When you think of Patrick Stewart, it’s likely that one of two things pops into your head – Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Professor Xavier of X-Men. Patrick Stewart has had a long and successful career and is widely known as a phenomenal actor after his humble beginnings in the 1960s with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But that all changed in 1987 when he picked up the leading role in Star Trek: The Next Generation. To many, he made the show, and many Trekkies consider it the best Star Trek series even to this day, and a lot of that is due to Stewart’s incredible talent with acting. Despite this, Patrick Stewart found it hard getting work after the series ended, and couldn’t find any meaningful jobs until the role of Professor Xavier opened up and, as we all know; he was a complete shoe in. Without him, the movie may have not seen the profound success that it did.

On the other side of things, Sir Ian McKellen, who played Magneto in the X-Men films, had a similar, yet different rise to fame. McKellen had a perhaps longer career than Stewart, where he acted in a lot of Theatre until the 1990s, where he started taking a lot of film and TV jobs such as six degrees of separation and Richard III. Then suddenly, it all happened at once. He was cast as Magneto for X-Men, one of the most infamous characters of the comic book series, and shortly after, cast as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is what most people associate Ian McKellen with – Magneto and Gandalf, two fantastic characters made whole by a wonderful actor.

These two actors are fantastic in their own right and have become close friends in recent years, Ian McKellen even presiding over Patrick Stewart’s wedding to Sunny Ozell in 2013. So it’s sad to say that it’s an end of an era as neither actor will be returning to their roles of Professor Xavier or Magneto, they will be sorely missed though I, personally, am excited to see what roles these actors will be taking in the future, because they’ve already proved themselves to be incredible in their field.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/ 30871156

[Dallas Miller, 1/18/2015, 5:42pm]

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