Original ‘Star Trek’ Star Nichelle Nichols Dies at 89

Nichelle Nichols, the pioneering Black actress who first played the role of Nyota Uhura in Star Trek: The Original Series, died Saturday night, her son announced on Facebook. She was 89.

“Last night, my mother, Nichelle Nichols, succumbed to natural causes and passed away,” her son Kyle Johnson wrote Sunday. “Her light however, like the ancient galaxies now being seen for the first time, will remain for us and future generations to enjoy, learn from, and draw inspiration.”

When Star Trek premiered in 1966, Nichols was one of few Black women starring in a major TV series, garnering her legions of fans not only among Trekkies but civil rights activists. She admitted, however, that it took a plea from Martin Luther King Jr. to stop her from leaving the show after the first season to pursue a Broadway career.

“He asked what I was talking about, and told me that I can't leave the show,” she told The Wall Street Journal in 2011. “We talked a long time about what it all meant and what images on television tell us about ourselves.”

King told Nichols that Star Trek was the only show that he and his wife let their kids stay up to watch, saying it showed Black people “as we should be seen every day, as intelligent, quality, beautiful, people who can sing dance, and can go to space, who are professors, lawyers.”

“If you leave, that door can be closed because your role is not a Black role, and is not a female role, he can fill it with anybody even an alien,” he told her.

Nichols stayed on and embraced her iconic role, which included one of the first interracial kisses on screen. She appeared at conventions throughout the years and partnered with NASA to help recruit women astronauts. She was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1992, and Zoe Saldana later took over her famous role in the 2009 reimagining of Star Trek.

Bernice King, King’s daughter, lauded Nichols’ career in a Twitter post on Sunday. “Representation matters. Excellence in representation matters even more,” she wrote. “Rest well, ancestor.”

George Takei, the series’ original Hikaru Sulu, tweeted that he would have more to say “about the trailblazing, incomparable Nichelle Nichols, who shared the bridge with us as Lt. Uhura of the USS Enterprise, and who passed today at age 89.”

“For today, my heart is heavy, my eyes shining like the stars you now rest among, my dearest friend,” he wrote.

Her later life was filled with some off-screen drama. Johnson, her son, filed a conservatorship petition in 2018 alleging that her former manager-turned-caretaker, Gilbert Bell, had exploited his mother’s dementia. Johnson was moved from Woodland Hills, California, where she had a home, to New Mexico with her son, according to the Los Angeles Times. She subsequently retired from public appearances a year later.

“Hers was a life well lived and as such a model for us all,” her son wrote.