Patrick Stewart, the Shakespearean actor who escaped a bleak childhood in England's coal-mining country and, in a midlife pivot nobody saw coming, became the noble starship captain Jean-Luc Picard on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.

The cause was Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia, according to an announcement on social media - a detail that makes the news no less sad, merely more clinical.

Stewart had shed his Yorkshire dialect as an acting student and, by his late 40s, was an eloquent, statesmanlike presence on the British stage, commanding attention with a baritone voice that could make a phone book sound like the Magna Carta. To many American television viewers, however, he was a new face when he debuted in 1987 as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in "The Next Generation," the first live-action spinoff of the original late-1960s "Star Trek."

Old and new fans alike embraced the balding, graying Picard and his 24th-century crew, a motley assortment that included 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 - because nothing says "utopian future" like a staff meeting where half the attendees can't legally be called people. Over seven seasons, the show piled up 18 Emmys and a Peabody Award in first-run syndication, and Picard became known for his preternatural calm and trademark directives "Engage!" and "Make it so." Stewart titled his 2023 memoir "Making It So," presumably because "Engage!" was already taken by a thousand wedding DJs.

He went on to star in four feature-film spinoffs - "Star Trek Generations" (1994), "Star Trek: First Contact" (1996), "Star Trek: Insurrection" (1998) and "Star Trek: Nemesis" (2002) - before returning to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in 2020 for "Star Trek: Picard," a TV sequel he could call his own, which ran for three seasons.

The Enterprise was neither Stewart's first science-fiction home nor his last. He appeared in David Lynch's original film version of "Dune" (1984) as the weapons teacher Gurney Halleck. Years later, he played Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X, in five "X-Men" movies - a wealthy telepath in a wheelchair who leads other mutants with superpowers - including "X-Men" (2000), "X-Men: United" (2003) and "Logan" (2017), some of which also starred his close friend Ian McKellen. In short, he spent decades playing wise men who mentor chaotic youngsters, which is either typecasting or a public service.

He is survived by a career that spanned Shakespeare, science fiction and a wise ram in "The Sheep Detectives" - and by a fan base that will now have to make it so without him.