Actor and singer Nichelle Nichols, who has died aged 89, was one of the first black women to be cast on American television in a subservient role when she played communications officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek series (1966-69). She also starred in the first US small screen kiss between a black woman and a white man, Uhura and Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner), in 1968.
When Nichols contemplated leaving Star Trek at the end of the first run, a chance meeting with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. at a fundraising event changed her mind. “He said I had the first non-stereotypical role, I had a role with honor and dignity and intelligence,” she recalled on a 2011 television program. “He said, ‘You just can’t abdicate. This is an important role. This is why we march. We never thought we’d see this on TV.”
Returning to a role she had seen as merely a stepping stone to Broadway, Nichols took it more seriously and reprized it in the original Star Trek films. She saw Uhura — her name was based on uhuru, Swahili for “freedom” — not only as a role model for blacks, 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 US 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 for the series’ future. “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 represented, not just in her time but in ours.”
Nichols was born in Robbins, Illinois, the daughter of Samuel, a chemist who had just been mayor of that town, and his wife Lishia (née Parks). Her paternal grandfather, a white southerner, had alienated her 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 College Inn revue at the Sherman House Hotel, Chicago. She later toured the US, Canada and Europe with the Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton Jazz Bands (1950-51), appeared in the Calypso Carnival Revue at the Blue Angel Nightclub, Chicago, and performed as a solo singer and dancer in USA 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 cast as campus queen Hazel Sharp in the original production of Kicks & Co at Chicago’s Arie Crown Theater (1961). Although the musical was a flop, Hugh Hefner saw Nichols and booked her to appear at his Chicago Playboy club.
In 1964, she starred in an episode of Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant, a Marine Corps drama. She then auditioned for Star Trek early the following year. Since her character had not yet been developed, she read Spock’s lines and stated that she impressed the producers so much that they checked to see if Leonard Nimoy was still signed to his contract. When it was confirmed that he did, they began discussing Uhura, whose name comes from the title of a novel about the African freedom struggle that Nichols had with her at the audition.
In her autobiography, Nichols revealed that she had a relationship with Roddenberry – who was married and already dating the woman who became his second wife – before Star Trek began. She later wrote a song for him, Jean, which she sang at his funeral in 1991. She was also a regular at Trekkies 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 separate films, beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and ending with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). She again played Uhura in the 2020 fan-made film Star Trek: First Frontier, and also appeared as Admiral Grace Jemison in the 2017 fan web series Star Trek: Renegades.
Nichols was so attached to Uhura that she was only occasionally offered other screen roles, although she voiced half a dozen TV cartoons. In the 1974 blaxploitation film Truck Turner, she was Dorinda, a foul-mouthed madam who hired a gangster to get revenge on the bounty hunters (played by Isaac Hayes and Alan Weeks) who killed her pimp friend. She later played Nana Dawson, the matriarch of a New Orleans family devastated by Hurricane Katrina, in the second series (2007) of the television 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 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 a NASA Community 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 organized 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 to songwriter Duke Mondy in 1968, both ended in divorce. She is survived by Kyle, the son from her first marriage who became an actor.
Nichelle Nichols (Grace Dell Nichols), actor and singer, born 28 December 1932; died July 30, 2022
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