Tributes paid to ‘Mirfield’s finest’ actor Sir Patrick Stewart

Childhood friend David Pinder described him as a “thoroughly nice man” and said the pair would meet up when they were both in Mirfield.

“I came back here when I retired from the Foreign Office and got into local politics,” he said.

“We couldn’t have been more different. He was very firmly old Labour and I at the time was Conservative, verging on Independent so we kept off politics.”

Pinder said the men would have lunch in the town and added: “People would come and go.

“They’d know it was Patrick and of course by then he was internationally famous, but people were very good. They’d just say hello and not pester him.”

Mirfield Free Grammar, which Stewart attended as a child, said he held a “special place” in its history.

The school said he had last visited in 2011, when he was presented with a commemorative plaque “made out of the very stage boards on which he made his first theatrical appearance”.

In a tribute, the school said: “Staff and students who met him during his visit remember him as a warm, friendly, compassionate and charismatic gentleman who left a last impression.

“We feel privileged to have been part of his story.”

Spen Valley MP Kim Leadbeater described Stewart as “Mirfield’s finest”.

Posting on X, the Labour MP described him as “an outstanding talent and someone who came across as a thoroughly decent and lovely”.