A Sense of Doubt blog post #4283 - RIP Patrick Stewart and Walter Koenig
No Comic Book Sunday today but related material.
As much as I loved Walter Koenig, the death of Patrick Stewart hit even harder.
And now, I MUST finish watching Picard.
Live Long and Prosper you two excellent people.
What follows are select articles.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/arts/television/patrick-stewart-dead.html
Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died
The British actor was 86. He achieved pop-culture stardom as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Patrick Stewart, who overcame a bleak childhood in England’s coal-mining country to find acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before making an unlikely career pivot in middle age that would bring him his greatest fame, playing a noble starship captain on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
The death, from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, was announced on social media.
With a commanding baritone voice — he had shed his Yorkshire dialect as an acting student — Mr. Stewart was by his late 40s an eloquent, statesmanlike presence on the British stage. But to many American television viewers, Mr. Stewart was a new face when he made his debut in 1987 as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “The Next Generation,” the first live-action spinoff of the original “Star Trek” series of the late 1960s.
Mr. Stewart went on to star in four feature-film spinoffs — “Star Trek Generations” (1994), “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996), “Star Trek: Insurrection” (1998) and “Star Trek: Nemesis” (2002) — before returning to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in 2020 in a TV sequel that he could call his own, “Star Trek: Picard,” which ran for three seasons.
The Enterprise was neither Mr. Stewart’s first science-fiction home nor his last. He appeared in David Lynch’s original film version of “Dune” (1984) as the weapons teacher Gurney Halleck. Years later, he was Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X, in five “X-Men” movies, playing a wealthy telepath in a wheelchair who leads other mutants with superpowers. Those films, some of which also starred Mr. Stewart’s close friend Ian McKellen, included “X-Men” (2000), “X2: X-Men United” (2003) and “Logan” (2017).
By the time he became a screen star, Mr. Stewart was a lauded stage veteran in Britain, where he began working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. After making his first public stage appearance at 19, he performed in both classical and contemporary works alongside fellow up-and-coming actors like Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Glenda Jackson.
In 1986, he won the London Fringe Theater best actor award for his role as the humiliated husband, George, in the Young Vic’s production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He also won Olivier Awards (Britain’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony) for playing Enobarbus, Mark Antony’s best friend, in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (1979) and Claudius, opposite David Tennant’s Danish prince, in “Hamlet” (2009).
To most American film and television fans, however, he was always Picard, even after the “X-Men” movies. And though in terms of substance the character may have been light years removed from his meatier roles with the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart continued to express pride in his work as that resolute ship captain, dismissing theater-world peers who had looked askance at him when he went to Hollywood.
“They used to ask me ‘Why, why, why?’ as if I was somehow slumming it,” he said in a 2003 interview with the London newspaper The Independent.
“What snobbery!” he said, adding: “For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s fine. I really believe we created an admirable individual.”
A Grim Upbringing
Mr. Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, England, a small, industrial river town in West Yorkshire. (He was given no middle name but later invented one, Hewes, when he joined a union that already had a member named Patrick Stewart.) His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in the British Army, and his mother, Gladys (Barrowclough) Stewart, was a weaver at a textile factory. Patrick was the youngest of their three sons.
The family scraped by, living in a grim little house with no running hot water. The bathroom was outside, in a brick communal outhouse for the neighborhood, one stall to a family. Patrick used his family’s stall as a reading nook.
Much later in life, he wrote and spoke about the domestic violence that had shattered his childhood. His father was reduced to working as a semiskilled laborer after his military career, and became what Mr. Stewart described as a resentful “weekend alcoholic” who physically attacked his mother for years, sometimes in Patrick’s presence.
As Mr. Stewart recalled in a 2009 article he wrote for The Guardian, “I knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn.”
The family dynamic was complicated. Despite the abuse, Patrick’s mother remained with her husband until her death in 1977, and throughout his life Patrick regarded his father with a mixture of anger, fear, sadness and regret. Interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2023, after his memoir was published, he told a reporter, tapping the cover of a copy, “I wish my father could have seen this.”
Patrick was 12 when an English teacher, Cecil Dormand, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship, handed out scripts for “The Merchant of Venice” and instructed him to read the part of Shylock. Patrick went on to work with local drama groups.
Graduating from secondary school at 15, he took a job as a junior reporter with the local newspaper but quit after a year; his editor had complained that he was spending too much time on his theater avocation. After that, he worked for a year as a furniture salesman to save money for drama school, though a local arts council ended up giving him a full scholarship so that he could enroll in the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theater School, which accepted him in 1957, when he was 17.
Two years later, he made his professional acting debut, as the marooned pirate Tom Morgan in “Treasure Island,” with the Lincoln Repertory Company in Lincoln, England. In other early appearances, he took the title roles in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (1963), at the Manchester Library Theater, and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Life of Galileo” (1965), at the Bristol Old Vic.
As part of the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart played more than a dozen roles, mostly supporting, in Stratford-upon-Avon and London between 1966 and 1969. He was the Player King in “Hamlet,” Grumio in “The Taming of the Shrew,” Cornwall in “King Lear” and Hector in “Troilus and Cressida.”
A Working Actor
By the age of 19, Mr. Stewart was already balding, a result of hereditary alopecia. (He wore wigs for many screen and stage roles.) And he was already frequently hearing the prediction familiar to many young character actors: The first 20 years of your career will be difficult; true fame, if it ever comes, may take a while. It was a forecast that was largely borne out.
Mr. Stewart continued to find work, including on British television series like “Coronation Street” and “Story Parade.” By the 1970s, he was winning substantial roles in BBC TV movies and mini-series.
He portrayed Lenin in “Fall of Eagles” (1974); the postwar prime minister Clement Attlee in “The Gathering Storm” (1974); John Thornton, a brainy mill owner, in “North and South” (1975); Sejanus, head of the Praetorian Guard, in “I, Claudius” (1976, seen in the United States on “Masterpiece Theater” in 1977); and the Soviet spymaster Karla in brief, nonspeaking appearances in two John le Carré adaptations, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982).
Mr. Stewart made his Broadway debut in 1971 in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He was Snout, the tinker who portrays the wall between Pyramus and Thisbe in the comedy’s lowbrow play-within-a-play. It would be 20 years before Mr. Stewart appeared on Broadway again, in a 1991 run of a solo production of “A Christmas Carol” he had developed a few years before. The holiday-season show, which he repeated on Broadway in 1992, 1994 and 2001, received a Drama Desk Award for outstanding solo performance.
He was largely considered an unknown when the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Mr. Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in a program that was open to the public.
A TV producer who was involved in developing a new “Star Trek” series happened to attend and soon persuaded Mr. Stewart to audition — even though, as Mr. Stewart later wrote, he knew “next to nothing” about the franchise.
Surprised to get the part — the “Star Trek” creator, Gene Roddenberry, who was overseeing the new series, had not been keen to hire him at first — Mr. Stewart expected the project to be a short-term commitment. How, he remembered thinking, could the show possibly succeed with a middle-aged pacifist captain with a French name and a British accent?
After its run ended, Mr. Stewart continued his stage and television career, now with the power of Hollywood fame behind him. Between 1995 and 2013, he starred in a handful of Broadway productions, two of them Shakespearean: He was Prospero in “The Tempest” in 1995 and, in 2008, the title character in “Macbeth,” for which he was nominated for a Tony.
He also played a self-satisfied bigamist in Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” (2000); a desperate, possibly dangerous homeless man in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker” (2003); and a veteran actor who has seen it all in David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater” (2010).
On American television, he portrayed a restless 17th-century spirit in “The Canterville Ghost” (1996); Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick” (1998); Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” (1999), this time with a cast of 50 or so; a wealthy rancher pointedly named Lear in “King of Texas” (2002); and Henry II, opposite Glenn Close, in “The Lion in Winter” (2003).
‘Being Silly’
Though his rock-steady Picard only rarely seemed to lighten up, Mr. Stewart was, in fact, no stranger to comedy.
He “got rather good at being silly,” The Sydney Morning Herald wrote. He played King Richard in Mel Brooks’s 1993 film spoof “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” parodying Sean Connery with a thick Scottish accent. He appeared in about 120 episodes of the animated series “American Dad!” as Avery Bullock, a C.I.A. deputy director with too many character flaws to count.
When asked to name the most distinguished moments of his career, Mr. Stewart often mentioned — not altogether facetiously — his appearances on “The Simpsons,” in 1995 and 2013, and “Sesame Street” (1996), on which he performed the soliloquy “B or Not a B.”
When he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1994, one of his sketch characters was an erotic-cake baker with a fetish even his customers couldn’t deal with. And the legion of projects for which he served as narrator included “Ted,” Seth MacFarlane’s 2012 movie comedy about a teddy bear with the soul of a frat boy.
After hundreds of screen and stage roles, Mr. Stewart — Sir Patrick since his 2010 knighthood — gave one of his final performances in “The Sheep Detectives” (2026), in which he was the voice of Sir Ritchfield, a wise old Boreray Blackface ram in a flock of crime solvers.
Mr. Stewart and Sheila Falconer, a choreographer, married in 1966, had two children, and divorced, almost a quarter-century later, in 1990. His marriage to Wendy Neuss, an American producer, also ended in divorce. The trigger in each divorce, he acknowledged in his memoir, was an affair with a younger woman. “In a life chockablock with joy and success,” he wrote, “my two failed marriages are my greatest regret.”
In 2013, he married Sunny Ozell, an American singer 38 years his junior, in a makeshift ceremony in a Mexican restaurant after a performance of “No Man’s Land” in Berkeley, Calif. His co-star Mr. McKellen, donning a cloak for the occasion, officiated, having been licensed by the Universal Life Church.
Mr. Stewart’s survivors include Ms. Ozell; his son, Daniel, who is also an actor; and his daughter, Sophie.
For Mr. Stewart, acting was a compulsion, he said, something he was driven to do. In 2011, a BBC interviewer asked him to describe the experience of being onstage. Mr. Stewart answered, “It feels like being a giant.”
And he saw no reason to quit, even in his later years.
“Acting was the thing that made me happy when I was 13 years old,” he wrote in his memoir, “and that is still the case 70 years later. I have so much more work to do. I am not done with the stage. I still want to try another TV comedy. I still have so many characters inside me that I need to let out.”
Patrick Stewart, X-Men and Star Trek star, dies at 86 after battle with Alzheimer’s
The actor will posthumously appear in “Avengers: Doomsday” later this year.
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https://ew.com/patrick-stewart-x-men-star-trek-star-dead-86-cause-of-death-12201185
- Patrick Stewart died at 86 on Wednesday.
- His family confirmed that the X-Men and Star Trek star battled Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia prior to his death.
- “He will be remembered for the dignity, compassion and humanity he brought to every role - in his art and life,” the statement read.
Patrick Stewart, known for his roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Professor Charles Xavier in the long-running X-Men film series, has died. He was 86.
“We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia,” read a statement shared to the actor’s Instagram account on Thursday. “He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all.”
The statement continued, “We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.”
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Patrick Stewart’s cause of death: What is Lewy body dementia?
The “Star Trek” and “X-Men” actor died on Oct. 28 at age 86.
- Actor Patrick Stewart died Oct. 28. He was 86.
- The Star Trek actor’s family attributed his death to Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
- The late Robin Williams also struggled with Lewy body dementia before his death in 2014.
The family of Sir Patrick Stewart, Star Trek’s Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and Prof. X in the X-Men, revealed Thursday that he died a day earlier of both Alzheimer’s disease and, a less commonly discussed diagnosis, Lewy body dementia.
It’s a condition that’s actually the second most common type of dementia after Alzheimer’s, according to the Mayo Clinic. Protein deposits called Lewy bodies “develop in nerve cells on the brain,” and they affect the parts of the brain used for memory, movement, and thinking.
On a daily basis, this can present similarly to Parkinson’s disease, with patients experiencing tremors, difficulties walking, slow movement, and rigid muscles. Long-term, they face a decline in mental abilities and can hallucinate.
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Other symptoms include trouble sleeping, poor regulation of bodily symptoms, and depression.
The disease affects more men than women, the medical center reports. People older than 60 or those with a family member diagnosed with Lewy body dementia or Parkinson’s disease are more likely to face it.
Fans of the late Robin Williams might recognize it from the conversations around his death on Aug. 11, 2014. The comedian died by suicide at 63.
His own struggle with the progressive neurodegenerative disease was captured in the 2020 documentary Robin’s Wish.
Susan Schneider, the Aladdin star’s widow, said in a statement when the trailer was released, “Armed with the name of a brain disease I’d never heard of, I set out on a mission to understand it, and that led me down my unchosen path of advocacy. With invaluable help from leading medical experts, I saw that what Robin and I had gone through, finally made sense — our experience matched up with the science. And what I discovered along the way was bigger than me, and bigger than Robin. The full story was revealed during the making of this film and it holds the truth that Robin and I had been searching for.”
In addition to Stewart and Williams, Golden Girls star Estelle Getty, Downton Abby actress Nathalie Baye, and CNN founder Ted Turner all suffered from the disease before their deaths in July 2008, April 2026, and May 2026, respectively.
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Stewart had continued working until the end, and he told TV Insider in what appears to be his final interview that he had more to give.
“I still continue to receive interesting offers and I love being challenged by new work, like voicing a pig’s head in Riz Ahmed‘s brilliant new series Bait,” Stewart said in the story published July 7. “I can’t imagine ever officially ‘retiring.’”
He added, “I’ll always and forever be an actor.”
His last film role is in Avengers: Doomsday, which is scheduled to debut in theaters on Dec. 18.
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Whoopi Goldberg pays tribute to Star Trek costar and longtime friend Patrick Stewart after his death
The platonic pair’s love will always live long and prosper.
- Whoopi Goldberg shared an emotional tribute to her Star Trek costar and longtime friend, Sir Patrick Stewart.
- The actor died Oct. 28 at age 86, years after he and Goldberg worked together on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
- Stewart deeply moved Goldberg during a 2020 episode of The View, where he surprised her by asking her to reprise her Star Trek role.
Whoopi Goldberg’s love for late friend and Star Trek costar Sir Patrick Stewart will live long and prosper after the actor died Wednesday at 86.
Goldberg, who first starred with Stewart in the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series from 1988-1993, shared a photo to Instagram on Friday, showing toy versions of herself and Stewart standing next to each other.
“See you on the next holodeck,” Goldberg said, referencing their time together on Star Trek, before finishing the post with a simple “RIP.”
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Stewart famously played Jean-Luc Picard on the program, while Goldberg portrayed a fan-favorite character, Guinan, a bartender and counselor on the Enterprise-D ship.
The pair’s friendship spanned decades before Stewart’s death, with the actor making frequent appearances on the Goldberg-hosted daytime talk show The View.
On one such occasion, Stewart nearly moved Goldberg to tears when he surprised her on air during a 2020 broadcast, asking her to reprise the role of Guinan on the second season of his Star Trek: Picard TV project.
“I’ve said this on the show before, but Star Trek was one of the great experiences, from the beginning to the end,” Goldberg said, growing visibly emotional as the segment went on. “I had the best, best, best time ever.”
Goldberg, 70, took him up on the offer and appeared in scenes for the project across season 2 in 2022.
Goldberg and Stewart later reunited on the set of The View for a major Star Trek cast reunion in early 2023 — which Entertainment Weekly exclusively previewed at the time.
Stewart told EW ahead of Picard’s debut that he wasn’t initially game for coming back.
“I’m very proud of the work we did on Next Generation — most of our work — but I felt I had said and done everything I could about Jean-Luc Picard and didn’t see any point,” he said, while producer Alex Kurtzman added: “That’s when he understood we were dedicated to exploring a new chapter in a way that hadn’t been done before.”
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Walter Koenig, famed Star Trek and Babylon 5 alum, dies at age 90
The late actor was known for his role as Russian crewman Pavel Chekov in the “Star Trek” universe.
- Star Trek alum Walter Koenig has died at age 90.
- The late actor’s rep confirmed his cause of death.
- Koenig was known for playing Russian crewman Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek universe.
Star Trek alum Walter Koenig has died at age 90.
The late actor’s rep confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter on Monday, sharing that Koenig had died from natural causes. Koenig’s team remembered him as someone with “warmth and unforgettable performances” in a statement to Variety.
“Walter helped inspire audiences with his optimism, humor, and adventurous spirit. Beyond Star Trek, his long and distinguished career showcased his versatility as an actor and his genuine love for his craft,” the statement continued. “His remarkable talent continued to shine in his later years, most recently with his performance in the short film Mr. Fleischmann, for which he received the Platinum Award for Best Actor at the 2026 Independent Shorts Awards — a fitting recognition of a lifetime devoted to his craft.”
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Victoria Sirakova/Getty
Koenig was known for his portrayal of Russian crewman Pavel Chekov on Star Trek, a role he played throughout several iterations of the sci-fi series. His most recent appearance in the Star Trek universe came in a 2023 episode of Star Trek: Picard, in which he voiced President Anton Chekov — the son of his original character.
“Walter’s legacy extends far beyond the screen,” the statement from his reps continued. “Through countless convention appearances and interactions with fans, he shared his kindness, wit, and appreciation with everyone fortunate enough to meet him. He understood what Star Trek meant to people and embraced the community that grew around it.”
Prior to his death, Koenig spoke highly of his decades-long experience in the Star Trek fandom, praising the Trekkies for how they’ve continued to evolve it.
“That camaraderie among Star Trek fans became more extensive when they started having conventions. It wasn’t only what you’d traditionally call nerds,” Koenig said during an interview with the Television Academy. “It was people who had a sense of humanity and a sense of justice. People who had imagination and people who loved monsters. It covered a much larger canvas than was initially thought.”
Koenig was also known for his role in a separate sci-fi series, Babylon 5, in which he played Alfred Bester in 12 episodes from 1994 to 1998. Acting was always in the cards for Koenig, who starred in stage productions at his New York high school before heading to college. At first, Koenig was pre-med at Grinnell College in Iowa, before transferring to UCLA, where he pursued a degree in psychology. While at UCLA, he took an acting class and a letter of recommendation from his teacher allowed Koenig to get into the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.
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- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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