When Patrick Stewart, then revered as one of England's great stage actors, arrived in Hollywood in 1987, he was greeted with suspicion.

Los Angeles showbiz columnists couldn't mention his name without a sharp intake of breath, as though an alien royal had somehow teleported into the A-list world. 

He had been cast as the captain of the Starship Enterprise, after all, in a revival of the Star Trek franchise.

Stewart, who has died aged 86, thought their reverse snobbery hilarious. 

On his first day on the Paramount studio set, he had a warning sign pasted up on his trailer: 'Beware, Unknown British Shakespearean actor.'

Over the next three decades, he established himself as one of the biggest stars on screen, as comfortable in superhero movies such as the X-Men series – in which he played Charles Xavier, or Professor X – as he was in Hamlet or King Lear.

He was able to take a catchphrase and, with his sonorous baritone theatrical delivery, make it sound like a command from the summit of Mount Olympus. 

As Captain Jean-Luc Picard, in television's Star Trek: The Next Generation, he could boom, 'Engage!' and 'Make it so!' as if these were lines from the Bard, not a comic book.

The show became phenomenally successful, pulling in audiences of 30million a week, clocking up 19 Emmy awards and spawning four feature films, as well as a TV sequel, Star Trek: Picard.

Despite all the accolades, he always felt that his former colleagues on the English stage, including many who acted with him in the 1960s and 1970s, looked down their nose at his career switch.

'They used to ask me 'Why, why, why?' as if I was somehow slumming it,' he said in 2003. 'What snobbery! For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that's fine. I really believe we created an admirable individual.'

Yet when he first took the role at the age of 47, he was as dubious about the casting as anyone else. 

'I couldn't understand why they'd gone for a boring old Brit,' he said, 'when they had access to so many American stars. I really believed they would replace me at the end of three months.'

'I thought by then they would have woken up to the grotesque reality that casting a middle-aged, bald, Englishman wasn't going to work.'

His decision to take the job was influenced by a deeply hurtful interview with a theatre producer in the mid-1980s, when he had been carving out a career for more than 20 years. 

He had a solid success at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon behind him, playing Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice.

As a teenager, I was lucky enough to see him in both and can vouch for his mesmeric, commanding stage presence.

He had also earned plaudits in the BBC's Roman saga I, Claudius, as the ruthless chief of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus.

So he was devastated to be told by a West End impresario that he wasn't famous enough to carry a production. 'I remember,' he said, 'sitting down to a meeting with a producer, to discuss the transfer to the West End of a play I had been appearing in at the Old Vic. 

The producer said, 'We have to have one actor that somebody has actually heard of.'

'That really hurt. I didn't feel that, after 27 years in the business, I should have to be sitting and listening to that kind of thing. But that was the reality in commercial terms. I had done all those years at the RSC, at the National Theatre, and I was still 'Patrick Who?'

He'd come from obscurity, without the benefit of a famous theatrical name. Born in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, in 1940, the son of a regimental sergeant major and a weaver at a textile factory, he was brought up in a house without even an outside toilet – all the families in the neighbourhood had to share a communal wash house. His father, an alcoholic, used to beat his mother. 

He learned, he said, how to 'insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn'.

After leaving school at 15, he became a junior reporter on the local newspaper and then a furniture salesman, before saving up enough money to enrol at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Starting in repertory theatre, in plays such as Treasure Island, he was eager for television and played a fireman on Coronation Street. 

Alarmed when he began losing his hair to alopecia at 19, he later turned his unusual appearance to his advantage in roles such as the Russian spymaster Karla, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

His determination to succeed took a toll on his health and, by his early 50s, he'd survived his first heart attack. 

Both directing and starring in The Next Generation, he began to feel ill but ignored the symptoms. 'I foolishly murmured to the assistant director that I had this pain in my chest...Ten minutes later, I was strapped on to the stretcher bed with a drip in my arm and was hurtled off to hospital. There's nothing quite like that to make you reflect on your life.'

His 24-year marriage to choreographer Sheila Falconer also fell victim to his obsession with work. 

His second marriage, to American producer Wendy Neuss broke down too, and in 2004, aged 64, he began dating actress Lisa Dillon, who was 25 and just out of theatre school. Both his children from his first marriage were older than her.

In 2013, he married American singer Sunny Ozell, who was 38 years his junior. The ceremony was unconventional, held in a Mexican restaurant. 

Sir Ian McKellen, his X-Men co-star, wore a cloak and officiated, thanks to a licence to perform weddings granted by the Universal Life Church.

Patrick Stewart continued to act into his 80s, until Alzheimer's disease forced him to retire. Asked why he couldn't quit the stage, he said: 'It makes me feel like a giant.'