Every obituary of Patrick Stewart opens on the bridge of the Enterprise or beside Charles Xavier’s wheelchair. The tribute from Ian McKellen, the friend who knew him before either role existed, starts somewhere else. “Before everything else,” McKellen wrote, “Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end.”

It is the first line of a eulogy by a man who has spent his life speaking other people’s words, and the order is the argument. The accent and the bluntness come first. Hollywood comes later, and the franchise the two men shared turns up in brackets.

A eulogy that starts with a voice

McKellen posted the statement on Instagram and X on Thursday, hours after Stewart’s death was announced. Stewart died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, aged 86, after what the statement on his accounts called “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia,” in the care of his wife, Sunny Ozell. McKellen began with what you could hear in him: “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.”

Then came the sentence that every outlet has since put in a headline: “He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.” It climbs the way a classical speech climbs, and the last step turns from public to private in four words. Both men made careers out of lines built like that one.

The warning on a London street

The middle of the tribute is a scene, and McKellen casts himself as the wrong voice in it. The two met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company, though never in the same productions. A few years later, he wrote, he ran into Stewart in central London and heard 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,” McKellen continued. He credited the gamble for “his devoted Trekkies” and for the theatre audiences who watched Stewart use international celebrity to play Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the West End and on Broadway. The cinema career gets a single aside: “(‘X-Men’ of course)”. The man who played Magneto opposite Stewart’s Professor X files their shared franchise as the least surprising item on the list.

The proudest achievement was not a role

The most revealing sentence is about pride. America was Stewart’s “adopted home,” McKellen wrote, the place where he met “his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin.” Then: “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.”

Not Picard, and not a Broadway opening. A university post in the county where the tribute began. The eulogy closes the circle it opened, which is what a well-made speech does, and it tells readers who only knew the captain that the man himself kept a different ranking.

The friendship fans adopted as their own

For audiences, the two had long been a double act. Variety recalls that they grew close on the first X-Men film, in adjoining trailers, “drinking tea — and maybe, in the afternoon, something a little stronger,” as Stewart told Wired in a later interview. McKellen officiated when Stewart married Ozell, and the pair made headlines for kissing on red carpets. “I’ll be frank with you — I’m in love with [him],” Stewart joked. “But then, so is my wife in love with him, too, so that’s all right.” On stage they played Waiting for Godot in the West End and later Godot and No Man’s Land on Broadway.

The rest of the mourning speaks the same language of family. The statement on Stewart’s accounts said he had been “held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter.” Wil Wheaton shared a throwback photo of himself with Stewart, a broken heart emoji and the words “Godspeed, Captain.” Jonathan Frakes wrote: “Rest in peace my friend.” Kevin Feige said his legacy lives on “in the many, many people he mentored,” and Joe and Anthony Russo thanked him “for teaching us humanity, both on and off the screen.”

A farewell neither friend has seen

McKellen closed with one line: “His farewell performance in ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ is yet to be seen.” Both actors return in the film, Stewart as Professor X and McKellen as Magneto, and Marvel opens it in theaters on December 18.

That sentence turns a release date into a wake. In December, the friend who once warned Patrick Stewart against getting lost in Hollywood will be on screen with him in his last Hollywood film, and he has already written its epilogue.

Tags: Meghan Markle, obituaries, Jeffrey Wright, Avengers: Doomsday, X-Men, Kevin Feige, Patrick Stewart, Mia Tharia, Ian McKellen