Majel Barrett

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Majel Barrett as Lwaxana Troi on .

Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (born Majel Lee Hudec on February 23, 1932 in Columbus, Ohio) is an American actress and widow of television director/producer/writer Gene Roddenberry. As a result of both her marriage to Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek's creator) and the fact that she has been in every Star Trek series, she is sometimes referred to as "The First Lady of Star Trek."

Majel Barrett played several onscreen roles in the various incarnations of Star Trek, the popular science fiction television series:

She first appeared in Star Treks initial pilot episode "The Cage" as the USS Enterprise'''s unnamed First Officer, "Number One". (According to the book ' by Herbert Solow and Bob Justman, Barrett was cast as Number One because she was romantically involved with Roddenberry at the time. Solow and Justman claim the network was furious that Roddenberry would attempt to put an unknown actress in such a prominent role simply because she was his girlfriend, and allege that Roddenberry later claimed that the network told him to remove her because they did not want a woman to be in such a high position of authority.)
Her role was changed to that of Nurse Christine Chapel when ' became a regular series; she continued this role in ' and .
She provided numerous voices for the animated series.
Years later, she was cast as the outrageously determined and iconoclastic Betazoid Ambassador Lwaxana Troi, who was a recurring character in ' and who also appeared in some episodes of '.
She also provided the regular voice of starship onboard computers for the original Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, ', ', and the Star Trek movies. She reprised her role as a shipboard computer voice in two episodes of the prequel series that involved later time periods.

As a result of her providing the computer voice in the Enterprise episode "In a Mirror, Darkly", Barrett became the first and only actor to participate in all six Star Trek series as well as the both the TOS and TNG-era film series.

Barrett also played the character Dr. Julianne Belman in , which was also created by Gene Roddenberry. She made a guest appearance in a Babylon 5 episode "Point of No Return", as Lady Morella, the psychic widow of the Centauri emperor; her role foreshadowed major plot elements in the series. Parodying her voice work as the computer for the Star Trek series, Majel performed as a guest voice on Family Guy as the voice of Stewie's ship.

External links

article at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki

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