West End theatres will dim their lights next week for Sir Patrick Stewart

A London theatre legend passed away earlier this week. Sir Patrick Stewart died aged 86 at his home in Los Angeles after a ‘brief and poignant journey’ with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. 

To pay tribute to the actor, West End theatres have announced they will dim their lights for two minutes at 7pm on Tuesday November 3.

Before he became famous around the world for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stewart was a revered stage actor, starring in many Shakespeare plays in the West End . 

In a post on Instagram, the Olivier Awards said: ‘Stewart made his professional stage debut in 1959 at the Theatre Royal in Bristol. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, appearing in up to 60 productions, and later came to international fame through Star Trek: The Next Generation and many other screen roles.

‘Knighted in 2010 for services to drama, Stewart received many awards for his work. He won Olivier Awards for Antony and Cleopatra (1979) and Hamlet (2009), while his one-man production of A Christmas Carol won Best Entertainment in 1994.’

Actors have shared tributes to Stewart online. Sir Ian McKellen, a long-time friend of Stewart, remembered him as a proud Yorkshireman who ‘wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love’. 

In a post on X, McKellen said: ‘We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in Star Trek. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”

‘Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes (X-Men of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.’

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