Nichelle Nichols
Nichelle Nichols is an actor, born 1932.
She was born Grace Dell Nichols in Robbins, Illinois in 1932, and she was a singer and a dancer as well as an actress. The role was Uhura, communications officer aboard the USS Enterprise, and it ran from 1966 through the animated series, six feature films and, decades later, a voice appearance in Star Trek: Prodigy.
What that role meant is not a matter of interpretation. A Black woman on the bridge of a starship, a professional among professionals, was without precedent on American television in 1966, and its significance was immediate to everyone watching. The performance itself gets underrated because the writing gave her so little: Uhura is frequently a function, opening hailing frequencies and reacting, and Nichols played her with a poise and a warmth that made the character feel like a whole person even when the script had not bothered to write one. The films gave her more room and a promotion to commander, and The Voyage Home in particular lets her be funny.
The second career may be the larger one. From 1977 to 2015 she worked with NASA, promoting its programs and recruiting astronauts, and that campaign helped bring in some of the first women and ethnic minority astronauts the agency flew. It is an unusual line on the resume of someone hired to read out subspace frequencies.
The rest of the filmography is a scattering: Dorinda in the 1974 crime picture Truck Turner, family films like Snow Dogs and Are We There Yet?, her own head in a jar on Futurama, and a late run of documentaries about the show that made her. She died in 2022.
Movies (19)
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
- Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
- Are We There Yet? (2005)
- Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster (2010)
- Snow Dogs (2002)
- Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
- Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017)
- Truck Turner (1974)
- Unbelievable!!!!! (2020)
- 50 Years of Star Trek (2016)
- Trekkies (1997)
- For the Love of Spock (2016)
- American Nightmares (2018)
- Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner (2006)
- The White Orchid (2018)
- United We Fan (2018)
TV (7)
Where to start with Nichelle Nichols
Go to the source. Star Trek is where it starts, and the sensible approach is a handful of the best-regarded episodes rather than a chronological slog through three seasons of variable writing. You are looking for the hours where Uhura gets something to play rather than a console to operate.
The films are the better showcase. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the tightest of them by common consent, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the one where the entire cast gets to be comic, which she is very good at. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock hands her a thoroughly enjoyable scene of insubordination.
Beyond Starfleet, Truck Turner is the one to seek out, a hard seventies crime picture about as far from the bridge as the decade allowed. Star Trek: Prodigy is the late return, and For the Love of Spock is the documentary to watch if you want to hear her talking about the work and the people she did it with.