The British actor Patrick Stewart, known worldwide as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men, died on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 86. His family announced the news a day later, as reported by El País.

According to his spokesperson, the cause was a brief course with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia. Stewart was accompanied by his wife, the actress and singer Sunny Ozell. In lieu of flowers, the family asked for donations to the Alzheimer's research center at Johns Hopkins University, according to the statement shared on his social channels and picked up by Ars Technica.

For the Latino community in North America, Picard and Xavier spanned entire generations: The Next Generation arrived dubbed on Mexican television in the 1990s, and the X-Men films brought the comics closer to movie theaters on both sides of the border. His death thus adds to a grief shared among families who grew up with those screens.

His career did not begin in science fiction. He was born in Yorkshire and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before going on to some 60 productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He played the captain of the Enterprise across 176 episodes between 1987 and 1994, returned to the role in four films and in the series Star Trek: Picard, and brought Xavier to life from 2000 through Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022. He won a Grammy in 1996 for narrating Peter and the Wolf and was knighted in 2010.

Reactions came quickly. CBC gathered the message from Hugh Jackman, his X-Men co-star, who remembered him as a great friend; that of William Shatner, the first captain of the Enterprise, who underscored his colleague's intelligence and sense of humanity; and that of Marvel Studios, which called him a singular talent and a true gentleman.

What comes next? One final screen appearance. Stewart filmed his part in Avengers: Doomsday, a film that has not yet been released and that, according to El País, will be Professor Xavier's farewell to cinema.

This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.