Year: 2019

Dorothy Catherine Fontana, better known by her “indeterminate gender” pen name D.C. Fontana, dies at the age of 80. Originally setting out to be a novelist, she found herself drawn to the business of writing for the then-new medium of television, working her way from secretarial jobs to production assistant and script editor. Some of her earliest work, for TV westerns such as The Tall Man and Ben Casey, went out under her full name; by the time she sold scripts to The Wild Wild West, she found it easier to use a pseudonym (often “Michael Edwards” or “Michael Richards”). As the production secretary for a new series launched in 1963 called The Lieutenant, she was nominally working for executive producer Del Reisman, but often worked alongside the show’s creator, a junior producer named Gene Roddenberry. When The Lieutenant was cancelled after a single season, Roddenberry hired her to work on his next project, a sci-fi series called Star Trek, of which she became the story editor and a frequent scriptwriter, creating several critical points of the series’ backstory, especially involving Spock’s home planet of Vulcan. Work for such shows as Bonanza, Circle Of Fear, The Six Million Dollar Man, Land Of The Lost, and The Fantastic Journey followed; she was effectively the showrunner of the early 1970s animated revival of Star Trek, even though she was credited only as an associate producer. She served as story editor once again on the TV version of Logan’s Run, and, with fellow Star Trek writer David Gerrold, did significant work developing a modern (late 1970s) revival of Buck Rogers for television, only to see much of that work go unused by the eventual showrunner, Glen A. Larson. (She did still write a script for the series, however.) Between 1986 and 1987, she was one of numerous alumni of the original Star Trek to be brought aboard to develop the TV spinoff Star Trek: The Next Generation, but she found the working environment (dominated by Roddenberry’s attorney, Leonard Maizlish) to be stifling, and made no contributions past the first season. (She also had to fight for co-writing credit on the series premiere, Encounter At Farpoint.) Later writing assignments included War Of The Worlds, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Hypernauts, ReBoot, and the posthumously-produced Roddenberry series Earth: Final Conflict.

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Actor Robert Walker Jr., perhaps best known as the troubled Charlie Evans from the classic Star Trek episode Charlie X (1966), dies at the age of 79. The son of a Hollywood acting power couple, Walker was expected from an early age to follow in his father’s footsteps; even after his parents divorced, his new stepfather, David O. Selznick, was a guiding force in his career. Early attempts at movie breakout roles proved less than successful, but Walker made a huge impression on TV audiences, with memorable appearances on Star Trek, The Invaders, and The Time Tunnel in rapid succession; movie success did eventually follow in such films as 1969’s Easy Rider and 1972’s Beware! The Blob, but it was television that provided much of his work. Later TV appearances included guest roles on The Six Million Dollar Man, CHiPs, Dallas, In The Heat Of The Night, and L.A. Law.

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L.A. session musician Michael Lamper, who had worked with groups as diverse as The Allman Brothers, Quiet Riot, and Los Lobos, dies at the age of 61. He had also played on solo albums by Tommy Shaw of Styx, Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon, Jack Blades of Night Ranger and Damn Yankees, and numerous others. He was also married (since 1992) to Star Trek: The Next Generation star Marina Sirtis, and had played a non-speaking background role as one of the brutish Gatherers in the third season episode The Vengeance Factor.

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Actor Rene Auberjonois, best known in genre circles for playing security chief Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for seven years, dies of metastatic lung cancer at the age of 79. A Tony-winning stage actor who didn’t break into films until Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H in 1970, he quickly became a familiar face on TV (Night Gallery, Ellery Queen, The Jeffersons, The Bionic Woman, Man From Atlantis, Wonder Woman, Beyond Westworld) and in movies (King Kong, The Big Bus, Eyes Of Laura Mars); the early 80s saw a new focus on voice roles for animation, including Smurfs, Super Friends, Challenge Of The Gobots), as well as the regular role of uptight chief of staff Clayton Endicott III on the political comedy Benson from 1980 through 1986. After Benson’s run, more voice work beckoned, including the role of Louis in Disney’s The Little Mermaid in 1989. 1991 saw his first appearance in the Star Trek universe, as warmongering conspirator Colonel West in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a role which landed on the cutting room floor until those scenes were reinstated for the home video release. In 1992, he was cast as Odo, a pivotal regular character on Deep Space Nine, winning him a new generation of fans as the series ran through 1999. Other genre roles include guest stints on The Outer Limits, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Stargate SG-1, Warehouse 13, The Librarians, and Star Trek: Enterprise (though in a role unrelated to Odo). From 2004 through 2008, he was a regular on the William Shatner legal dramedy Boston Legal.

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