The Swagger and Stamp of the First Lady of ‘Star Trek’

Statuesque, regal and poised, Majel Barrett Roddenberry was, in all possible respects, the First Lady of Star Trek, part of the historic franchise from its earliest incarnation, the only actress to have not one, not two, not three, but four recurring roles throughout its films and series, a vital ambassador to the ever-massive fan community and, perhaps first and foremost, the wife of the boss, Gene Roddenberry, whose imagination launched the entire phenomenon.

And she was also, in the words of Jonathan Frakes, the Star Trek: The Next Generation actor and director still active in the now 60-year-old franchise, “a broad, and she took great pride in that.”

After making her way to Hollywood in the late 1950s, native Ohioan Majel Leigh Hodak launched a promising acting career that eventually included early roles in films like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and television series including Bonanza, The Untouchables and Leave It to Beaver; as a regular face in the Desilu stable, she even received comedy tutoring from no less than Lucille Ball.

And while working on a 1964 episode of the military drama The Lieutenant, she met Gene, the show’s creator and executive producer, a war veteran, former Pan Am pilot and ex-cop (like her late father), who was about to embark on his next, more visionary venture for Ball’s Desilu, the then-revolutionarily brainy and deeply metaphorical sci-fi series Star Trek. In the series pilot, Majel was cast as Number One, serious, efficient and second-in-command of the starship Enterprise — a role that in mid-’60s TV would have been a landmark example of a woman in a position of authority. “I assume my father gave her that role because he saw that in her as a human being … a leader among women,” says her son Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry. “She deserved that role. That was her.”

Except the powers-that-be at Desilu found the first pilot — “The Cage,” starring Jeffrey Hunter — intriguing yet too intellectual for TV, and they took exception to another aspect of Gene’s vision. “Apparently the executives — ironically, Lucy may have been among them — didn’t want a strong woman in that part,” says Frakes. “That’s how dated and behind the times we were back in ’66. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

It didn’t help that Majel had, of course, become romantically entangled with Gene, whose first marriage was collapsing as his writer-producer star rose. Some execs objected to casting “the producer’s girlfriend” in such a pivotal role. Deciding to give Gene a then-unheard-of second shot at a pilot, Desilu also gave him a choice: Jettison either the odd pointy-eared alien Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy or the female commander. He chose Spock, transferring Number One’s cool, dispassionate traits and command duties to the Vulcan, and the rest, of course, was history.

But Majel herself wasn’t out of the picture. “When Number One didn’t work out and the first pilot got shit-canned, he recast her as Nurse Chapel,” says Frakes. Dying her hair a transformative honey blonde, she was granted a recurring role as the ship’s head nurse, Christine Chapel, compassionate and cursed with a barely concealed longing for the remote Spock — and, dropping her voice to a lower, more robotic tone, she also provided the voice of the ship’s then-innovative interactive computer.

As the couple’s creative link endured, their relationship solidified: Shortly after Trek’s controversial cancellation in 1969, they married in a Shinto ceremony, in full kimonos, during a getaway in Japan, and from there an enduring partnership moved forward. “His loyalty to his wife goes way, way, way back,” says Frakes. “Where he went, she went.”

“The number one thing I can say about my mother is she loved my dad in a way that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen before,” says Rod. “They went through a lot, and they both had their strengths and weaknesses.” Rod recalls Majel focusing her energies raising on him at home, while also pursuing her own interests, including overseeing Lincoln Enterprises, which sold mail-order Star Trek merchandise before the franchise became a licensing juggernaut under Paramount with the revival of Trek beginning with the first movie in 1979.

She would occasionally reprise the Chapel role on film and animation, while also still tackling other acting parts here and there, like a bit as a robotic brothel owner in Westworld. “She was still a strong woman,” remembers Rod. “By no means would I call her submissive in that traditional ’60s, ’70s, ’80s format … She was there for my father to take care of him, but it wasn’t a submissive way.”

And she positively reveled in the designation “broad,” he recalls. Indeed, the polar opposite of both Number One’s icy demeanor and Chapel’s long-suffering yearning, Majel is remembered by friends and colleagues as a boisterous, brassy, take-no-prisoners presence. “She was a force of nature,” says Marina Sirtis, who played Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation. “You definitely knew when she entered a room

Rod recalls that his parents belonged to a golf club that had a men-only lounge one night a week. “She said, ‘Eff that,’” he laughs. “She would hang out with the boys, because she could tell the dirty jokes. You just imagine that sort of old, wealthy, privileged group of men smoking their cigars and all that, and she’d be right down there with them making them laugh. She was a bit of a sailor in her own right.”

Indeed, much of Majel’s formidable, funny, larger-than-life persona was translated into her fourth significant Trek role, playing Counsellor Troi’s “Auntie Mame”-esque, man-eating diplomat mother, Lwaxana Troi, as a recurring guest on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, which allowed her room for both uproarious comedy and, on occasion, deeply moving dramatic moments.

“I think she shocked Sir Patrick Stewart — he wasn’t quite ‘Sir’ then — with how wonderfully brassy she was,” remembers Frakes. “Gene always managed to make it down to the set when she was shooting, which he only did when Klingons were fighting or if Majel was shooting, so read that as you will. The word would come down from the writer’s building and they’d set up his chair and he’d sit happily next to the camera and watch Lwaxana Troi.” Frakes also clocked how delighted Majel seemed to be to have, after a long stint supporting Gene away from the soundstage, a plumb acting opportunity. “I think if you’ve been bitten badly by the bug, there’s no time when you don’t want to come do it again.”

“I didn’t meet Majel until she was a guest star on our show in the episode ‘Haven,’ and we didn’t bond immediately because she was the boss’s wife, and we were all a bit nervous because as a cast; we were a little rowdy,” recalls Sirtis. But the two quickly became extraordinarily close, and Sirtis was embraced by Majel’s warm, maternal side.

“As someone fresh off the boat from London when I got TNG, one of the most wonderful things about the job was that the Roddenberry family kind of adopted me,” she says. “So I had a very personal relationship with Majel that probably transcended that of a normal coworker. When my own mother passed away, I remember saying to Majel that she had to live a very long time because she was the only mum I had left.”

After Gene’s death in 1991, Majel would continue to serve as a steward for both his Star Trek interests and unrealized projects that eventually became series, such as Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda. Shortly before her death in 2008, she recorded her last role: the voice of the Enterprise computer in the J.J. Abrams-helmed reboot film Star Trek. In 2024, the couple’s cremated remains were, poetically, launched into deep space together.

Majel’s voice would ultimately provide inspiration to the tech teams developing early AI projects that would emerge over subsequent years — indeed, Amazon’s early Alexa model was code-named “Majel.” Even before her passing, says Rod, “Someone approached her to be the voice of their upcoming computer thing, and she had said no. And I was like, ‘What, are you crazy?’” He nevertheless had his mother professionally record her voice and, working with the company OTOY, has created a working model he’d hopes to make available free to fans.

“I would love to somehow get her voice out there. My intention was never to profit off it, for it to just get out there,” he says. “I wouldn’t be giving them the voice of the computer. I’d be giving them a voice of Majel Roddenberry.”

Today, Paramount+’s prequel series Star Trek; Strange New Worlds has revived two of Majel’s roles, expanding both Chapel and Number One well beyond the social and cultural restraints of their mid-’60s origins. Jess Bush drew inspiration both from Majel’s performance and her off-screen persona. “I know that she was kind of disappointed with what she was really able to do with Nurse Chapel and the material that she was given to play with, but you can still see this kind of underlying, sometimes saltiness and sarcasm,” says Bush. “I wanted to reverse-engineer it into a more bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, more naive version of that energy.

“Because there wasn’t a heap of material for her in The Original Series, I also did more research into her as a person,” adds Bush. “The way that she dyed her hair and came back through the back door … She had this real vigor and it’s like, ‘I’m going to make this work for me.’ I think she just has this real kind of joyous self-possession, this ‘Life is magnificent and I’m going to take it by the reins.’ I wanted to distill that kind of energy.”

As SNW’s Number One, Rebecca Romijn had even less footage to study. “Only 13 minutes of screen time! That’s all I’ve had to go on,” she says, though she was determined to do right by both the character and the actress who originated her.

“I’m like, ‘Well, Majel, let’s prove them wrong at this point. Now’s the chance.’ So it’s been pretty incredible to take it on. I wish she were here for feedback.”

Romijn says she discovered a telling detail recently when Rod shared Majel’s signed, original script for “The Cage” with her at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International. “She had written copious notes in all of her scenes. And I guess this script had been written for a man, because in all of the stage directions, it still said, “He passes to the left. He sits down. He picks up a thing,” and she crossed out every single one and wrote her, she. And I hope they reprinted that script for her. ‘Not him. Her.’”

Sirtis says she especially admired Majel’s utter lack of complaint that her Number One never made it past the first pilot (though her performance would resurface through repurposed footage in The Original Series two-parter “The Menagerie” and, later, the release of the full unedited pilot). “She never harkened back to the unfairness of it and never complained.”

“There was always a humble quality when it came to Star Trek and fandom and a respect for the fans,” says Rod, who recalls his mother deeply valuing the fact that fans continually kept Trek alive whenever its longevity was at risk. At conventions, he recalls, “instead of going into the signing room with all the other actors, she would stay out at her table. And if anyone told her she had to go in there, she’d give them a certain finger … She wouldn’t just sign, collect money and walk away. She would engage with just about everyone who came by.”

“Without an audience, without people there kicking and screaming and saying, ‘We want this,’ it wouldn’t be here today,” he adds. “She knew that, and she gave the fans almost as much love as she gave my father.”