Majel interview from July 2000
Was digging through my Star Trek Magazine back issues, and found an interview with Majel from July 2000. Since she says a lot about Number One all through the interview, I thought I would reprint it here. I've also added it to the Writer's Resources section of the Masterlist.
In one form or another, Majel Barrett Roddenberry has featured in every incarnation of STAR TREK. Modern fans know her as Lwaxana Troi or the voice of Starfleet's computers and old hands know her as Nurse Chapel, but she started life as theU.S.S. ENTERPRISE's first officer-the cold and emotionless Number One.
She was going to be the Vulcan. Not literally, of course Spock was always going to be the US.S. Enterprise NCC-l701's resident alien but in all the important ways. She would have been cold and emotionless, she was going to be the captain's first officer, and, although she was human, she was from another planet. She was Number One, the only major role who didn't survive STAR TREK's first pilot, ‘The Cage.' The part would. have been played by Majel Barrett, who explains that Number One was a much more developed character than anyone realized.
The very best
"We didn't have a background for her, so I created one. To me, she was from a different planet where they actually numbered people. She was one of a litter, let's say the only time they would breed was when they needed people-they would clone them and try to get as much intelligence into each one as they could. As they were growing up they would take their place, and be given a position according to their excellence. She actually turned into Number One and therefore went onto a starship. It was a way of life, just a manner of being; she hadn't done anything particularly wonderful until she got there and met people. She was bred for excellence, that's all. At the time, she was the one who really didn't have any emotions. Gene basically suggested that. That was the Number One character; that was my character."
Tailor made
As everyone knows, Majel eventually married Gene; they were already a couple when he sold the idea for a science fiction show. She remembers that she didn't like the name ‘STAR TREK,' but she was delighted when Gene settled down to create a character for her. "Gene wrote the part of Number One for me. As a matter of fact, that's the first thing he wrote. He wrote that, then he knew he would have the captain, and he wanted an alien. That's the way he wrote the parts. He knew what it was going to be as soon as he got this frame-work, which of course was that there was a starship somewhere out there, working for the Federation, going on a five-year mission to explore new worlds, and facing things no one had ever faced before. That was the bone work of it; from there on in there wasn't a lot to do but write episodes."
When the first of those episodes, ‘The Cage,' went into production, Majel was in the thick of things. As well as creating the role of Number One, she was on hand to help the production team test out makeup and costumes.
"In one picture that I have I've got the black hair that I was going to use as Number One, I've got Susan Oliver's [Vina's] green makeup on, I've got a robe of material that we were testing, which ended up as a bed sheet, and there's something else. I was testing four different things. We had a lot of fun testing for about three or four days before we actually got going.
Green lady
"I remember one time I was testing Susan's makeup because she had to be green. I was under contract and she wasn't, so guess who got the makeup tests? They kept on making me green; they'd send it out to the lab and I'd come back all rosy and pink, so [makeup artist] Freddie Phillips made me more green, and the tests came back the same way Finally, Freddie called the lab and said, ‘How do I get this woman green?' And they said, ‘She's supposed to be green? We've been color correcting!' They had it green enough in the first place. That was kind of fun."
The end of a character
NBC was impressed by ‘The Cage,' but felt it wasn't quite right, so they told Gene they would fund a second pilot as long as he made some changes. They wanted to recast a few of the roles and, most importantly, they wanted him to lose the Number One character, which was bad news for Majel.
"They said that people wouldn't tolerate a woman second in command of a starship, because she'd be too unbelievable. That was back in 1964. Of course, I was disappointed; this was going to be a marvelous part. Can you imagine where that part would have gone if it had stayed in? And, strangely enough, nothing would have been affected. De Kelley's part wouldn't have been affected, and Leonard Nimoy's part wouldn't have been affected. The captain's part wouldn't have been affected. There would have been one more person on the bridge. Every time I look back on that I say ‘Oh, damn! What an opportunity"
Merging personalities
Thankfully for STAR TREK, some of Number One's most interesting personality traits survived in another character. "What happened was the Spock character really took over Number One's characteristics, to the point where be had no humor and the one eyebrow that went up. That was my part, but when they threw me out Gene decided he wanted somebody to play that character. So he said this was the way he wanted the Spock character played.
"He had given Leonard the ears anyway, and he'd already said he was very stoical, so was that character too; it just became more Spock started out with a much fuller character than most people had, because he had mine too.
Majel's return
Number One may have gone, but Majel was still very much involved with Gene and STAR TREK. "I was on the lot most of the time. Gene would write the words and then I would speak them, so he could hear what it sounded like with a person saying them. It helps a lot." And while she was helping Gene, Majel was looking for a role that would see her back on the USS. Enterprise.
"I was watching each of these scripts coming in, because I knew what I was going to do; they weren't going to keep me out of this thing. It didn't happen until about the fifth or sixth script came in [‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?']. There was a character by the name of Christine; originally her name wasn't Chapel-it was something French. I had just finished a play using the last name of Chapel, and I just liked it so much. I. thought, ‘Christine Chapel; ah, that sounds like Sistine Chapel. There's a little play on words.' The rest of the story stayed the same-she was this doctor going out after her fiancé"
Secret identity
Majel was determined that this would be her role, but, as she explains, her previous involvement with STAR TREK presented her with a very real problem.
‘After you've been canned from a part in a pilot, the network doesn't want to see you again. So I bleached my hair very, very blonde one morning and I went over and sat in Gene's office talking to Penny [Unger], who was his secretary He came in and nodded at Penny, said ‘Good morning' to us and walked into his office. I thought. 'Well, that didn't make much of an impression at all; I'm going to lose this battle.' He came out again, gave some papers to Penny and looked at me and nodded again, then turned and went hack into his room. And then the door opened and he said, ‘Majel?!' 1 said ‘Gene. if I can fool you, I can fool NBC.' He said. ‘You're right, obviously' And we pulled it off. We did it."
Hidden past
There was one slight problem: Gene planned to reuse footage from "The Cage' in the two-part episode ‘The Menagerie.' People may not have been able to tell that Chapel and Number One were played by the same actress just by looking at them, but they would notice if the same person was credited with both roles. The solution was incredibly simple: Majel would use an alias.
"We called me M. Leigh Hudec, which is the credit I have on ‘The Cage' to this day For three years I played the part of Christine Chapel without them ever knowing that I was in the pilot."
Character flaws
Majel may have fought for the role of Nurse Chapel, but she says she never really warmed to her. "She was probably sweet, charming, and looking out for people. She was probably the most sincere person on the starship, but then she didn't start out with that militaristic life. I liked her she's OK; she just wasn't a very exciting character. I didn't care for her that much.
"She was a namby-pamby type of woman. First, she was a doctor to start, and to go out and find her fiancé she had to take a demotion, probably in rank and pay, because there was already a doctor aboard the Enterprise. Then when she finds her fiancé he turns out to be an android, so he's not going to do her much good. Then she turns around and signs on to a five-year mission with this ship, still with a reduction in rank and pay This woman's not too smart; she doesn't have a whole lot going for her. We played her out and everything, and there were some great moments in it, but each time I used to think, ‘Oh boy, if only Number One were here."' The writers did give Chapel a defining characteristic, however: she was secretly (and hopelessly) in love with Spock. But, as Majel says, this was never meant to be a significant element of the show
Hopeless love
"They toyed with the Spock/Chapel relationship for a while. I think it just kind of cropped up somewhere. It wasn't meant to be developed as a thing; it was just something that was there. He was throwing his plomeek soup at her, or what have you. It was just an incident; from that, of course, it developed into, ‘They must be in love.'
"You know now that I'm producing shows too, I can see that you don't tie up your top people with somebody else, because you know somewhere out there somebody's going to think, Ah, he was going with this girl before; now look at that he's two-timing her with this other girl out there.' You just can't do it, so you stay away from that type of thing, and if they ever got together there goes your story"
Enduring popularity
Chapel continued to make regular appearances until STAR TREK was cancelled in 1969. At this point most other shows would have been given up for dead, but Majel and Gene were never convinced they were finished with STAR TREK.
"We always thought there would be more STAR TREK from the very beginning. We thought we could revive it because we had gotten it back that first year. Then, I think it was in 1971 when that first convention happened in New York; both Gene and I went to it, and we got the shock of our lives. We figured, ‘Won't this be nice. Four or five hundred people will be there. Well, it was 25,000. That's when we started to realize there was more to it than met the eye, and we began to wonder if they had these in any other places and if it was something worth chasing down. Of course, it was easy to find out that it was."
Once they had discovered just how popular STAR TREK was, Gene and Majel did every thing they could to keep the fans' interest alive. In particular; Majel threw herself into organizing Lincoln Enterprises, the Roddenberrys' merchandising operation, which is still going strong today
Souvenir catalog
"We started to encourage these groups and fan clubs; we started an official fan club ourselves. We opened up a market place, which I still have. You could do things with a catalog-you could buy little pieces of STAR TREK. No one had ever merchandised a television show before. We sent out a couple of things that said, ‘If we offered you a chance to buy a script, to buy a writer's guide, to buy a jacket or a hat, or whatever you want, would you be interested?' They all wrote back affirmatively, so we made a catalog. And, my God, everybody sent back and wanted everything we had. I got some rights from Paramount; I have exclusivity on 10 particular items. That's how the whole thing got going I sent out over 800,000 pieces of mail in one year. It wasn't as easy as it is now; you didn't have machines, you did it by hand. We had a really strong crew, and people were madly in love with the whole idea of STAR TREK"
By 1973, there was a STAR TREK animated series, and a few years after that Paramount green lighted a new STAR TREK TV series that would have featured a new, improved version of Christine Chapel.
"I was delighted they allowed Chapel to come back in, and if it had gone as a television series she would have improved, because I was there and knew more about it, and Gene would have taken care of that anyway She was going to be a doctor. The ship got bigger; so there would have been more than one doctor."
Uncertain future
The problem was that Paramount wasn't sure what format it wanted STAR TREK to return in. "I had three different contracts, as did everyone else, and every single one of those contracts had to be paid off each time they changed their minds. No sooner did we get going in one direction than a memo would come and they'd say ‘Stop! We're thinking of taking it in another direction. Instead of a series, now we're thinking of making four a year; and making them two hours apiece. They put us under contract for that. On the next one, it was, ‘No, we're going to go back and do a movie; perhaps a movie of the week.' It wasn't until 1977 or 1978 that they finally decided we were going to make a big time movie."
Majel made an appearance in the first STAR TREK movie, but apart from a single cameo she had nothing to do with the movies that followed. However, her involvement with STAR TREK was far from over.
Perfect role
In 1987, Gene masterminded a new STAR TREK series, and once again he created a role especially for Majel.
"STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION was already on air when Gene came out with this thing. He said, ‘I've got a great part for you. You don't have to act!' I ended up as Lwaxana, the mother from hell. Actually, he said she was the Auntie Mame of the Galaxy. That's what I was going on; I didn't even know about the mother from hell part until after I read the show and by that time I was so excited I couldn't even be angry with him."
Whereas Number One had been rather repressed and quiet, Lwaxana was clearly larger than life, which is exactly how Majel set out to play her. "I said, ‘I'm going to make it as big as I can get it because I'll have a director there, and he'll pull me back.' Well, nobody ever pulled me back, so she just kept getting bigger and bigger, and we had more and more fun."
Although Lwaxana was designed to be annoying, Majel soon discovered that she was surprisingly popular. "I asked people afterward, ‘Why do you like this character?' and they said, ‘Because there's something i have in my ...‘ and then, quote, ‘mother! aunt/sister. She reminds me of somebody in my family' Every single person would say that. There's a little bit of her in everything. She's universal.
New depths
"Since the audience liked this character, as hellish as she could be, they said, ‘OK, let's try her again.' The part from then on became somewhat sillier, and then all of a sudden they came up with ‘Half a Life.' You know, it was such a departure. They had this great show that they wanted to get on the air, and they had no one to play the part, so they thought, ‘It can't get too maudlin if we put the town clown in it.' So they got Lwaxana and an excellent actor, David Ogden Stiers, and they let us go. The other people almost had a week off because it was virtually a two-person show He and I just had a wonderful time with it."
This was a massive turning point for Lwaxana, who became a much more developed character and exceeded all of Majel's expectations. "Before then she was extremely one-dimensional. When they found out that character could do that kind of work, they said, ‘OK, we can give her a different kind of thing now.' It was just beautiful; there were so many places for me to go with that. I've never had a character developed for me to that extent. It was magnificent; I loved it."
Delighted as she was with this transformation, Majel still occasionally misses the old Lwaxana. "She's so much more developed now. She's had a tragedy of a child who was killed, and she blames herself for it. What can you say: ‘Now I'm playing tragedy and I'd like to get a little more humor into it'?"
Into the future
After TNG came to an end, Lwaxana made several guest appearances on STAR TREK DEEP SPACE NINE, with Odo replacing Picard as the object of her affections. Majel says she couldn't have asked for two better co-stars, and describes both men as ‘consummate actors.' Now that DS9 has also finished, Lwaxana has probably made her final appearance. Majel is still involved with STAR TREK, though. For the last 13 years she has provided the voice for all Starfleet computers, and still makes regular visits to Paramount to record new dialogue for STAR TREK VOYAGER.
In the last few years she's turned to producing, and has devoted her energies to bringing some of Gene's unrealized projects to the screen. ‘Earth: Final Conflict' is now well established, ‘Andromeda' is due to debut in the fall, and Majel assures us this is only the beginning.
In one form or another, Majel Barrett Roddenberry has featured in every incarnation of STAR TREK. Modern fans know her as Lwaxana Troi or the voice of Starfleet's computers and old hands know her as Nurse Chapel, but she started life as theU.S.S. ENTERPRISE's first officer-the cold and emotionless Number One.
She was going to be the Vulcan. Not literally, of course Spock was always going to be the US.S. Enterprise NCC-l701's resident alien but in all the important ways. She would have been cold and emotionless, she was going to be the captain's first officer, and, although she was human, she was from another planet. She was Number One, the only major role who didn't survive STAR TREK's first pilot, ‘The Cage.' The part would. have been played by Majel Barrett, who explains that Number One was a much more developed character than anyone realized.
The very best
"We didn't have a background for her, so I created one. To me, she was from a different planet where they actually numbered people. She was one of a litter, let's say the only time they would breed was when they needed people-they would clone them and try to get as much intelligence into each one as they could. As they were growing up they would take their place, and be given a position according to their excellence. She actually turned into Number One and therefore went onto a starship. It was a way of life, just a manner of being; she hadn't done anything particularly wonderful until she got there and met people. She was bred for excellence, that's all. At the time, she was the one who really didn't have any emotions. Gene basically suggested that. That was the Number One character; that was my character."
Tailor made
As everyone knows, Majel eventually married Gene; they were already a couple when he sold the idea for a science fiction show. She remembers that she didn't like the name ‘STAR TREK,' but she was delighted when Gene settled down to create a character for her. "Gene wrote the part of Number One for me. As a matter of fact, that's the first thing he wrote. He wrote that, then he knew he would have the captain, and he wanted an alien. That's the way he wrote the parts. He knew what it was going to be as soon as he got this frame-work, which of course was that there was a starship somewhere out there, working for the Federation, going on a five-year mission to explore new worlds, and facing things no one had ever faced before. That was the bone work of it; from there on in there wasn't a lot to do but write episodes."
When the first of those episodes, ‘The Cage,' went into production, Majel was in the thick of things. As well as creating the role of Number One, she was on hand to help the production team test out makeup and costumes.
"In one picture that I have I've got the black hair that I was going to use as Number One, I've got Susan Oliver's [Vina's] green makeup on, I've got a robe of material that we were testing, which ended up as a bed sheet, and there's something else. I was testing four different things. We had a lot of fun testing for about three or four days before we actually got going.
Green lady
"I remember one time I was testing Susan's makeup because she had to be green. I was under contract and she wasn't, so guess who got the makeup tests? They kept on making me green; they'd send it out to the lab and I'd come back all rosy and pink, so [makeup artist] Freddie Phillips made me more green, and the tests came back the same way Finally, Freddie called the lab and said, ‘How do I get this woman green?' And they said, ‘She's supposed to be green? We've been color correcting!' They had it green enough in the first place. That was kind of fun."
The end of a character
NBC was impressed by ‘The Cage,' but felt it wasn't quite right, so they told Gene they would fund a second pilot as long as he made some changes. They wanted to recast a few of the roles and, most importantly, they wanted him to lose the Number One character, which was bad news for Majel.
"They said that people wouldn't tolerate a woman second in command of a starship, because she'd be too unbelievable. That was back in 1964. Of course, I was disappointed; this was going to be a marvelous part. Can you imagine where that part would have gone if it had stayed in? And, strangely enough, nothing would have been affected. De Kelley's part wouldn't have been affected, and Leonard Nimoy's part wouldn't have been affected. The captain's part wouldn't have been affected. There would have been one more person on the bridge. Every time I look back on that I say ‘Oh, damn! What an opportunity"
Merging personalities
Thankfully for STAR TREK, some of Number One's most interesting personality traits survived in another character. "What happened was the Spock character really took over Number One's characteristics, to the point where be had no humor and the one eyebrow that went up. That was my part, but when they threw me out Gene decided he wanted somebody to play that character. So he said this was the way he wanted the Spock character played.
"He had given Leonard the ears anyway, and he'd already said he was very stoical, so was that character too; it just became more Spock started out with a much fuller character than most people had, because he had mine too.
Majel's return
Number One may have gone, but Majel was still very much involved with Gene and STAR TREK. "I was on the lot most of the time. Gene would write the words and then I would speak them, so he could hear what it sounded like with a person saying them. It helps a lot." And while she was helping Gene, Majel was looking for a role that would see her back on the USS. Enterprise.
"I was watching each of these scripts coming in, because I knew what I was going to do; they weren't going to keep me out of this thing. It didn't happen until about the fifth or sixth script came in [‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?']. There was a character by the name of Christine; originally her name wasn't Chapel-it was something French. I had just finished a play using the last name of Chapel, and I just liked it so much. I. thought, ‘Christine Chapel; ah, that sounds like Sistine Chapel. There's a little play on words.' The rest of the story stayed the same-she was this doctor going out after her fiancé"
Secret identity
Majel was determined that this would be her role, but, as she explains, her previous involvement with STAR TREK presented her with a very real problem.
‘After you've been canned from a part in a pilot, the network doesn't want to see you again. So I bleached my hair very, very blonde one morning and I went over and sat in Gene's office talking to Penny [Unger], who was his secretary He came in and nodded at Penny, said ‘Good morning' to us and walked into his office. I thought. 'Well, that didn't make much of an impression at all; I'm going to lose this battle.' He came out again, gave some papers to Penny and looked at me and nodded again, then turned and went hack into his room. And then the door opened and he said, ‘Majel?!' 1 said ‘Gene. if I can fool you, I can fool NBC.' He said. ‘You're right, obviously' And we pulled it off. We did it."
Hidden past
There was one slight problem: Gene planned to reuse footage from "The Cage' in the two-part episode ‘The Menagerie.' People may not have been able to tell that Chapel and Number One were played by the same actress just by looking at them, but they would notice if the same person was credited with both roles. The solution was incredibly simple: Majel would use an alias.
"We called me M. Leigh Hudec, which is the credit I have on ‘The Cage' to this day For three years I played the part of Christine Chapel without them ever knowing that I was in the pilot."
Character flaws
Majel may have fought for the role of Nurse Chapel, but she says she never really warmed to her. "She was probably sweet, charming, and looking out for people. She was probably the most sincere person on the starship, but then she didn't start out with that militaristic life. I liked her she's OK; she just wasn't a very exciting character. I didn't care for her that much.
"She was a namby-pamby type of woman. First, she was a doctor to start, and to go out and find her fiancé she had to take a demotion, probably in rank and pay, because there was already a doctor aboard the Enterprise. Then when she finds her fiancé he turns out to be an android, so he's not going to do her much good. Then she turns around and signs on to a five-year mission with this ship, still with a reduction in rank and pay This woman's not too smart; she doesn't have a whole lot going for her. We played her out and everything, and there were some great moments in it, but each time I used to think, ‘Oh boy, if only Number One were here."' The writers did give Chapel a defining characteristic, however: she was secretly (and hopelessly) in love with Spock. But, as Majel says, this was never meant to be a significant element of the show
Hopeless love
"They toyed with the Spock/Chapel relationship for a while. I think it just kind of cropped up somewhere. It wasn't meant to be developed as a thing; it was just something that was there. He was throwing his plomeek soup at her, or what have you. It was just an incident; from that, of course, it developed into, ‘They must be in love.'
"You know now that I'm producing shows too, I can see that you don't tie up your top people with somebody else, because you know somewhere out there somebody's going to think, Ah, he was going with this girl before; now look at that he's two-timing her with this other girl out there.' You just can't do it, so you stay away from that type of thing, and if they ever got together there goes your story"
Enduring popularity
Chapel continued to make regular appearances until STAR TREK was cancelled in 1969. At this point most other shows would have been given up for dead, but Majel and Gene were never convinced they were finished with STAR TREK.
"We always thought there would be more STAR TREK from the very beginning. We thought we could revive it because we had gotten it back that first year. Then, I think it was in 1971 when that first convention happened in New York; both Gene and I went to it, and we got the shock of our lives. We figured, ‘Won't this be nice. Four or five hundred people will be there. Well, it was 25,000. That's when we started to realize there was more to it than met the eye, and we began to wonder if they had these in any other places and if it was something worth chasing down. Of course, it was easy to find out that it was."
Once they had discovered just how popular STAR TREK was, Gene and Majel did every thing they could to keep the fans' interest alive. In particular; Majel threw herself into organizing Lincoln Enterprises, the Roddenberrys' merchandising operation, which is still going strong today
Souvenir catalog
"We started to encourage these groups and fan clubs; we started an official fan club ourselves. We opened up a market place, which I still have. You could do things with a catalog-you could buy little pieces of STAR TREK. No one had ever merchandised a television show before. We sent out a couple of things that said, ‘If we offered you a chance to buy a script, to buy a writer's guide, to buy a jacket or a hat, or whatever you want, would you be interested?' They all wrote back affirmatively, so we made a catalog. And, my God, everybody sent back and wanted everything we had. I got some rights from Paramount; I have exclusivity on 10 particular items. That's how the whole thing got going I sent out over 800,000 pieces of mail in one year. It wasn't as easy as it is now; you didn't have machines, you did it by hand. We had a really strong crew, and people were madly in love with the whole idea of STAR TREK"
By 1973, there was a STAR TREK animated series, and a few years after that Paramount green lighted a new STAR TREK TV series that would have featured a new, improved version of Christine Chapel.
"I was delighted they allowed Chapel to come back in, and if it had gone as a television series she would have improved, because I was there and knew more about it, and Gene would have taken care of that anyway She was going to be a doctor. The ship got bigger; so there would have been more than one doctor."
Uncertain future
The problem was that Paramount wasn't sure what format it wanted STAR TREK to return in. "I had three different contracts, as did everyone else, and every single one of those contracts had to be paid off each time they changed their minds. No sooner did we get going in one direction than a memo would come and they'd say ‘Stop! We're thinking of taking it in another direction. Instead of a series, now we're thinking of making four a year; and making them two hours apiece. They put us under contract for that. On the next one, it was, ‘No, we're going to go back and do a movie; perhaps a movie of the week.' It wasn't until 1977 or 1978 that they finally decided we were going to make a big time movie."
Majel made an appearance in the first STAR TREK movie, but apart from a single cameo she had nothing to do with the movies that followed. However, her involvement with STAR TREK was far from over.
Perfect role
In 1987, Gene masterminded a new STAR TREK series, and once again he created a role especially for Majel.
"STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION was already on air when Gene came out with this thing. He said, ‘I've got a great part for you. You don't have to act!' I ended up as Lwaxana, the mother from hell. Actually, he said she was the Auntie Mame of the Galaxy. That's what I was going on; I didn't even know about the mother from hell part until after I read the show and by that time I was so excited I couldn't even be angry with him."
Whereas Number One had been rather repressed and quiet, Lwaxana was clearly larger than life, which is exactly how Majel set out to play her. "I said, ‘I'm going to make it as big as I can get it because I'll have a director there, and he'll pull me back.' Well, nobody ever pulled me back, so she just kept getting bigger and bigger, and we had more and more fun."
Although Lwaxana was designed to be annoying, Majel soon discovered that she was surprisingly popular. "I asked people afterward, ‘Why do you like this character?' and they said, ‘Because there's something i have in my ...‘ and then, quote, ‘mother! aunt/sister. She reminds me of somebody in my family' Every single person would say that. There's a little bit of her in everything. She's universal.
New depths
"Since the audience liked this character, as hellish as she could be, they said, ‘OK, let's try her again.' The part from then on became somewhat sillier, and then all of a sudden they came up with ‘Half a Life.' You know, it was such a departure. They had this great show that they wanted to get on the air, and they had no one to play the part, so they thought, ‘It can't get too maudlin if we put the town clown in it.' So they got Lwaxana and an excellent actor, David Ogden Stiers, and they let us go. The other people almost had a week off because it was virtually a two-person show He and I just had a wonderful time with it."
This was a massive turning point for Lwaxana, who became a much more developed character and exceeded all of Majel's expectations. "Before then she was extremely one-dimensional. When they found out that character could do that kind of work, they said, ‘OK, we can give her a different kind of thing now.' It was just beautiful; there were so many places for me to go with that. I've never had a character developed for me to that extent. It was magnificent; I loved it."
Delighted as she was with this transformation, Majel still occasionally misses the old Lwaxana. "She's so much more developed now. She's had a tragedy of a child who was killed, and she blames herself for it. What can you say: ‘Now I'm playing tragedy and I'd like to get a little more humor into it'?"
Into the future
After TNG came to an end, Lwaxana made several guest appearances on STAR TREK DEEP SPACE NINE, with Odo replacing Picard as the object of her affections. Majel says she couldn't have asked for two better co-stars, and describes both men as ‘consummate actors.' Now that DS9 has also finished, Lwaxana has probably made her final appearance. Majel is still involved with STAR TREK, though. For the last 13 years she has provided the voice for all Starfleet computers, and still makes regular visits to Paramount to record new dialogue for STAR TREK VOYAGER.
In the last few years she's turned to producing, and has devoted her energies to bringing some of Gene's unrealized projects to the screen. ‘Earth: Final Conflict' is now well established, ‘Andromeda' is due to debut in the fall, and Majel assures us this is only the beginning.