Watch: Patrick Stewart, ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and ‘X-Men’ Actor, Dead at 86
Patrick Stewart was used to fans being in “an uncharacteristic tizzy” when they spotted him.
But singer Sunny Ozell, then a waitress at NYC restaurant Franny’s, was so out of sorts when the actor came in for dinner in 2008 that her boss ordered her to offer his table a complementary dessert. And she did not want to.
“So that was what brought this exuberant young woman our way,” Stewart wrote in his 2023 memoir Making It So, noting that he didn’t find out for weeks that Ozell, then 29, had seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and was simply starstruck.
They married in 2013 and Ozell was with Stewart when he died Oct. 28 at their Los Angeles home after what his family described as a “a brief and poignant” battle with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was 86.
Stewart’s most recent Instagram post was from Oct. 16, sharing that he was “delighted” his audiobook Patrick Stewart Performs the Complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare, published in April, had been submitted for Grammy consideration.
Incidentally, Stewart had noted in his book that Odell had “a better grasp of social media” than he did, calling her “masterful in showing people how much fun we have.”
Which the classically trained thespian admittedly found helpful when it came to shutting down snark about their 39-year age gap.
“It was not lost on me that in some quarters, eyebrows were raised at me marrying a woman younger than my own children,” Stewart—who shared son Daniel and daughter Sophie with first wife Sheila Falconer—wrote, pointing to their recent 10th wedding anniversary as “a testimony to our enduring and very real love.”
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They did break up briefly, but it wasn’t because Ozell, now 47, was of the next generation—though he was admittedly “jolted” when he wanted to watch her perform and the gig was at 11 p.m.
“She was worth it,” he wrote. “Date number three.”
They ended up on a first date after Ozell told Stewart during their meet-cute at Franny’s that she’d been hoping to see him on Broadway in Macbeth. He procured tickets, and then a backstage glass of wine turned into dinner.
Stewart told the New Yorker in 2023 that Ozell only recently “admitted to me that she had always been attracted to bald men, from her teenage years. I said, ‘Oh, at last! I now understand why you had the nerve to let me take you out.'”
They “quickly got serious,” he wrote in his book, but their relationship also turned “transatlantic,” as he was based in London. Still, they traveled all over and she was his date when he was knighted in 2010.
They spent an idyllic Christmas that year with her parents at their ski cabin in Lake Tahoe, Nev. But a few weeks later, he wrote, they reunited at the cabin and “had a serious falling-out…about the long-distance, see-you-when-I-see-you way we were living.”
He explained, “Our lives were in so much temporal and geographical misalignment that our relationship didn’t seem to be building, but drifting aimlessly.”
So, they went their separate ways—but not for long.
They started talking again in February 2011, Ozell went to visit him in June and—many extensive heartfelt conversations later—they broached the subject of marriage during a romantic trip to Venice in April 2012.
Stewart wrote he was “pretty sure” he didn’t propose, that they reached a “shared conclusion.” Ozell mostly concurred, as detailed in his book, saying, “By the time you proposed to me in Venice, it was a foregone conclusion and truly not some big event. There was no ring, no getting down on your knee.”
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They tied the knot in Lake Tahoe on Sept. 7, 2013, in front of guests including Stewart’s son Daniel, Ozell’s parents Bill and Judy, LeVar Burton and Billy Crudup.
The groom’s dear friend Ian McKellen officiated—and was one of the few who knew that the couple were already married, having presided over their vows several weeks beforehand at a Mexican restaurant in California, which legally recognized McKellen’s online ordainment while Nevada did not.
It was Stewart’s third trip down the aisle and Ozell’s first. And though they weren’t boldly going where no one had gone before, they did proceed to have so much fun together.
Stewart also credited Ozell for his rapt social media following, telling AARP in 2023 how she persuaded him to let her film him reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, insisting people would be interested.
“It is extraordinary,” Stewart said, “that now calls from the other side of the street are ‘I love Star Trek! I love X-Men! I love your sonnets!'”
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He noted in his book that the death of his older brother Trevor at 87 in 2022 “inevitably” caused him to consider his own mortality (eldest brother Geoffrey died in 1974 at 48), but he was “in no hurry to leave and have no plans to do so any time soon.”
“I am fortunate to live an active life and to be in good health,” he continued. “But at my age, I obviously take nothing for granted. I do the normal things, like eat right and exercise. I also do memory exercises to keep the brain sharp.”
And Ozell was by his side throughout.
Remembering the nights he spent in her 365-square-foot apartment in New York while he was doing Macbeth, Stewart wrote, “She had saved me from mentally falling apart those last few weeks on Broadway, and has basically continued to do so ever since.”
Keep reading to see Stewart’s iconic life in photos:
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