Ian McKellen, who starred alongside Patrick Stewart onstage and onscreen in projects including the “X-Men” films and “Waiting for Godot,” took to Instagram on Thursday to remember his late friend.
“Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt,” McKellen wrote. “Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”
McKellen and Stewart appeared together most prominently in Fox’s “X-Men” film series, playing the Marvel Comics characters Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier, respectively. The pair shared the screen in “X-Men,” “X2,” “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “The Wolverine” (in a post-credits scene) and “X-Men: Days of Future Past.” They will reunite once more in this December’s “Avengers: Doomsday,” which McKellen has called Stewart’s “farewell performance.”
“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,’” McKellen continued. “’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.”
Stewart and McKellen also shared the stage in several productions beyond the “X-Men” franchise. The two notably starred together in West End and Broadway productions of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” as well as productions of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land.” Their collaborations have made them one of the most celebrated pairings in modern theater and on screen.
“America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin,” McKellen concluded. “But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.”
Stewart died at his Los Angeles home on Wednesday at 86, following what his family described as “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
