The Star Trek actress who shattered stereotypes
Nichelle Nichols 1932–2022
Just a year after taking the role of Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols decided she’d had enough of Star Trek. While she liked playing the Enterprise communications officer, one of the first Black female television characters in a leading role, she had viewed the part as a stepping-stone to other work— preferably on Broadway. And star William Shatner’s ego was already grating on her. But at an NAACP fundraiser, the organizer introduced her to someone he called “your biggest fan.” A smiling Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of how much he and his family admired her work on the show. When she said she was leaving the cast, his face fell. “You can’t do that,” she recalled him saying. “Don’t you understand, for the first time we’re seen as we should be seen?” That conversation, she later said, convinced her that playing Lt. Uhura “was something more than just a job.” She stayed with the series until its end in 1969.
The daughter of a chemist in suburban Robbins, Ill., Nichols first worked professionally as a singer and dancer in Chicago, said the Associated Press, starting at 14 and touring with Duke Ellington a few years later. Her big-screen debut in 1959’s Carmen Jones was followed by “several small film and TV roles.” A guest spot on the 1963 drama The Lieutenant introduced her to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and the two had a brief romantic relationship. Nichols’ red minidress uniform in Star Trek “permitted her to flaunt her dancer’s legs,” said The Washington Post, but the Enterprise’s sole female officer was usually crisp and businesslike. One exception was a 1968 episode in which she and Shatner’s Captain Kirk are forced by hostile telekinetic aliens to embrace, in “one of the first interracial kisses on American prime-time television.”
Nichols went on to release three albums, but Lt. Uhura defined her career, said People. She appeared in the first six Star Trek movies and became a key outreach ambassador for NASA, recruiting women and people of color as astronauts. Even after her 2018 diagnosis with dementia, Nichols frequently attended fan conventions; last December, she was “seen waving, blowing kisses, and flashing Star Trek’s famous Vulcan salute” at L.A. Comic Con. “I am still very proud of Uhura,” she wrote in her 1994 memoir, “and what she represented, not only in her time but in ours.”