Patrick Stewart is dead at 86, and the same press that can't find a column inch for the plumber or the coal miner is flooding the zone with tributes to a millionaire actor who championed the causes elite media already adored.
The "Star Trek" and "X-Men" star died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home after what his spokesperson called "a brief and poignant journey" with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia, according to a statement on his official Instagram account.
What's telling isn't that Stewart is being mourned — it's who the media chooses to mourn, and what it says about their priorities. TIME rolled out the full Hollywood roll call: Hugh Jackman, Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, each outdoing the last. NBC News made sure to spotlight Stewart's LGBTQ+ activism, quoting his 2015 Advocate interview where he called supporting gay civil rights "a natural and uncomplicated choice" and said "much too much fuss was being made about" opposition to it. NBC10 Boston and NBC News both led with his decades-long friendship with Ian McKellen, who officiated Stewart's 2013 wedding to singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell.
The irony is that Stewart actually came from the kind of background the press routinely ignores. Arkansas Online — alone among the five outlets — reported that he grew up in Mirfield, Yorkshire, coal-mining country, in a house without a bathroom. His father, a former regimental sergeant major in the British Army, was prone to what Stewart described as "repeated violence against my mother." In his memoir, Stewart wrote that his father would come home drunk and angry: "Sometimes it was with an open hand, other times a closed fist. Always he aimed for her head." Stewart later became a patron of Refuge, a shelter for domestic abuse victims — the kind of cause that doesn't get the red-carpet treatment.
That part of the story — the real part — got buried beneath franchise nostalgia and activism celebration. The Los Angeles Times ran a listicle of his five best performances. Nobody's writing listicles about the working-class families still living in the Yorkshire towns Stewart escaped.
Stewart won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and spent 14 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He took the Star Trek role against McKellen's advice — "The only person who advised me not to do it is sitting to my left," Stewart joked at a 2014 panel — and it, as he put it, "changed my life. Every single corner of it has not been unaffected by that." He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010. He'll appear posthumously in "Avengers: Doomsday" this December.
The question isn't whether Stewart had talent. He did. The question is why the same media apparatus that celebrates celebrity activism can't muster a fraction of that energy for the people Stewart came from — the ones still growing up in houses without bathrooms, still waiting for someone to notice.
