On this date in 1940, English actor Patrick Stewart was born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, to Gladys (née Barrowclough) and Alfred Stewart. His mother was employed as a weaver and textile worker while raising Stewart and two older brothers. His father had menial jobs, including general laborer and milkman, after his World War II military service, which included being evacuated on the last day of the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, a bloody debacle for British, Belgian and French forces.
His traumatic “combat shock” from the war turned Stewart’s father into “an angry, weekend alcoholic” who was not a good financial provider and subjected the family to domestic abuse. (Square Mile magazine, Feb. 3, 2020) Stewart attended schools affiliated with the Church of England but left at age 15. He was interested in drama, which he continued to study while working at various jobs, including a brief stint as a newspaper reporter and obituary writer. But his heart was in the theater.
Stewart’s first professional stage appearance was with the Bristol Old Vic Company production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” and he became a stalwart member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for nearly 20 years. Though he preferred classical theater to other genres, Stewart also took roles in many TV series without becoming a household name.
Stewart explained how that changed: “In 1986 I was assisting a Shakespeare scholar, David Rodes, in a lecture he was giving in Los Angeles. Also signed up for this course of public lectures was a Hollywood producer, Robert Justman, who was involved in preparing a revival of ‘Star Trek.’ Robert always claimed that at one point in the evening he turned to his wife and said: ‘We’ve found the captain.’ ” (The Guardian, March 6, 2018)
The captain of the USS Enterprise was Jean-Luc Picard in the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which ran from 1987-94. The show “strongly implied that most members of The Federation are atheists. Vulcans in particular view supernatural beliefs to be highly illogical. Picard, when told by an adviser that to save his crew member’s life he must pose as a god for a less advanced culture, he decried, ‘Your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement? To send them back into the dark ages of superstition, and ignorance and fear! No!’ ” (“The Top 10 Atheist Characters on Television,” The Humanist, July 19, 2012)
From 1994 to 2002, he also played Picard in four films. “I was unprepared for the albatross around my neck that [the role] would prove to be,” he said in 2020. Concerns about being typecast made him wary of signing up for the X-Men film series as Charles Xavier, founder and mentor of a superhero team, a role he played in seven movies starting in 2000. His friend Ian McKellan co-starred. (See this listing for his numerous credits as of this writing in 2025, many critically acclaimed, onscreen and onstage.)
Stewart married dancer-choreographer Sheila Falconer in 1966. They divorced in 1990 after having a son Daniel and daughter Sophia. He married TV producer Wendy Neuss-Stewart in 2000. They filed for legal separation after three years of marriage and 10 years together. In the 2011 documentary “The Captains” directed by William Shatner, Stewart said “I have two major regrets, and they’re both to do with the failure of – my failure in – my marriages.”
In 2008, Stewart began dating singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell, whom he met while performing in “Macbeth” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, near where she was working as a waitress. They wed in 2013 when he was 72 and she was 35. McKellan officiated at their wedding. “We are both atheists but we definitely believe in energies, and trying to leave with a positive vibe,” Ozell said. (Toronto Star, Dec. 30, 2015)
He was knighted for his services to film, theater and television in 2010 and was named a patron by Humanists UK for his exploration of the human condition through the arts. He has publicly endorsed the right to assisted suicide and in 2011 became a patron of Dignity in Dying.
Stewart ruffled some feathers in 2015 in Northern Ireland when he expressed support for Christian bakers in Belfast who had refused to bake a cake saying “Support Gay Marriage” alongside an image of Bert and Ernie from “Sesame Street.” Stewart posted online that while he opposes organized religion and is an advocate of same-sex marriage, “I would support their rights to say ‘No, this is personally offensive to my beliefs, I will not do it.’ ”
PHOTO: Stewart at the 71st Annual Peabody Awards luncheon in 2012; photo by Anders Krusberg / Peabody Awards under CC. 2.0.
