On screen, one wanted to save mutants and the other wanted to rule them. Off screen, they were the closest of friends for half a century. Some of cinema’s best rivalries are built on real affection. The actors know each other so well that every glare, every barbed line and every standoff lands with extra weight. Audiences feel it, even when they cannot name it.
For more than two decades, that was true of Professor X and Magneto in the X-Men films. Patrick Stewart played the wise, patient Charles Xavier. Ian McKellen played Erik Lehnsherr, his oldest friend and fiercest opponent. Stewart died on Oct. 28, 2026, at his home in Los Angeles, at 86, with his wife, Sunny Ozell, at his side. The next day, McKellen shared a tribute on Instagram that said everything about the man and the friendship.
“A Man to Rely On, to Admire and in My Case, Love”
“Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire,” McKellen wrote. Then came the line that has been shared around the world: “He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”
He also looked back to the beginning, recalling that they first met as ambitious young actors at the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago, and ahead to what is still to come: Stewart’s farewell performance in Avengers: Doomsday, which has yet to be released.
From the Royal Shakespeare Company to X-Men
Stewart, born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, in 1940, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966 and stayed until 1982, appearing in more than 60 productions. Hollywood came later, and big: Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, then Professor X from 2000.
It was on the X-Men sets that the two men grew truly close. Two British stage actors, playing comic-book legends, found in each other a friend who understood exactly where they came from.
A Friendship Made of Godot, a Wedding and Laughter
They took that friendship back to the stage, playing Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, and later performing it on Broadway in repertory with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 2013 and 2014. In 2013, McKellen officiated Stewart’s wedding to Sunny Ozell. Few friendships include both a Beckett play and a wedding ceremony.
Friendships like this one are rare, and they deserve to be remembered as carefully as the roles. It is the same instinct behind Richard Kline remembering John Ritter decades on. If you have a friend who has been there for 10, 20 or 50 years, tell them, today, what they mean to you. Long commitments have a way of paying off, whether it is a friendship or the routine Helen Mirren has kept for decades. The lesson worth borrowing is that long friendships are built, not found.
The Bottom Line
On screen they were rivals, off screen they were close friends. Ian McKellen remembers Patrick Stewart as a man who wore his heart on his sleeve, and as someone he loved, after a friendship that began half a century ago.
