Actor and singer Nichelle Nichols, who has died aged 89, was one of the first black women to appear on US television in a non-subordinate role when she played communications officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the series original Star Trek (1966-). 69). She was also involved in the first American small screen kiss between a black woman and a white man, Uhura and Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner), in 1968.
When Nichols considered quitting Star Trek at the end of the first run, a chance meeting with civil rights leader Martin Luther King at a fundraising event changed his mind. “He said I had the first non-stereotypical role, I had a role with honor and dignity and intelligence,” he recalled on a 2011 TV show. “He said, ‘You just can’t abdicate. This is an important role. That’s why we leave. We never thought we’d see it on TV.”
Returning to the part he had seen simply as a step for Broadway, Nichols took it more seriously and reprized it in the original Star Trek spin-off films. She saw Uhura, whose name was based on uhuru, the Swahili for “freedom,” not only as a role model for black people, but also for women with ambitions to become astronauts or scientists.
Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner in Plato’s Stepchildren, the Star Trek episode that featured the first American small screen kiss between a black woman and a white man. Photo: Paramount Television/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry championed sexual and racial equality and presented a hopeful vision of the future for the series. “The promise of this imaginary universe was real to me,” Nichols wrote in his 1994 autobiography, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories. “I’m still very proud of Uhura: proud of who she was (or will be) and what she stood for, not only in her time but in ours.”
Nichols was born in Robbins, Illinois, the daughter of Samuel, a chemist who had just served as mayor of that city, and his wife, Lishia (nee Parks). His paternal grandfather, a white southerner, had alienated his parents by marrying a black woman. After Nichols and her family moved to Chicago, she studied dance at the Chicago Ballet Academy from the age of 12.
Two years later her professional career began as a singer and dancer in the revue College Inn at the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago. He later toured the United States, Canada, and Europe with the Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton Jazz Bands (1950-51), appeared in the Revue Calypso Carnival at the Blue Angel Nightclub, Chicago, and performed as solo singer and dancer in the United States and Canada. .
Moving to Los Angeles, Nichols was a principal dancer in the film version of Porgy and Bess (1959), which led to her being campus queen Hazel Sharpe in the original production of Kicks & Co at the Arie Crown Theater in Chicago. 1961). Although the musical was a failure, Hugh Hefner saw Nichols and booked her to appear at his Chicago Playboy Club.
In 1964, he acted in an episode of Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant, a Marine Corps drama. He then auditioned for Star Trek early the following year. With his character still to be developed, he read Spock’s lines and claimed to have impressed the producers so much that they checked to see if Leonard Nimoy had still signed his contract. When it was confirmed that she was, they started talking about Uhura, whose name comes from the title of a novel about the struggle for freedom in Africa that Nichols had with her at the audition.
In his autobiography, Nichols revealed that he was in a relationship with Roddenberry, who was married and already dating the woman who became his second wife, before Star Trek began. He later wrote a song for himself, Gene, which he sang at his funeral in 1991. He was also a regular at Trekkie fan conventions.
After Star Trek ended in 1969, she voiced Uhura in Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973–74) and played the role in the first six spin-off films, beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979 ) and ending with Star. Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). She once again portrayed Uhura in the 2020 fan-made film Star Trek: First Frontier, as well as appearing as Admiral Grace Jemison in the 2017 fan web series Star Trek: Renegades.
Nichols was so associated with Uhura that she was only occasionally offered other screen roles, although she voiced half a dozen television cartoons. In the 1974 blaxploitation film Truck Turner, she was Dorinda, a foul-mouthed lady who hires a gangster to get revenge on the bounty hunters (played by Isaac Hayes and Alan Weeks) who killed her boyfriend pimp She later played Nana Dawson, the matriarch of a New Orleans family devastated by Hurricane Katrina, in the second series (2007) of the TV science fiction drama Heroes.
Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner in Los Angeles in 2006. Photo: Chris Delmas/AFP/Getty Images
In 1975, Nichols formed Women in Motion, which produced music-based educational materials. The initiative was later expanded, with a NASA grant, to become an astronaut recruitment project targeting women and ethnic minorities. Among the thousands who applied was Sally Ride, who became the first American woman in space. Nichols won NASA’s Public Service Award in 1984.
As a singer, Nichols released three albums, Down to Earth (1967), Uhura Sings (1986) and Out of this World (1991). In 1990 she also did a one-woman show, Reflections, a musical tribute to black performers such as Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt, at the Westwood Playhouse in Los Angeles.
Nichols’ two marriages, to dancer Foster Johnson in 1951 and songwriter Duke Mondy in 1968, both ended in divorce. He is survived by Kyle, the son from his first marriage, who became an actor.
Nichelle Nichols (Grace Dell Nichols), actor and singer, born December 28, 1932; died on July 30, 2022