The Man Receiving the Applause

The news arrived while I was watching something else.

Celebrity Traitors was live on BBC One. Notifications appeared on devices, interrupting the evening with something for which the evening had made no provision. My first thought was “Stop all the clocks”: Auden by way of Four Weddings and a Funeral, a poem remembered through a performance, reaching for me before I could find words of my own.

There is something painfully appropriate about that. So much of what Patrick Stewart meant to me had reached me in precisely that fashion. Someone else’s words, made intimate by an actor. Something invented becoming part of the emotional equipment of a real life.

Now the man who had done that, again and again, was gone.

I wanted to know how to account for the place he had occupied. How someone I had never properly met could have been such familiar company for so long.

For me, that began with Jean-Luc Picard.

As a teenager, I knew him as the captain of the Enterprise. The Next Generation became one of those programmes whose significance exceeds any sensible account of its plots. You remember people, rooms, the sound of a voice. You remember how it felt to spend time there.

Picard could be forbidding. He could be impatient, uncomfortable with intimacy, markedly happier addressing a diplomatic crisis than an emotional one. Stewart made all of that part of his appeal. There was effort involved in being this man. His composure had weight because we could sometimes see what it cost him.

He made the act of considering something look dramatic. Listening could alter a scene. A pause could suggest that a principle was being tested rather than merely recited. In a universe full of extraordinary machinery, he made a human being deciding what was right worth watching.

That mattered to me before I would have known how to explain why.

And then, across years, he kept appearing. The films. The return in Picard, three seasons I am grateful to have had. Professor Xavier, offering another form of authority: a man whose extraordinary power was accompanied by the conviction that frightened, dangerous, excluded people might still deserve a home.

And King Richard in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, because there was also the pleasure of watching that magnificent seriousness become a joke. He could enter a ridiculous film carrying the weight of an entire historical drama, and understand exactly what made that funny.

An account of his career can arrange these performances by date. Memory refuses to be so tidy. They sit alongside different versions of me.

There is the teenager watching Picard. There is the person discovering X-Men. There is the older viewer returning to familiar people in Picard and feeling the years in their faces, and in his own response to them.

Patrick Stewart kept turning up while I was becoming somebody else.

Perhaps that helps explain the force of this evening. A death like this reaches backwards through your life.

I did once sit in the same room as him.

It was at the Southbank Centre, a few years ago, for a talk connected with Making It So. The Centre records his Royal Festival Hall memoir appearance as part of its October 2023 London Literature Festival.¹ I was in the balcony. He was there below, an actual person at an ordinary, measurable distance.

After years of seeing him through screens, that was extraordinary enough.

What I remember most is the affection in the room.

An audience can applaud out of politeness, excitement, habit. This felt like love accumulated over years, finally finding somewhere to go. People who had brought private histories with them were briefly able to express something together.

And he seemed touched by it.

From where I sat, there was something almost disbelieving in his response, as though he could not entirely reconcile what he felt about himself with what the room was offering him. That was my impression. A balcony seat cannot tell you another person’s thoughts. I would not want to turn a remembered expression into a diagnosis of his soul.

Still, the impression has stayed.

We had known him as men whose presence steadied a room. Here was the actor receiving the room’s tenderness, and apparently finding it moving.

Perhaps some of us were trying to thank him for things he could never have known he had done.

I had acquired two copies of his book: one in the hope of a signature, another supplied with the event. There was no opportunity to have it signed. I still have not properly read it.

It is an oddly specific thing to be left with tonight: two books, no signature, and an evening that now feels more precious than either.

The first tributes have the same mixture of public recognition and something much more private.

Jonathan Frakes, his colleague across decades of Star Trek, shared the announcement with the words “Rest in peace my friend.” Wil Wheaton posted a photograph of them together, a broken heart, and a brief farewell to his captain. Terry Matalas, who guided Picard’s third season, shared a smiling photograph as the image he wanted to remember.²

These are early responses. They cannot stand for everything the Next Generation cast will wish to say, and the absence of a verified statement from someone tonight tells us nothing about their grief.

Frakes’s few words move me because of their simplicity. We know the captain and his first officer; he knew his friend. Behind all the scenes we can revisit are working days, conversations and shared years that belong to the people who were there.

William Shatner’s tribute remembered the intelligence, grace and humanity Stewart brought to his work, connecting the qualities of Picard with his affection for the actor.³

Hugh Jackman’s farewell was especially tender: “I will miss you, Patrick Stewart, all of my days.”⁴

That last phrase reaches beyond the announcement and into the ordinary future. There will be days on which something happens that he would have liked to tell him. A joke, a memory, an idea for another job.

I remember an interview around Logan in which Stewart’s affection for Jackman seemed unmistakable. In my recollection, there was enthusiasm about sharing a stage in Sweeney Todd. I cannot establish the precise interview here, so I hold that as a remembered possibility, rather than a production that was promised.

But I remember the pleasure of imagining it.

There is documented tenderness, too. At the Berlin screening of Logan, Stewart recalled Jackman taking his hand as the film approached its ending. They watched, and cried, together.⁵

For all the public machinery surrounding those films, that is such a small and lovely thing to picture: two friends, moved by something they had made.

Logan remains, for me, among Stewart’s finest performances.

It asks something difficult of an actor whose presence had become so reassuring. Charles Xavier is frail, irritable, dependent. The mind that had once represented possibility and refuge has become a source of danger. Care is exhausting. Love persists through circumstances that do very little to flatter the people involved.

Stewart lets Charles be difficult. His vulnerability does not make him conveniently gentle. His dignity survives embarrassment, anger and confusion, because the performance allows all those things to belong to a person.

For someone so associated with command, it was an extraordinary willingness to be seen without it.

The shock of losing Xavier in The Last Stand had already become part of my emotional history with these films: Jean Grey’s power, his disappearance, the peculiar distress of watching a familiar presence suddenly removed.

Tonight brings that memory back. Fiction had let me rehearse losing him, though fiction could always invent a return.

That option feels different now.

There is another sadness around the edges of this affection, and it deserves care.

Stewart spoke publicly in 2023 about regret over the priority he had given his work, and about trying to be more present with his grandchildren. He also suggested that his children had offered forgiveness.⁶ Those were his reflections at a particular time. His family’s experience belongs to them, and we cannot know its final shape from interviews.

I would not want to make his regrets into a neat lesson about the price of greatness.

But they do complicate the gratitude.

We received so much of his time. Across all those hours of television and film, we encountered a man bringing concentration, intelligence and feeling to our evenings. The people closest to him had a different relationship with the demands of that work.

Their story cannot be absorbed into ours simply because ours is affectionate.

I can love what he gave me and acknowledge how little that tells me about being his child, his partner, his friend.

In fact, that acknowledgement makes my affection feel more honest. He was a person capable of regret, still attempting things, still finding parts of life difficult. The applause did not settle every account.

I think again of that man at Southbank, visibly moved by what was coming towards him.

I wanted more Picard.

A fourth season, perhaps. Another iteration of Star Trek in which he had a substantial place. I knew there had already been farewells, but some small, hopeful part of me remained available for another announcement.

Wanting that did not mean I thought he owed it to us.

There is a simple pleasure in knowing that someone whose work you love is still out there, potentially preparing to surprise you. The possibility becomes part of how you inhabit the present. You do not think about it every day. You discover its importance when it closes.

Stewart’s relationship with Picard had changed over the years. In his Southbank interview, he acknowledged having once felt constrained by the association. By 2023, he could describe Jean-Luc as “a friend, and a great gift.”¹

I am glad he reached that feeling.

It means something that the role I had loved since adolescence had become a source of affection for him too. That he could return to it, explore it differently, and spend more time among those people.

There are performances I would still have liked to see. There always would have been.

For tonight, I want to let that wish remain a wish, without allowing it to diminish what we actually received.

The book is still there.

Two copies, in fact. An almost comic excess of opportunity to listen to someone I wish I could have known better.

Reading it will not give me the whole man. A memoir is a life remembered and arranged by its author; people exceed even the stories they tell about themselves. But it will let me spend time with the account he chose to offer. Yorkshire, the theatre, the work, the friendships, the mistakes: a life extending far beyond the characters through whom I first found him.

I am sorry I left it so long. I am grateful it is there.

And I am grateful I went to that talk.

For one evening, the affection that had accumulated in separate homes could be expressed in his presence. Whatever he made of it, whatever doubts or private thoughts he carried, he had the chance to hear that room.

I hope some of its warmth stayed with him.

Tonight I keep returning to the balcony, to the distance between us, to the man below receiving the applause.

Thank you, Patrick, for so many hours of my life.

I wish there were more ahead with you in them.