NICHELLE NICHOLS
(28 December 1932 – 30 July 2022)
The American actress, singer and dancer Nichelle Nichols, who has died from heart failure aged 89, will be forever associated with Star Trek and the part of Nyota Uhura – because she was one of the first black women to be cast in a leading role for a major TV series. More to the point, she was cast as a woman of substance rather than a mere supernumerary servant (as was the usual fate of black female performers). This recalls the advice once given to a budding young black actress by the singer Pearl Bailey: "Look honey, whatever you do, don't carry a tray."
Lieutenant Nyota Uhura gave Nichols the chance to show that a black woman could be intelligent as well as beautiful. The part saw her as a translator and communications officer. The escape from menial roles in film and television is reflected in the name Uhura given by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, as it is a Swahili word meaning ‘freedom’. And, if that were not enough, the part created another first in that in November of 1968 Uhura shared a kiss with Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), allegedly the first interracial kiss on television which, tame as it may seem now, made history.
Grace Dell Nichols was born one of ten children in Robbins, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to a factory worker, Samuel Earl Nichols, and his wife Lisha. Not being fond of the name of Grace, their daughter changed it to Nichelle, after the Greek goddess Nike. Her stage debut was in 1961 in a flop musical called Kicks and Co, based vaguely on Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine. Hefner subsequently booked her for his Chicago nightclub.
She also appeared in a Chicago production of Carmen Jones and a New York staging of Porgy and Bess. She later toured as a singer with the Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton bands. Other stage shows she did included the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint... and James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr Charlie. An appearance on The Lieutenant, the Gene Roddenberry series in 1964, led to her and many other actors being cast for Star Trek.
When Nichols had played the role of Uhura for some time, she decided to leave the series to do a Broadway show. However, at a banquet in aid of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, Roddenberry introduced her to her greatest fan. That man was Dr Martin Luther King who persuaded Nichols to stay with Star Trek because it was such an important role for the black community and for women in particular. So she stayed and continued until the series finished in 1969. She also voiced an animated series of Star Trek and appeared in six film versions up to 1991.
Apart from the Star Trek movies, Nichelle Nichols appeared in Otto Preminger's Porgy and Bess (1959), uncredited as a dancer, and had small parts in Made in Paris with Louis Jourdan, Mister Buddwing with James Garner, Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding! with George Hamilton, and the blaxploitation action-thriller Truck Turner (1974) with Isaac Hayes and Yaphet Kotto. Then along came Star Trek and her fate was sealed. After she had finished with the TV series she made other films including Snow Dogs with Cuba Gooding Jr (2002), Lady Magdalene’s, about a Nevada brothel, which she also produced, and several others before her last film, Unbelievable!!!!! in 2020, which was aptly enough a parody of Star Trek.
Nichols did other work including albums of standards and rock songs. She was involved with Nasa helping to recruit women of different races and ethnicities for the national space agency. She wrote her autobiography Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories in 1994 and collaborated with Margaret Wander Bonanno in 1995 on Saturn's Child, a novel about an unearthly beauty with stunning powers.
Nichelle Nichols was first married to the dancer Foster Johnson in 1951, but they soon divorced after having a son, Kyle. In 1968 she married Duke Mondy but they divorced in 1972. In her autobiography she revealed that before Star Trek she had had a relationship with Gene Roddenberry .
MICHAEL DARVELL