Sir Ian McKellen Can't Hold Back TEARS About Patrick Stewart's Death

Sir Ian McKellen Can't Hold Back TEARS About Patrick Stewart's Death Sir Patrick Stewart has died. His family has announced that he passed away on October 28, at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. And here is the part almost nobody saw coming. According to the reports, Stewart had not publicly disclosed that he was ill. His family says he died after what they called a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia. The world learned about the illness and the loss in the same breath. So today we are asking one question. What did Patrick Stewart never tell us? We will walk through his whole life, from a poor house in Yorkshire to the captain's chair of the Enterprise. And at the very end, I will give you the honest answer, including the part that no one, not even the people reporting this, can answer. Stay to the end. Because there is one thing he did tell the world, years ago, and it changes how you hear everything else. Let's start at the beginning. Patrick Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, Alfred, was a regimental sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment, a veteran of the Second World War who had been at Dunkirk. The house was poor. And it was not peaceful. Alfred was violent toward his wife. Stewart grew up in that house. Remember that. His English teacher, Cecil Dormand, is credited with starting his love of Shakespeare. At 15, Stewart left school and became a reporter at a local newspaper. One of his jobs there was writing obituaries. After a year, his editor told him to choose, journalism or acting. He chose acting. It is a strange detail now. The man who would be the subject of obituaries around the world began his working life by writing them. He had a friend on that road, a young man named Brian Blessed, whom he met at a drama course. Together, they won grants to attend the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. On his way out, the school's principal gave him a line he said he still thought about decades later: you will never achieve success by ensuring against failure. On May 19, 1959, he made his professional debut at the Theatre Royal in Bristol, playing a cutpurse in Cyrano de Bergerac. In 1966 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he stayed for sixteen years. In 1979 he won his first Laurence Olivier Award, for Antony and Cleopatra. Television knew him too. He played Lenin in Fall of Eagles, the schemer Sejanus in I, Claudius, and the spymaster Karla in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In 1984, he was Gurney Halleck in Dune. Then, in 1987, everything changed. A producer named Robert Justman saw him at a reading at UCLA, and Stewart agreed to come to Hollywood for a revival of Star Trek. But he did not believe in it.