), Pamela Price (CC BY-SA 4.0), PBS 1980 (public domain), Anders Krusberg/Peabody Awards (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons