Patrick Stewart Escaped a Violent Home to Become TV's Moral Compass

Try to picture Captain Jean-Luc Picard with a Yorkshire accent. Patrick Stewart once performed the version in his own voice: "Space. Final frontier. Make it so. Aye, sir."

Stewart said, "We did toy with the Yorkshire accent," adding, "It was incomprehensible to the producers in Hollywood."

Stewart, the Shakespearean stage actor who died at 86, turned a turbulent childhood and an unlikely profile for a leading man into Jean-Luc Picard, the starship captain who became television's thoughtful moral center.

He grew up with a father who had been a sergeant major, a man with a violent temper who suffered from post-traumatic stress. The boy found refuge in performing. Stewart recalled that with an audience present and the lights on, he felt completely at home. "I never had stage fright," Stewart said. "I never felt embarrassed in any way."

He then, as correspondent Daniela Relf noted, "spent 16 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company," the British troupe devoted to Shakespeare, and took television jobs while remaining little known to general viewers. Hollywood came calling with a part in director David Lynch's adaptation of the science fiction novel Dune, followed by a comic turn as a rude restaurant host in actor and comedian Steve Martin's L.A. Story.

Then came Star Trek, the long running space adventure, and Picard. Correspondent Daniela Relf described Stewart as "Bald, middle-aged, not the stereotype of a Hollywood leading man." Relf called him "formidable" and "even threatening," and "every inch a starship commander."

That commander was also a thoughtful diplomat who preferred negotiation to fighting. Relf described Picard as "thoughtful, cultured, the very moral centre of the universe," and called the captain "Sir Patrick Stewart's finest creation."

After Star Trek came the X-Men movies, in which a new generation knew him as Professor Charles Xavier. He circled back to theater as a battle worn Macbeth and in an acclaimed Waiting for Godot alongside his longtime friend Ian McKellen, who like Stewart had been knighted. He then revisited Picard at nearly 80.

Entertainment journalist Sandro Monetti, who knew him well, last saw him in Los Angeles on the day of King Charles's coronation. Monetti said Stewart was "a very proud Brit" and recalled, "Patrick was hosting a celebration for the British community here in Los Angeles." Monetti added, "A great talent, but a lovely man as well."