‘Patrick Stewart brought virile star power to the stage, from clowns to kings to wounded lions’

With his striking voice, so rich and resonant, the actor blazed through the RSC – and his time in Hollywood only enriched him. Yet he was a great team player, capable of anything, as his double acts with Ian McKellen showed Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86, was a classic example of the company actor who becomes a star: a natural Enobarbus who winds up playing Mark Antony.

It would be easy to say that he had fame thrust upon him through his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, but I would argue that it was a two-way process. As Peter Bradshaw points out , Stewart brought his RSC-trained gravitas to the screen, but his roles in popular franchises gave him an extra layer of confidence and authority on stage. He became, in short, an even more powerful actor. I felt a particular fascination with Stewart’s career, since he was in the first play I ever reviewed for a national paper. He was Warwick in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at the Bristol Old Vic in May…