Patrick Stewart: 10 Essential Roles

Had Sir Patrick Stewart only played Jean-Luc Picard, commanding officer of the USS Enterprise, or Charles Xavier, leader of the X-Men, the British actor would have secured himself a permanent place in both movie-and-TV history and nerd fandom. He played both, however — as well as a host of roles on stage and screen in a professional career that spanned six decades before his death today at age 86. Rarely has an actor turned a simple phrase like “Make it so” into a baritone-blessed mantra of authority and gravitas. From those landmark sci-fi and superhero-cinema turns to his more comic turns, one half of a classic theater piece’s duo, and voicing a seriously snarky pig’s head — yes, you read that correctly — here are a handful of our favorite Patrick Stewart roles.

• ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (1987)

  Image Credit: CBS/Getty Images

  Patrick Stewart wasn’t a big Star Trek devotee — or even a real science fiction aficionado — when he was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. “Gosh, no!” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I have no enthusiasm for it whatsoever.” But after some initial hesitation, fans found incredible enthusiasm for Stewart after seeing the classically-trained Shakespeare actor battle the Romulans, find common cause with the Klingons, and even engage in a flirty will they/won’t they with chief medical officer Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden.) And in the two-part “Best of Both Worlds” episode, Picard was transformed by the Borg into the evil Locutus. ““Resistance is futile,” he said, in one of the most famous moments in Star Trek history. “Your life, as it has been is over.” A role like this could have easily typecast Stewart for life, which was the fate for many of the original Star Trek actors. But Stewart was such a titanic talent that it only elevated him to new career heights, and he’d even return to it for the late-career franchise highlight Picard. —Andy Greene