(I looked up the original script, it’s “Kiazi’s children. Their faces wet.” But I’m gratified that you knew what I meant.)
I’ll be re-watching The Inner Light in his honor tonight.
It was inevitable, though you always hope for an exception. I don't think I've ever seen any work of his I didn't deeply appreciate.
I can still hear the voice: "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before."
Wow, what a loss. So many iconic characters, so much inspirational
Lewy body dementia was what Robin Williams had but they didn't discover until after his death and I guess he was misdiagnosed during life.
https://lewybodyresourcecenter.org/robin-williams-lewy-body-...
I also want to mention his hilarious role as bullock in American dad, the way he takes a role both so seriously and ridiculously makes him so fantastically hilarious.
I love him and will miss him.
Good startup advice. Good life advice.
You might also have missed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA
I met Patrick when we organized a Star Trek convention. He was even kinder and gentler in person than in his role as Picard.
RIP a legend
I was more of a Shatner movies Star Trek kid but I remember watching The Next Generation when it first came out and liked it. RIP to a legend.
I also really liked him in a Christmas Carrol (1999). I thought he played the role really well.
But he start losing his hair at 17 and really struggled with it. A turning point came when a friend (a Hungarian judo black belt) and his wife wrestled him down and physically cut off his toupée with scissors.
His agent even had him do the Star Trek audition in a wig, but luckily the crew had better ideas.
He was host at an academy awards event for technical achievement a few years back. Usually they send some random actor who jokes about how nerdy everything is. Having Patrick Stewart there was very popular he was 'one of us' even though he said himself he knew very little about tech. Had a chance to talk to him a bit afterwards and got to tell him how well appreciated he was by that audience. Gracious and funny, exactly how you might imagine he would be.
A sad loss.
Star Trek TNG + Captain Picard acted as a male role model, a different moral philosophy, and a celebration of nerdy people as competent and important in the world
Anyway, it's a sad day, but I do appreciate that both his work and the influence he's had on people like me live on.
Edit: Oh man, I can't believe I'm crying at work over an actor.
He was a wonderful actor and by all accounts a wonderful person.
I often think of Picard looking down at us, through a force field in the Enterprise D, sees our wars, our inequalities and slowly shakes his head: "Savages". In his role as Picard he was a bit of a teacher to me.
Really enjoyed his stuff. Always enjoyed that he could do both the grand and the silly with equal aplomb.
William Shatner was just on earlier this month, incredible he's still going strong at 95.
I hope our current environment is one that can elevate someone of similar talents to an equivalent stature, but I worry our media is not up to the task.
When I think of our civilization, the Ressikan Flute often comes to mind.
Pour one out. https://picard.ytmnd.com/
This was a person who from a relatively young age looked old, but more importantly behaved with a sort of dignity and thoughtfulness that projected way beyond his years. I'm not really sure how to assimilate the news because on the one hand obviously this was going to be happening sooner or later. He has always just felt old. But on the other, he's felt old for my whole life, so why shouldn't he just continue on that way without bound.
Instead I’ll go find my old DVD box set of “I, Claudius” where he had a memorable role too.
His performance (as well as how the character was written) still today illustrate what I view as an ideal male archetype. Fair, honest, in control of his emotions yet passionate. Thank you for the gift your performance has given me Mr Stewart. My life would likely have turned out a lot worse without a solid example of that a good man could be
Sir Patrick, my captain, you will be sorely missed.
He really was able to translate the literature to acting relevance for me (as a lit person)
Vivaldi's poetry ... left something to be desired (think Vogon), but Patrick Stewart made it noble.
RIP
Now cheer up me lads, t’is better to have loved and lost, than never have loved at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZn6c4CeJCc [The one on Pogo’s channel doesn’t include clips of Stewart, just his voice. This is a reupload of the original]
Never have I seen such presence and charisma squeezed into so short a scene.
One of the things I particularly liked is that he admits to the mistakes he made, and the times when he wasn't the human being he strived to be.
I didn't know anything about him other than his work, which is perhaps as fine an epitaph as any man could have.
Nah, it's SciFi. They'll find a way of writing them back in. Won't they?
It might of been Im not sure, not the case? But perhaps against a white wall it was clear we were the only ones standing for the performance and in turn it felt he was performing for us. It just felt like that.
I ofcourse have no idea if he was just looking in our general direction but it weirdly felt like it and I thought it was kind.
Ive never had such a "he was doing it for us" self centered view of any other performance Ive ever been to, but I always remembered this, and like to believe it was true.
The play itself was about him being an old dying forgetful man. It was so convincing I somehow left thinking that surely he was but ofcourse it was just excellent acting.
Watching Star Trek TNG episodes when they first aired in the late 80s had a powerful effect on my imagination as a child. It would not, and could not, have been the same show without Patrick Stewart. RIP.
~ Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Generations
Let me go and fix that.
I'll never forget this line, and what it means. I think of it often.
echo $'\U1F596'
No being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another, but yesterday we lost someone very important.
Extremely sad day for the geeks in us. Good bye professor X.
I didn't bother him, as much as we both wanted to (he looked busy), what struck me was how casual Sir Patrick Stewart was in his faded sweatshirt talking to some awestruck kid and his mom.
Never too late to do the other thing. Keep going.
more of us men should be like him and who he was and what he stood for
Shakespeare effectively changed his life, and it's incredible to think that you could map everything he did and his success to his love of the bard.
If I had to take a lesson from his life, it's to have something you love, even if it isn't trendy (especially if it isn't) because most good things flow from that.
Godspeed, captain.
Thank you, Patrick. Rest in peace.
PS. Something that's really sad (at least here in my Scandinavian country) is that it's currently completely impossible to stream TNG anywhere at all. No idea of the situation is the same elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world. Thank goodness I found the complete DVD collection in a thrift store earlier this year. But the saddest thing of all is that the current generation of young people miss out on experiencing the feeling of hope that Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the TNG crew gave us through their story. And miss out an important vision showing the possibility of a positive and bright version of the future, where humankind has grown into a mature and competent version of itself. Especially now in these dark and uncertain times.
I did notice that in the latest Wolverine he seemed to be doing not so well with his physical status, looking quite frail and his voice was also no longer strong as it used to be (that was in Logan 2017, so already 10 years ago). Dementia is kind of eating away at the neurons.
Closest i've seen is The Orville which I found best described as McFarlen using his money to pay for his Larping (in a good way), but was pretty much just copy pasting.
It was such a fascinating show and handled issues with a tact and nuance you're lucky to get today.
I was fortunate enough to get to chat with him and some of the lead crew of ST:TNG while at a local convention. He was exactly how I imagined he would be in "real life", such a clever and well-spoken class act. RIP <3
A little off topic, but are there any modern utopian/positive sci-fi shows still being released? I feel like ST:TNG was the last of its kind?
— Picard in TNG episode Night Terrors
I grew up with this guy. I will always remember him, his work. I will always smile when he comes on screen. And I will always keep using his facepalm meme with a smirk. Thanks Patrick Stewart.
Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of people around me who could show me what a good person was supposed to be like. So I found those elsewhere. In games and in Star Trek. To me, Jean-Luc Picard was probably the closest thing I had to a proper father figure.
He embodied everything I felt a person should aspire to be. Intelligent, thoughtful, but also compassionate, principled.
He taught me that you could exercise authority without cruelty, resolve conflict without violence, understood that strength wasn’t about dominating others, but about having the wisdom and restraint not to.
He taught me that you could be rational without being cold, that you could lead without humiliating others, and that kindness and competence weren’t opposites.
These weren’t just qualities I simply admired in a fictional character in a silly science fiction show. They were things I tried to build into myself. They were what I had.
I’m having a really hard time with this. I never know how to articulate how this feels, because I grew up with these role models and most of the people I know haven’t and it feels awkward.
You were a positive force. RIP
Google “Dear Satan”.
Now it's just Sulu and Captain Kirk....
Stewart was rather like Alan Rickman's Galaxy Quest character in real life: when he first joined the TNG cast he was rather arrogant and thought he was demeaning himself, a Shakespearean actor slumming it as a spaceman on terrestrial American television. As a consequence, the rest of the season one cast started pranking him pretty hard on set. In a textbook example of what the British mean when they say they're "taking the piss out of someone", Stewart was humbled and developed a good sense of humor about it all, and would go on to embrace Star Trek and the Picard role, and not take himself so seriously in general. Which to me, is worthy of the absolute highest respect for a performer. He brought the same professionalism and enthusiasm to Picard, Charles Xavier, and Yaotl from TMNT (2007) that he did to any of his Shakespearean roles.
RIP Sir Patrick
A wonderful human being with charisma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWdUlFCESeY
The cast also seem like a group of genuinely nice people. It's so nice to see the real world friendship there. A group of people I'd want to be friends with. Sir Patrick Stewart was the perfect Captain Picard. Someone many of us looked up to even though he's a fictional character.
Quite a sad day.
Patrick Stewart's role in TNG was iconic and left a big mark on me as a kid. I felt like TNG really envisioned a society that would be utopic, and I was always inspired by his code, his faith in himself and his morals, and his deep curiosity and compassion for the people around him and the strangers out in the universe.
The world of TNG still lives in a tiny corner of my brain, as a place of both comfort and inspiration.
The NY times editorial board seems to have become even more performatively egalitarian. Stewart (like Ian McKellen) was (IMNSHO quite rightly) recognized with a knighthood for his services to drama. They call him "Mr Stewart" - technically there is no such person.
The correct way to refer to him is Sir Patrick Stewart, or Sir Patrick thereafter. Ditto McKellen.
And yes, the US doesn't issue its own knighthoods, peerages &c - but the US constitution is fairly clear on what is disallowed - but that doesn't affect a non-US Citizen
The foreign emoluments clause [0] applies to "holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them" and the section also prevents the US from creating any title of Nobility, but editorial courtesy usually grants foreigners their titles [1]
It's perfectly correct to ignore honorary knighthoods - like that conferred on Bill Gates. It's discourteous to ignore them for those rightly conferred, and inconsistent. [2]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C8-1/...
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1929/10/27/archives/the-unshackling-...
ETA: Steward also voiced Picard in robot chicken's "night crew": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8
Sir Patrick Stewart inspired me since my childhood. Thank you captain!
I never knew that. I wonder if, in the "I, Borg" episode, they chose the name "Hugh" as a reference to this when coming up with a name for the newly individuated Borg. It's a stretch, but I'd like to think so.
RIP Mr. Stewart.
I think all of us growing up in the 80s and 90s just don't realize that we probably lived in the most awesome time period in human history. Everything was just peak. Vibes, music, film, art, travel.
Now the OGs all die... and I look around and see nothing and no one to step into their humongous foot steps...
Though he was most known for playing Captain Picard and Professor Xavier, I will always remember him for his portrayal of King Leondegrance in Excalibur.
As a kid watching him kick major ass in the Siege of Cahir scene led to many battles between my brothers and I, dualing each other with mop and broom sticks. We watched Excalibur and handful of other films over and over again via VHS tapes, ha ha ha.
RIP Mr. Stewart. Thanks for the memories and creating an amazing body of work I will continue enjoying until I join you in death.
I bet Shatner, somehow, will get it.
So many thoughts and memories...here are some:
First time watching Star Trek in Tunisia in the early 1990s. It was a very hot summer, and the air-conditioned basement of my friend’s folks contained every episode of The Original Series and The Next Generation, and a computer with games like Rogue, as well as American junk food like sour cream and onion chips and cherry-vanilla ice cream, so we spent quite a bit of time there :D
Star Trek TNG’s optimistic view of humanity overcoming its primitive base instincts.
Videogames and VR as nascent versions of the holodeck.
Facepalm, [PicardTips](https://mastodon.social/@PicardTips@mas.to), etc.
Quotes, conversations, monologues, including [Data’s about death](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik8i-Ev__s4), with the butterfly.
Background [hum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYTthcDCTtE&t=59s) of the Enterprise, Ressikan Flute in [The Inner Light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_Th...).
“[More familiarity with our own mythology may help us relate to theirs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZeB4gFMQA).”
Jokingly speaking in stentorian English, like a captain, while riding on a boat. A young person asks me where I learned to speak like that. Answer: Watching Jean-Luc Picard in TNG, and reading some VVilliam The Spear Shaker!
https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/download/
> “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
> “Seize the time... Live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”
Goodbye, Captain.
Thank you.
<3
One small quote of his character from TNG that got deeply burned into my brain : "time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and allows us to cherish every moment because they will never come again"
My mom was a huge Trekkie and it's something I had some ambient exposure to in childhood but didn't really get into until adulthood when I started watching TNG as a comfort show after her cancer diagnosis, and we'd sometimes watch episodes together where it became apparent she had a pretty good memory of all the episodes and knew which ones she liked and didn't like. I wish I'd written down more of her specific favorites, but was pretty stricken with grief at the time. That said, the show meant a lot to me and helped me find comfort and go to sleep at times when I really needed it. His portrayal of Picard managed to strike a refreshing balance of sensitive and inspiring. I also really respect his commitment to Shakespeare and theater, and how it influenced his acting style even in non-theater roles (of course Star Trek was also famous for having its captains be Shakespearean, but he nailed the assignment).
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