Prayers for her.
Prayers for her.
Get well Nichelle. Bummer getting old, Nyota....I’m getting long in the tooth myself. Prayers up.
Prayers for her health and speedy recovery.
Like so many my age, ST:TOS was a strong influence on my life.
I also heard she was asked by MLK to stay on the show, even if her role wasn’t as developed as she wanted. She was a positive influence for women and blacks (and all folk actually), even before she said a single line of dialog.
I don’t know nor care what her personal politics are — she was and is an important part of our culture.
Ping for your sci-fi ping list.
I’ve heard Nichelle tell the story multiple times on various venues
She owned that role like all of the main TOS actors.
BTW, my little scifi ebook is free this weekend
Interesting facts:
Her great-grandfather, James Gillespie, was Welsh
(March 26, 1997) Her younger brother Thomas Alva Nichols committed suicide with the other members of the notorious Heaven’s Gate cult in Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego, California.
Discovered by Duke Ellington in her mid-teens, she toured with both Ellington and Lionel Hampton as a lead singer and dancer
Mr. Spock: [as Kollos] Uhuru, whose name means freedom. “She walks in beauty, like the night.”
Dr. McCoy: That’s not Spock.
Mr. Spock: Are you surprised to find that I’ve read Byron, Doctor?
Dr. McCoy: That’s Spock.
(from “Is There No Truth In Beauty”, 1968)
I hope she is doing well. That said, I don’t know her personal politics, but her son lives not too far from me and is one of the biggest libtards I know. Worse, he’s a libtard activist. He arranged for a full sized parade float to come here to the southwest corner of New Mexico. It was a float with a 12 foot tall effigy of then president George W Bush, with 12 foot flames coming out his butt. Her son then spent the whole weekend driving that float around the small towns here. I hope she isn’t like him, but somebody raised him that way.
I’ve never seen her in person, but her MLK story grew from something pretty basic to something more grand, apparently with each telling. Basically, she wanted to quit the show because her supporting role was repetitious, and King told her she had to stay because “they” (meaning whitey) couldn’t take down what she’d done. Later on in the “Plato’s Stepchildren” episode, Kirk and Uhura kissed — the first interracial kiss on US network TV.
After the series ended, Shatner couldn’t get any longer term work, and basically slept in the back of his van, living however he could, getting a day of work here and there, surviving but just barely. He’s been in thousands of roles, mostly small ones, but starred in four TV series that come to mind (the last one was cancelled during its first season, but he was already so old, it is a tribute to his reliability that he could get cast, and the production could get insured), and had one-off roles in many others.
Years went by, Star Wars came out, paving the way to reboot Star Trek as a movie (there had been a stillborn attempt to revive the TV series, scripts were written, the cast was mostly onboard, but the plug got pulled; this would have been after the animated series). The movie sucked, but made gobs of money, leading to, what? Nine sequels? Five sequels with the original cast, a sixth sequel with a few members of the original cast (and a lot of screen time for Shatner), more with TNG cast; four spinoff TV series.
And still Nichols told Shatner in interview that she hated him; Takei apparently concocts hateful lies that he tells on talk shows; meanwhile, when Nimoy had started down that terrible road of geriatric forgetfulness and into dementia, he wouldn’t appear at a convention unless Shatner was there beside him, to improv lines that were funny but slightly absurd and nonsequitur, in order to help his friend.
A gorgeous woman.
Open a hailing frequency, Lieutenant ...
I hope her recovery goes well. I suffered a small stroke 5 years ago and have had seizures since that very day.
Prayers up.
Praying for her.....my gosh what a crush I had on her back in the day.