Tag Archives: Star Trek

Star Trek actors in wiki: married to David Ogden Stiers

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“Miri.” … The girl in the title was supposed to be 12 or 13, but the actress was 19. A few years later she played the girl in True Grit, who was supposed to be 14. She got married five times. “After she starred in True Grit, film critics predicted that she was at the beginning of a long career as a great actress. In fact, she has made almost no films of note since.”  Still, she was John Cusack’s mom in Better Off Dead (1985); David Ogden Stiers played her husband. … Michael J. Pollard played the teen who was stirring up trouble among the kids. But he was 27. I give his name because I never saw True Grit but I did see Bonnie and Clyde, where he played the second second banana, right after Gene Hackman. He got a Supporting Actor nom for that, not bad. One of his later films was Melvin and Howard (1980).


With a face like Pollard’s, a real pulped masterpiece of boyish oddity, you’d think he would have been all over the place, in any goofy-guy role that came up, and it appears that he did at least work. … One of the little kids, a kid with an army helmet that has a net on it, is the son of Greg Morris, who was a Mission: Impossible regular. This same kid grew up and played Jackie Chiles on Seinfeld. … There’s a movie called Homeboys in Space. … One of Roddenberry’s daughters has a former schoolmate named the Rev. Peggy Pearl-Kirkby.


“Conscience of the King.”  The villain, Alto Karidian, is played by a guy who did Shakespeare from the 1930s to the late ’50s, then started doing Hollywood. His son helped start Sesame Street. … The character’s daughter, or the actress playing her, was voted Miss Memphis in high school and went on to do okay as a cool-blond type on tv. For instance, she played the police-woman sidekick on Ironsides, a crime-drama vehicle that ran for years (Raymond Burr’s in a wheelchair and he solves crimes). In the 1980s and ’90s “she worked frequently as a costume designer for a number of B movies.” Her first season of Ironsides, she had won an Emmy for best supporting actress. …

There was an episode of Mission: Impossible called “Cocaine” and it guest-starred William Shatner.  … Great movie title: Twenty-Three Paces to Baker Street. … The guy playing one of the ensigns is a Canadian doo-wop singer and “co-wrote the theme song for the hit TV series The Fall Guy.” 

Special notice: Bruce Hyde, a long-faced, distinctive guy in his 20s who was charming as the goofy Irish ensign, Lt. Riley. He showed up here and in “Naked Time” (he was the guy driving Kirk nuts by singing). Wiki just says he wound up teaching at St. Cloud State in Minnesota. Memory Alpha fills in this: Hyde did 9 tv guest shots in 13 months, then played Hair in San Francisco and was converted by his role into being an actual hippie. “I was going to get a Volkswagen bus and a big bag of brown rice and go find God. And that’s what I did.” Then he got his doctorate and now he’s chairman of Theater, Film Studies and Dance at St. Cloud. To me that’s not a bad way for things to work out.

… as Kevin Riley

Traces of greatness among old Wiki actors

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Who am I kidding? Nobody’s going to link to this shit. But yeah, the last batch was here.

“What Are Little Girls Made Of.” Sherry Jackson. Wiki says Jackson “is probably best remembered today for her role as Terry Williams on The Danny Thomas Show (AKA Make Room for Daddy) from 1953–58.” According to Star Trek associate producer Robert Justman, the sight of Jackson in costume caused William Shatner to sweat and become crosseyed (though I don’t have the book at hand, so maybe memory exaggerates). 


“Dagger of the Mind.” The mad scientist was played by James Gregory, the guy who played Inspector Luger in Barney Miller! (And also the dopey McCarthyite/Communist pawn Sen. Johnny Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate!) He was an excellent comic actor, so good he made you glad the tv was on, but in “Dagger” he played a straight villain and anyway the episode is a real snooze.



… Marianna Hill. She’s credited in Godfather II as “Deanna Dunn-Corleone,” which I think would make her the shiksa (or whatever the term would be for a shiksa equivalent in the Italian frame of reference) who married Fredo and then got too friendly with Troy Donahue. If so, she delivered a great little comic performance. (“Never marry an Italian! They treat their women like shit!”) 

Old actors from Wikipedia, “Mudd’s Women” edition

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Last batch here.

“Mudd’s Women.” Roger C. Carmel, who played Harry Mudd, “was also the voice of Smokey Bear in fire safety advertisements, as well as Decepticon lieutenant Cyclonus in the popular Transformers animated series.” (update, In comments, Joe S. Walker adds that Carmel also appeared “in one of the worst films of all time, Myra Breckenridge.”)


Of the three women Harry Mudd brings aboard the Enterprise, one was played by Karen Steele, who “reportedly earned her first money by spearing baby sharks in the private cove on the estate of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.” In 1970 she lost her agent because she turned down being a regular on a tv series and instead went on a morale tour of Pacific service hospitals. This was during Vietnam. That year she said, “A lot of people in this town just don’t understand me. … They don’t believe me when I tell them I’d rather spend 17 hours talking to General Westmoreland than exchanging amenities at some Hollywood party.”   

Another, Susan Denberg, was “Playmate of the Month” in the August 1966 issue of Playboy. During the late 1960s she had drug problems: “I became hooked on LSD and marijuana … I needed LSD every day, almost every hour…” I don’t think that’s really possible.

Ted Cassidy, Eddie Paskey … it’s more first season Star Trek actors in Wiki

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Jesus, there’s a lot of this stuff. … Memory Alpha is a bit of a millstone; it’s more than doubled how much I have to read.

Ah well. Last batch here. 

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” … Ted Cassidy. He was huge and odd looking, so he played aliens and monsters (like Lurch in The Addams Family). But he started as a radio personality in Dallas, where he did on-the-scene reporting about JFK’s death: 


On November 22, 1963, shortly after the John F. Kennedy assassination, Cassidy interviewed several of the witnesses, including two very close witnesses, William and Gayle Newman, after the Newmans had appeared on WFAA-TV, but before they left to go to the Dallas Sheriff’s office (no tape exists of that interview for the radio station did not start recording their broadcasts until about 1:45 PM). He also interviewed the manager of his radio station who was in the Book Depository and saw a man run out of the building shortly after the shooting. The manager offered several times to talk to Dallas police who repeatedly refused to interview him.


In 1978 he voiced the Thing on the cartoon Fantastic Four! And the opening narration for The Incredible Hulk. “He also co-wrote the screenplay of 1973’s The Harrad Experiment, in which he made a brief appearance.” The Harrad Experiment is about a college where all the kids get it on as part of progressive education.

Also from “What Are,” a credit for Eddie Paskey, “a U.S. actor primarily known for his role as ‘Lieutenant Leslie’, a redshirt, on Star Trek, in which he is noted for being the most omnipresent actor with the fewest got i spoken lines during the entire series. He appeared in 57 episodes.”

Paskey got into pictures when he was discovered pumping gas in the Pacific Palisades. He kept working at the station on weekends while doing tv guest spots, then quit show business in the late ’60s and “went into business for himself in Santa Ana, California, [eventually] owning and operating an auto-detailing service called The Air Shop with his wife Judy. He sold the business in 2004. Today, he and Judy, along with their 1955 T-Bird, and are members of Hot Rods Unlimited, a SoCal auto club.“

First Season Wiki: more old Star Trek actors

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All right, I got done with the second season. Because my planning is fucked up, I now start on the first season.
Note:  Just came across a site called Memory Alpha, a wiki devoted to Star Trek. Good design and a lot of info, though the material below is all from regular Wikipedia.

“Charlie X”: Robert Walker Jr. was the son of Jennifer Jones. She left his father for David O. Selznick when Walker was three or so, and a year later she won Best Actress for Song of Bernadette. … The character actor Abraham Sofaer’s wife was named Psyche Angela Christian. 

“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot … Gary Lockwood did a 1968 caper film called They Came to Rob Las Vegas. In 1978 he did a made-for-tv movie called The Incredible Journey of Dr. Meg Laurel. … Sally Kellerman. She wound up as Rodney Dangerfield’s love interest in Back to School (1986). Yikes. … Paul Carr “toured in summer stock with Chico Marx.” His character dies in “Where No Man,” and Wiki says that more or less makes him the first dead redshirt, though none of the uniforms in the episode were actually red. … Paul Fix played the ship doctor but was replaced for the rest of the series by DeForest Kelley. In 1972 the two of them wound up in the same lousy, career-nadir horror film, Night of the Lepus, which was about “giant mutant rabbits” in the Southwest.
“The Naked Time.” There’ an episode of Trapper John, M.D. called “Old Man Liver” and it was written by a bit player in this episode. … The guy who played Amorous Crewman voiced a role in Akira.
“Balance of Terror.” Back in 1932, RKO did a movie called Secrets of the French Police.

More from Wiki about old Star Trek actors

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I’m working my way thru the second season.

In “The Omega Glory” there’s a big lug named Roy Jenson, “remembered by many as the first man beaten up by Caine on the television show Kung Fu (1972).” He also played pro football on the Alouettes, Montreal’s team.


The scientist who creates a mad computer on “The Ultimate Computer” was played by William Marshall, “best known for his title role in the 1972 blaxploitation classic Blacula and its sequel Scream Blacula Scream (1973), and as the ‘King of Cartoons’ on the 1980s television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse beginning with its second season.” But he also did Shakespeare: “His Othello … was called by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times ‘the best Othello of our time'” That’s pretty good.

The son of the man who “raised the alarm during the attack on Pearl Harbor” played a proconsul in “Bread and Circuses,” the show’s Roman episode.

In the same episode, the actor who played the oldest and most saintly of the “Followers of the Son” was also author of a book of poems called Forty-Four Scribbles and a Prayer. 

During the ’60s Terri Garr was a bit player in “nine Elvis Presley features. Her first speaking role was a one-line appearance as a damsel in distress in The Monkees film Head written by Jack Nicholson.”


 

Old actors in Wikipedia

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I’m reading Wiki entries on people who have been in old Star Trek episodes.


In “A Piece of the Action,” there’s a guy named Kalo who carries a tommy gun and is ordered around by the big mob boss (who is played by Anthony Caruso). The guy playing Kalo, his name is Lee Delano, studied dance with Martha Graham!

In “A Private Little War,” there’s a witch-temptress played by a woman who later married Zubin Mehta, conductor of the LA Philharmonic. The woman, Nancy Kovack, became a real-life Jackie Collins sort of character, a tv actress who has made it and is now wife of a celebrity jet setter. Kovack is an “ardent and strict” Christian Scientist, known among “Hollywood’s elder generation” for her views. Susan McDougal, a name from the Whitewater affair, worked as Kovack’s personal assistant for a while, and the two of them wound up going at it in court.

The same episode has a big lug in, I think, a white wig, and his name is Tyree. The guy, Michael Witney, who played him married Twiggy in 1977 and dropped dead of a heart attack in 1983.

A burning-eyed 35-ish guy plays the main villain in “Patterns of Force,” the Nazi episode. That was Skip Homeier, and “in 1943 and 1944 he played the role of Emil in the Broadway play Tomorrow the World. Cast as a child indoctrinated into Nazism who is brought to the United States from Germany following the death of his parents.” I never heard of that play. It sounds terrible but so in tune with its era you’d think it would have hit big enough for something of it to stick around in the public memory.

 There’s a John Wayne movie called The High and the Mighty, and a Joan Crawford film called The Damned Don’t Cry. Apparently someone in the Crawford film describes her character as “tough as a seventy-five cent steak.”

Barbara Bouchet played an alien called Kelinda in “By Any Other Name.” In 1970 she moved to Italy and began starring in erotic comedies and erotic thrillers.  “In 1985, she established a production company and started to produce a successful series of keep fit books and videos. In addition, she opened a fitness studio in Rome. … She lives with her family in Rome, where she is a set member of the city’s celebrity social life.“