Make it not so!

Starting off with a bit of bad news this afternoon: Sir Patrick Stewart has died of Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia at the age of 86:

With a commanding baritone voice — he had shed his Yorkshire dialect as an acting student — Mr. Stewart was by his late 40s an eloquent, statesmanlike presence on the British stage. But to many American television viewers, Mr. Stewart was a new face when he made his debut in 1987 as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “The Next Generation,” the first live-action spinoff of the original “Star Trek” series of the late 1960s.

Old and new fans embraced the balding, graying Picard and the members of his 24th-century crew, among them a pale-skinned android with deadpan comic timing; an intense, half-alien mind-reader; a gruff Klingon; and a blind human engineer wearing a vision visor. Over the show’s seven seasons, as it piled up 18 Emmys and a Peabody Award in first-run syndication, Picard became known for his preternatural calm and his trademark directives “Engage!” and “Make it so.” (Mr. Stewart titled a 2023 memoir “Making It So.”)

By the time he became a screen star, Mr. Stewart was a lauded stage veteran in Britain, where he began working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. After making his first public stage appearance at 19, he performed in both classical and contemporary works alongside fellow up-and-coming actors like Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Glenda Jackson.

In 1986, he won the London Fringe Theater best actor award for his role as the humiliated husband, George, in the Young Vic’s production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He also won Olivier Awards (Britain’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony) for playing Enobarbus, Mark Antony’s best friend, in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (1979) and Claudius, opposite David Tennant’s Danish prince, in “Hamlet” (2009).

“Acting was the thing that made me happy when I was 13 years old,” he wrote in his memoir, “and that is still the case 70 years later. I have so much more work to do. I am not done with the stage. I still want to try another TV comedy. I still have so many characters inside me that I need to let out.”

He will be missed.