“Heart On His Sleeve”: Sir Ian McKellen’s Moving Tribute To Friend & Ally Sir Patrick Stewart

Sir Ian McKellen has paid tribute to his beloved friend and X-Men co-star Sir Patrick Stewart, remembering his honesty, his Yorkshire roots, and a friendship that stretched across half a century.

Stewart, best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek and Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men, died on Wednesday aged 86, following Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

Stewart was a longstanding ally of the LGBTQIA+ who championed marriage equality and supported Pride, and whose very public love for McKellen, an openly gay man, was a beautiful thing to witness for many decades The red-carpet kisses, the hand-holding, the vocal proclamations of love for one another!

People have spent decades shipping the pair, despite the fact that Stewart was straight and married to singer Sunny Ozell. McKellen even officiated their wedding in 2013.

But their actual friendship was truly beautiful.

Sir Ian McKellen’s tribute to his best friend, Sir Patrick Stewart

McKellen shared the following tribute on Instagram:

“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,” wrote McKellen. “You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. 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.

“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.”

“America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. 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.

“His farewell performance in ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ is yet to be seen.”

 

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Yes, I’m crying, you are crying, we are all crying. We should all be so lucky to experience friendship like theirs.