The day that changed my life: Nichelle Nicols, Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura, now 80, recalls her part in American TV's first interracial kiss



The world tilted for me back in the 1960s, when American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King told me he and his family were big fans of my Star Trek character, Lieutenant Uhura, because of what she’d achieved for women and racial minorities.



Uhura, whose name comes from ‘uhuru’, the Swahili word for ‘freedom’, was fourth in command on the Starship Enterprise, which made her one of the first prominent black female characters in a major TV show.



This was considered so important to the civil rights struggle that Dr King even persuaded me not to leave the show after the first series, when I was offered a role on Broadway.



When Dr Martin Luther King told me he and his family were big fans of my Star Trek character, Lieutenant Uhura, because of what she'd achieved for women and racial minorities, my life changed

So to have Uhura’s historical importance daringly sealed with an interracial kiss with Bill Shatner’s Captain Kirk really made my name – especially since the Starship Enterprise’s five-year mission was ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’!



Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was a genius the way he went way beyond what was considered the norm for the time.

The episode with the kiss, Plato’s Stepchildren, aired in November 1968 and caused a huge stir, even though it was careful to portray the situation as having been forced on Uhura and Kirk by alien telekinesis.

Some TV stations in America’s conservative Deep South wouldn’t show it, although I remember one white Southern man writing to say that although he was opposed to the mixing of the races, ‘any time a red-blooded American like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain’t gonna fight it.’



Originally they wanted Uhura to kiss Leonard Nimoy’s Mr Spock instead. Since Spock was half-man, half-Vulcan, that would have made it American TV’s first interspecies kiss! But Bill Shatner said, ‘Hell no, if anybody’s going to kiss Uhura, Kirk is!’



She was fourth in command on the Starship Enterprise, which made her one of the first prominent black female characters in a major TV show

TV executives thought it too risky to show the actual kiss on screen, so Gene Roddenberry shot two versions – one that showed us locking lips and the other with the kiss just out of shot. But during the discreet version, Bill deliberately messed around by crossing his eyes, so they couldn’t use it.



I can’t remember how many takes we did for the kissing version, because Bill, who has a wicked sense of humour, kept saying, ‘I think we need just one more take to get it right.’ I had to keep having my lipstick repaired by the make-up lady between takes and Bill had to be cleaned up as well because by then he was wearing my lipstick, which had rubbed off on him. By the time we finally wrapped, we were laughing our heads off.



I have an affection for all the characters I’ve played, but Uhura was my favourite. I played her in seven movies, and the TV series led to me becoming a NASA advisor, recruiting the first women and minority astronauts for its Space Shuttle programme.

