Patrick Stewart, Voice of American Dad’s Avery Bullock and a Grammy-Winning Narrator, Dies at 86. His Last Big Performance Was an Audiobook

Patrick Stewart, the stage and screen actor whose voice carried Jean-Luc Picard, Avery Bullock on American Dad! and a Grammy-winning recording of Peter and the Wolf, has died at 86. He spent his final year in front of a microphone, recording all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets for an audiobook.

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Stewart died on Wednesday, October 28, at his home in Los Angeles. His family announced the news on his official social media accounts on Thursday: “We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia.”

The statement, also given to The Hollywood Reporter by his spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak, says he “has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all.”

Most obituaries lead with the Starship Enterprise and the X-Men. For anyone who works with their voice, there’s a second career running alongside the first, and it lasted more than forty years.

A voice trained on Shakespeare

“A son of Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, he travelled from the Royal Shakespeare Company to an equally acclaimed career spanning six decades on Broadway, the silver screen and television,” the family wrote.

Image: Luigi Novi, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

That stage training shows up everywhere in his voice work. His one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which he took to Broadway in 1991, had him play all of the story’s 40-plus characters on his own, according to his Wikipedia biography. Any narrator who has had to give a full cast of characters their own voice in a single read will know what that asks of an actor.

He also narrated orchestral works, among them Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and that recording won him a Grammy. Wikipedia sums up why producers kept calling: “Known for his strong and authoritative voice, Stewart lent his voice to a number of projects.”

Twenty years as Avery Bullock

His longest voice role was on American Dad!, where he played CIA Deputy Director Avery Bullock from 2005, a role credited across 122 episodes. It was the opposite of Picard, and he loved it.

“Playing an obnoxious, loud, opinionated, vulgar-minded, self-obsessed character was just fantastic. And fun!” he told Time in 2015. “I worked with Seth MacFarlane on American Dad! and loved that experience,” he said in the same interview. “Playing Deputy [CIA] Director Bullock opened up opportunities for me I just hadn’t had before.”

Those opportunities included 16 episodes of Family Guy, guest roles on The Simpsons and Futurama, and the deadpan narration that opens Ted in 2012 and its sequel in 2015.

Dubs, games and narration

Animation studios cast him for weight and authority. He voiced Seti, the pharaoh, in The Prince of Egypt in 1998, King Goobot in Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, the Great Prince in Bambi II and Bill Shakespeare in Gnomeo and Juliet. As Anime News Network notes, he was also Lord Yupa in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Lloyd Steam in Steamboy.

Game players knew him as Emperor Uriel Septim VII, whose death opens The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in 2006. The role earned him a Spike TV Video Game Award, and his original recordings were used again in the 2025 remaster. He played Zobek in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and its sequel, and reprised Picard in several Star Trek games.

He kept working right up to this year. His filmography lists Sir Ritchfield in the 2026 animated film The Sheep Detectives and a voice role in the 2026 series Bait.

His last big performance was an audiobook

This spring, Simon & Schuster Audio released Patrick Stewart Performs the Complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare, an unabridged recording of all 154 poems with his own commentary. It grew out of the readings he posted online during the pandemic.

“One night over dinner in the early days of the Covid pandemic, I recited the exquisite Sonnet 116 to my wife,” he told the Folger Shakespeare Library when the audiobook came out. “It became something of a part-time job for us, and to this day I’m so proud of this little internet project we created.”

Image: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What he said about the recording itself could sit on the wall of any narrator’s booth. “I wanted the listener to feel as though I was speaking to them, with them, for them,” he said. “I wanted my readings to feel immediate and down to earth.”

According to Far Out, it was revealed on his social media only last week that the audiobook had been submitted for Grammy consideration in the Best Audiobook, Narration and Storytelling Recording category.

Tributes

Tributes began within hours. “All of us at Marvel Studios are deeply saddened by the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart,” the studio said. “He was a singular talent, a generous collaborator, and a true gentleman.”

His family’s statement closes on the work: “He will be remembered for the dignity, compassion and humanity he brought to every role.” It also lists his causes, from human rights and refugees to veterans’ mental health and “his cherished foster pitties.”

Image: NackteElfe, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons

Stewart once said of the captain who made him famous: “His voice became my voice, and there were other elements of him that became me.” For a generation of listeners, gamers and animation fans, it worked the other way round too. A lot of characters got his voice, and they’re better for it.

Sources: Statement from the family of Patrick Stewart, as published by Just Jared and Far Out; The Daily Beast; Anime News Network; Time (2015 interview); Folger Shakespeare Library; Patrick Stewart’s filmography and biography on Wikipedia; Marvel Studios statement via Far Out. Main image: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Lee este artículo en español: Muere Patrick Stewart, voz de Avery Bullock en American Dad! y narrador ganador de un Grammy, a los 86 años. Su última gran actuación fue un audiolibro

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