When Nichols considered quitting Star Trek at the end of the first series, a chance meeting with civil rights leader Martin Luther King 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,” he recalled on a 2011 TV program. “He said, ‘You just can’t quit. This is an important role. That’s why we march. We never thought we’d see this on TV.” Returning to the part she had seen as merely a stepping stone to Broadway, Nichols took it more seriously and reprized it in the spin-off films of the original Star Trek. She saw Uhura – her name was based on uhuru, Swahili for “freedom” – not only as a role model for black people, but also for women with aspirations of becoming astronauts or scientists. Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner in Plato’s Stepchildren, the Star Trek episode that featured the first kiss on the US small screen 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 future of the series. “The promise of this fictional universe was real to me,” Nichols wrote in her 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 just in her time but in ours.” Nichols was born in Robbins, Illinois, the daughter of Samuel, a chemist who had just served as that town’s mayor, and his wife, Licia (née Parks). Her 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 College Inn Revue at the Sherman House Hotel, Chicago. She later toured the US, Canada and Europe with the jazz bands of Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton (1950-51), appeared in the Calypso Carnival revue at the Blue Angel nightclub in Chicago, and performed as a solo singer and dancer in all 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 starring as 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 perform at his Chicago Playboy Club. In 1964, he starred 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 her character still developing, she read Spock’s lines and claimed to have impressed the producers so much that they checked to see if Leonard Nimoy was still signed to his contract. When it was confirmed that she had, they began discussing Uhura, whose name came from the title of a novel about the African freedom struggle that Nichols had auditioned with her. 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 starting Star Trek. She later wrote a song for him, Gene, 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 spin-off films, beginning with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and ending with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). She once again played Uhura in the 2020 feature film Star Trek: First Frontier, as well as Admiral Grace Jemison in the 2017 fan web series Star Trek: Renegades. Nichols became so attached to Uhura that she was only occasionally offered other screen roles, although she voiced half a dozen television cartoons. In the 1974 exploitation film Truck Turner, she was Dorinda, a troubled lady who hires a gangster to get revenge on the bounty hunters (played by Isaac Hayes and Alan Wicks) who killed her pimp boyfriend. She later played Nana Dawson, the matriarch of a New Orleans family devastated by Hurricane Katrina, in the second series (2007) of the science fiction television 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 educational materials based on music. The initiative was later expanded, with a grant from Nasa, 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 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 staged 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. She is survived by Kyle, the son from her first marriage, who became an actor. Nichelle Nichols (Grace Dell Nichols), actress and singer, born December 28, 1932. died July 30, 2022
