Grace Dell "Nichelle" Nichols ( nish-EL; December 28, 1932 – July 30, 2022) was an American actress, singer and dancer whose portrayal of Uhura in Star Trek and its film sequels was groundbreaking for African American actresses on American television. From 1977 to 2015, she volunteered her time to promote NASA's programs and recruit diverse astronauts, including some of the first female and ethnic minority astronauts.
Born in the Chicago suburb of Robbins, she trained in dance, and began her career as a dancer, singer and model in Chicago. As an actor, she appeared on stage, in television and in film.
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Early life
Grace Dell "Nichelle" Nichols was born the third of six children on December 28, 1932, in Robbins, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to Samuel Earl Nichols, a factory worker who was elected both town mayor of Robbins in 1929 and its chief magistrate, and his wife, Lishia (Parks) Nichols, a homemaker. Disliking her name, Nichols asked her parents for a new one; they suggested Nichelle, which they said meant "victorious maiden" (from Nike and the suffix -elle). The family later moved into an apartment in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, where Nichols attended Englewood High School, graduating in 1951. From age 12, she studied dance at the Chicago Ballet Academy.
Career
Nichols began her professional career as a singer and dancer in Chicago. She then toured the United States and Canada with the bands of Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton. In 1959, she appeared as the principal dancer in the film version of Porgy and Bess. Her acting break was an appearance in Kicks and Co., Oscar Brown's highly touted but ill-fated 1961 musical. In the thinly veiled satire of Playboy magazine, she played Hazel Sharpe, a voluptuous campus queen who was tempted by the devil and Orgy Magazine to become "Orgy Maiden of the Month". Although the play closed after a short run in Chicago, Nichols attracted the attention of Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, who booked her as a singer for his Chicago Playboy Club. She also appeared as Carmen for a Chicago stock company production of Carmen Jones and performed in a New York production of Porgy and Bess. Between acting and singing engagements, she did occasional modeling.
In January 1967, Nichols was also featured on the cover of Ebony magazine, and had two feature articles in it in five years. She continued touring the US, Canada, and Europe as a singer with Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton. On the West Coast, she appeared in The Roar of the Greasepaint and For My People, and garnered high praise for her performance in the James Baldwin play Blues for Mister Charlie. Prior to being cast as Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek, Nichols was a guest actress on television producer Gene Roddenberry's first series The Lieutenant (1964) in the episode "To Set It Right", which dealt with racial prejudice.
Star Trek
On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.
She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind. Towards the end of the first season, Nichols was offered a role on Broadway. Preferring the stage to the television studio, she decided to take the role. Nichols went to Roddenberry's office, told him that she planned to leave, and handed him her resignation letter. Unable to convince her to stay, Roddenberry told her to take the weekend off, and if she still felt she should leave, he would give her his blessing. That weekend, Nichols attended a banquet organized by the NAACP, where she was informed that a fan wanted to meet her:
I thought it was a Trekkie, and so I said, "Sure". I looked across the room and whoever the fan was had to wait because there was Dr. Martin Luther King walking towards me with this big grin on his face. He reached out to me and said, "Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan". He said that Star Trek was the only show that he, and his wife Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch. [She told King about her plans to leave the series because she wanted to take a role that was tied to Broadway.] I never got to tell him why, because he said, "You cannot, you cannot... For the first time on television, we will be seen as we should be seen every day—as intelligent, quality, beautiful people who can sing, dance, and go to space… who are professors, lawyers… If you leave, that door can be closed, because your role is not a black role, and is not a female role; he can fill it with anybody, even an alien".
Calling Nichols a "vital role model", King compared her work on the series to the marches of the ongoing civil rights movement. The next day, she returned to Roddenberry's office to tell him she would stay. When she told Roddenberry what King had said, tears came to his eyes.
Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison cited Nichols' role of Lieutenant Uhura as her inspiration for becoming an astronaut. Whoopi Goldberg has also spoken of Nichols' influence, saying she asked for a role on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and her character Guinan was specially created, while Jemison appeared on an episode of the series.
Music
Nichols released two music albums: Down to Earth, a collection of standards released in 1967, during the original run of Star Trek; and Out of This World, released in 1991, a more rock-oriented album themed around Star Trek and space exploration.
As Uhura, Nichols sang on the Star Trek episodes "Charlie X", "The Changeling", and "The Conscience of the King".
Work with NASA
After the cancellation of Star Trek, Nichols volunteered her time in a special project with NASA to recruit minority and female personnel for the space agency. She began this work by making an affiliation between NASA and a company which she helped to run, Women in Motion.
The program was a success. Among those recruited were Dr. Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut, and United States Air Force Colonel Guion Bluford, the first African-American to go into space, as well as Dr. Judith Resnik and Dr. Ronald McNair, who both flew successful missions during the Space Shuttle program before their deaths in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986. Recruits also included Charles Bolden, the former NASA administrator and veteran of four shuttle missions, Frederick D. Gregory, former deputy administrator and a veteran of three shuttle missions and Lori Garver, former deputy administrator. An enthusiastic advocate of space exploration, Nichols served from the mid-1980s on the board of governors of the National Space Institute (today's National Space Society), a nonprofit, educational space advocacy organization.
In late 2015, Nichols flew aboard NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) Boeing 747SP, which analyzed the atmospheres of Mars and Saturn on an eight-hour, high-altitude mission. She was also a special guest at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on July 17, 1976, to view the Viking 1 soft landing on Mars. Along with the other cast members from the original Star Trek series, she attended the christening of the first space shuttle, Enterprise, at the North American Rockwell assembly facility in Palmdale, California. On July 14, 2010, she toured the space shuttle simulator and Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center.
Nichols' work with NASA is given significant focus in the documentary Woman in Motion about her life.
Personal life
In her autobiography, Nichols wrote that she was romantically involved with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry for a few years in the 1960s. She said the affair ended well before Star Trek began, when she realized Roddenberry was also involved with her acquaintance Majel Hudec (known as Majel Barrett).
When Roddenberry's health was fading, Nichols co-wrote a song for him, "Gene", which she sang at his memorial service.
She also wrote that she had "a short, stormy, exciting relationship" with Sammy Davis Jr. in 1959.
Nichols married twice—first to dancer Foster Johnson (1917–1981), whom she married in 1951 and divorced the same year. They had one child together, Kyle Johnson, who was born August 14, 1951. She married Duke Mondy in 1968; they divorced in 1972.
Nichols' younger brother, Thomas, was a member of the Heaven's Gate cult for 20 years. He died on March 26, 1997, in the cult's mass suicide that purposefully coincided with the passing of Comet Hale–Bopp. Thomas frequently identified himself as Nichelle's brother in promotional materials released by the cult.
On February 29, 2012, Nichols met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. She later tweeted, "…[President] Obama was quoted as saying that he'd had a crush on me when he was younger… I asked about that, and he proudly confirmed it! President Obama also confirmed for me that he was definitely a Trekker! How wonderful is that?!"
Health and death
In June 2015, Nichols suffered a mild stroke at her Los Angeles home and was admitted to a Los Angeles-area hospital. A magnetic resonance imaging scan confirmed a small stroke had occurred, and she began inpatient therapy. In early 2018, she was diagnosed with dementia, and subsequently announced her retirement from convention appearances.
Following a legal dispute over the actions of her manager-turned-caretaker Gilbert Bell, her son Kyle Johnson filed for conservatorship in 2018. Before a court granted his petition in January 2019, Nichols' friend Angelique Fawcette, who had already expressed concern in 2017 over Bell's control of access to her, pressed for visitation rights, including by opposing Johnson's petition. That dispute, and a 2019 court case by Bell over being evicted from the guesthouse on Nichols' property, were both ongoing as of August 2021.
Nichols died of heart failure in Silver City, New Mexico, on July 30, 2022, at the age of 89, and her ashes were launched into deep space along with those of Majel Barrett and Douglas Trumbull.
In June 2026, her family was awarded $13 million in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Recognition
In 1982, Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his novel Friday to her. Asteroid 68410 Nichols is named in her honor.
In 1992, she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for her contribution to television.
In 1999, Nichols was awarded a Goldene Kamera for Kultstar des Jahrhunderts (Cult Star of the Century). In 2010, Nichols received an honorary degree from Los Angeles Mission College.
Nichols received The Life Career Award from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films in 2016, the first woman to receive it. The award was presented as part of the 42nd Saturn Awards ceremony. Nichols was awarded the Inkpot Award in 2018.
Nichols was an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Udea nicholsae, a species of snout moths, was named in her honour.
The second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds began with a pre-credits dedication, referencing one of her recurring lines from the original series: "For Nichelle who was first through the door and showed us the stars. Hailing frequencies forever open..."
Filmography
Discography
Down to Earth (Epic Records, 1967)
Uhura Sings (aR-Way Productions, 1986)
Out of this World (GNP Crescendo, 1991)