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An American actress, singer, and dancer by the name of Nichelle Nichols. Her most well-known role is Nyota Uhura, which she played in Star Trek: The Original Series and its film sequels. Nichols’ portrayal of Uhura on American television broke new boundaries for African American actresses. Nichols dedicated her time from 1977 through 2015 to promoting NASA programs and finding a diverse group of astronauts, including women and people of color.
| Name | Nichelle Nichols |
| Net Worth | $10 million |
| Occupation | Actress, Singer, Dancer |
| Age | 89 years |
| Height | 1.68m |
We’re deeply saddened to report the passing of Nichelle Nichols – a trailblazer, an inspiration, and so much more. She will be deeply missed. https://t.co/iBwyOPaxTP
— Star Trek (@StarTrek) July 31, 2022
The Net worth of Nichelle Nichols
Nichelle Nichols, whose real name is Grace Dell Nichols, lived from the time of her birth on December 28, 1932, until her passing at age 89 on July 30, 2022. She was raised in the Chicago neighborhood of Robbins, Illinois, where she was born and raised. Nichelle is the third of six children born to Lishia (Parks) Nichols and Samuel Earl Nichols, a manufacturing worker who served as both the mayor and chief magistrate of Robbins in 1929. The family later relocated to an apartment in Chicago’s Woodlawn district. She graduated from Englewood High School in 1951 after attending there for her high school education. Nichols also attended school in Los Angeles and New York City. Thomas Nichols, the younger brother of Nichols, belonged to the Heaven’s Gate movement. He passed away on March 26, 1997, during the cult’s mass suicide that was timed to comet Hale-demise. Bopp’s He had been a member for 20 years and frequently stated in cult publicity that he was Nichelle’s brother.
Career
Nichelle Nichols had her big break in the 1961 musical Kicks and Co., directed by Oscar Brown but ultimately a failure. She portrayed Hazel Sharpe, a curvaceous campus queen who was being seduced by the devil and Orgy Magazine to become the “Orgy Maiden of the Month,” in a hardly disguised parody of Playboy magazine. Despite the play only had a brief run in Chicago, Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, noticed Nichols and hired her for his Chicago Playboy Club.
Additionally, Nichols performed in a New York production of Porgy and Bess and as Carmen in a Chicago stock company production of Carmen Jones. In between her singing and acting gigs, Nichols occasionally modeled. Nichols also appeared on the cover of Ebony magazine in January 1967 and had two feature stories published in it over a five-year period. Nichols traveled as a vocalist with the Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington ensembles across the Americas, Canada, and Europe.
She performed in The Roar of the Greasepaint and For My People on the West Coast. Her portrayal of Blues for Mister Charlie in the James Baldwin drama received high appreciation. Nichols appeared as a guest actor in the racial prejudice-focused episode of Gene Roddenberry’s first television series, The Lieutenant (1964), “To Set It Right,” before she was chosen to play Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek.
In Star Trek
One of the first Black women to appear on Star Trek, a popular television series, was Nichelle Nichols. She played a unique supporting role as a bridge officer. When Nichols was considering quitting the show, a discussion with Martin Luther King Jr. convinced her otherwise. Nichols was given the chance to take a role on Broadway near the close of the first season.
Nichols made the decision to accept the part because she preferred the stage over the television studio. Nichols sent her resignation letter and informed Roddenberry that she would be leaving his office. After unsuccessfully attempting to persuade Nichols to stay, Roddenberry advised her to take the weekend off and promised to give her his approval if she choose to leave. Nichols learned that a fan was sincerely interested in seeing her while she was at an NAACP banquet that weekend.
I agreed because I believed it to be a Trekkie. Whoever the fan was had to wait, as I glanced across the room and saw Dr. Martin Luther King approaching me with a huge grin on his face. Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your biggest admirer, he added, reaching out to me. He claimed that he and his wife Coretta would only allow their three young children to stay up and watch Star Trek. She informed King of her intention to quit the show in order to accept a part associated with Broadway. I was never able to explain why because he told me I couldn’t. We will be portrayed on television for the first time as the educated, admirable, and attractive people we should be every day—people who can sing, dance, and travel to space—as well as academics and attorneys. Furthermore, Dr. King Jr. said, “If you leave, that door can be closed because your role is not a black role, and it is not a female role; he can fill it with anybody, even an alien.”
King personally urged her to continue filming the series, telling her that she “could not give up” because the role she was playing served as an important role model for Black children and young women across the nation as well as for other children who would see Black people portrayed as equals. King even made a positive comparison between her work on the series and the marches of the ongoing civil rights movement. Nichols was rendered speechless by King’s remark, which made her appreciate the significance of her contribution to the civil rights fight. The next day, she returned to Roddenberry’s office to inform him that she would be staying.
Roddenberry started crying when she revealed what King had said. Roddenberry pulled out Nichelle Nichols’ resignation letter, which he had already torn up, when Nichols requested for her role back. Whoopi Goldberg and former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison have both mentioned Nichols’ influence and acknowledged his portrayal of Lieutenant Uhura as their source of motivation. In response to Goldberg’s request, the character Guinan was created especially for the show, and Jemison made an appearance in one of the episodes.
In the Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” which aired on November 22, 1968, Nichelle Nichols kissed white actor William Shatner in the role of Captain James T. Kirk. Although there are other previous examples, the episode is cited as the first interracial kiss on scripted American television. Despite being shown as being forced by extraterrestrial telekinesis, the Shatner/Nichols kiss was hailed as innovative. There were both positive and negative comments.
Nichols quotes a letter from a white Southerner who stated, “I am utterly opposed to the mingling of the races,” on page 197 of her 1994 memoirs Beyond Uhura, Star Trek, and Other Memories. But a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk won’t resist when he holds a stunning dame who resembles Uhura in his arms. What do you say, let’s make a little more TV history… and kiss my black ass!? Nichols humorously referred to the kiss during the Comedy Central Roast of Shatner on August 20, 2006.
Despite the series’ discontinuation in 1969, Star Trek persisted in other forms and continued to influence Nichols’ life. In Star Trek: The Animated Series, she voiced Uhura once more; in the episode “The Lorelei Signal,” Uhura takes over as captain of the Enterprise. Nichols expressed her disappointment that this never occurred on the original series in her autobiography. The most recent Star Trek movie with Nichols as a co-star was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Nichols was one of the four cast members still alive when Leonard Nimoy passed away in 2015; the others were William Shatner, George Takei, and Walter Koenig.
Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, an autobiography by Nichelle Nichols, was released in 1994. She stated that during the final season of Star Trek, she was given the part of Peggy Fair in the television series Mannix, but producer Gene Roddenberry refused to let her out of her contract. Nichols acted in small television and film parts between the conclusion of the original series and the Star Trek animated series and feature films. She made a fleeting appearance as a secretary in Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding! (1967), and in her sole performance in a blaxploitation movie, Truck Turner (1974), she played Dorinda, a foul-mouthed madam alongside Isaac Hayes.
In the Futurama episode “Anthology of Interest I,” Nichols voiced one of Al Gore’s Vice Presidential Action Rangers and she also provided the voice of her own head inside a glass jar in the episode “Where No Fan Has Gone Before.” She played Thoth-Kopeira in an episode of Batman: The Animated Series and provided the voice for Elisa Maza’s mother Diane Maza in the animated series Gargoyles. She delivered her own voice in the 2004 Simpsons episode “Simple Simpson.”
She played the mother of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character, the male lead, in the comedy movie Snow Dogs (2002). She played Lady Magdalene, the mistress of a legal Nevada brothel in tax default, in the 2006 movie of the same name. She has sung three songs in the movie, two of which she wrote, and she also worked as executive producer and choreographer. She received two nominations for the Sarah Siddons Award for Best Actress in Chicago theatre. She received two nominations, the first for her role as Hazel Sharpe in Kicks and Company and the second for her work in The Blacks.
In the second season of the NBC show Heroes, Nichelle Nichols had a recurring role. Her debut was on October 8, 2007, airing of the episode “Kindred.” She played Nana Dawson, a New Orleans family’s matriarch who looks after her great-nephew, series regular Micah Sanders, and her orphaned grandkids despite having been physically and financially destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, Nichols played a psychiatrist in the movie The Torturer in which she also served as the star.
She joined the cast of The Cabonauts, an online-only sci-fi musical comedy, in 2009. In addition to singing and dancing, Nichols portrays CJ, the CEO of Cabonauts Inc. She first appeared on The Young and the Restless on August 30, 2016, as the elderly mother of Neil Winters. On March 22, 2017, she was nominated for her first Daytime Emmy in the “Outstanding Guest Performer in a Drama Series” category for this performance.
Music
Two music albums were released by Nichelle Nichols. During the first season of Star Trek, in 1967, a collection of standards called Down to Earth was published. Out of This World, which came out in 1991, is more rock-oriented and has Star Trek and space travel as themes. In the Star Trek episodes “Charlie X” and “The Conscience of the King,” Nichols performed songs in the role of Uhura.
Utilize NASA
After Star Trek was canceled, Nichelle Nichols gave her time to work on a special NASA effort to find minority and female employees for the space agency. She started this project by establishing a partnership between NASA and Women in Motion, a business she co-founded. The initiative was successful. They included Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut, and Colonel Guion Bluford of the United States Air Force, who became the first African-American astronaut. They also included Drs. Judith Resnik and Ronald McNair, both participated in successful Space Shuttle missions before passing away in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986.
Recruits also included Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator, Frederick D. Gregory, a former deputy administrator and a veteran of three shuttle missions, and former NASA administrator Charles Bolden. Nichols, a passionate supporter of space exploration, was on the board of governors of the National Space Institute (now the National Space Society), a nonprofit, educational organization that promotes space exploration, starting in the middle of the 1980s.
Late in 2015, Nichols took a flight on NASA’s Boeing 747SP Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which conducted an eight-hour, high-altitude mission to study the atmospheres of Mars and Saturn. On July 17, 1976, she attended a special event at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to watch the Viking 1 soft landing on Mars. She was present for the christening of the first space shuttle, Enterprise, at the North American Rockwell assembly plant in Palmdale, California, along with other Star Trek cast members. On July 14, 2010, she visited Mission Control and the Johnson Space Center’s space shuttle simulator. The main subject of the Nichols biography documentary Woman in Motion is her work with NASA.
Politics
President Barack Obama and Nichols had a meeting in the Oval Office on February 29, 2012. “Months ago, President Obama was quoted as claiming that he’d had a crush on me when he was younger,” Nichols also wrote of the meeting in a tweet she later posted. “When I inquired about it, he enthusiastically affirmed it! Additionally, President Obama acknowledged to me that he was unquestionably a Trekker! How fantastic is that? Nichols was a committed Presbyterian and a devoted Democrat.
Recognition
Robert A. Heinlein gave her a special dedication in his 1982 book Friday. She has an asteroid named after her, 68410 Nichols. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1992 in recognition of her work in television. Nichols received the Goldene Kamera for Kultstar des Jahrhunderts in 1999. (English: Cult Star of the Century). In 2010, Los Angeles Mission College awarded Nichols an honorary degree. In 2016, Nichols became the first female recipient of the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films’ Life Career Award. During the 42nd Saturn Awards event, the award was given out. 2018 saw Nichols receive the Inkpot Award. Nichols belonged to the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority as an honorary member.
Relationship with Gene Roddenberry, the inventor of Star Trek
Nichols detailed her brief romantic relationship with Star Trek founder Gene Roddenberry in her book from the 1960s. When she discovered Roddenberry was also engaged with her acquaintance Majel Hudec, she claimed the relationship came to an end well before Star Trek premiered (known as Majel Barrett). Hudec later got married to Gene Roddenberry and played the nurse Christine Chapel on Star Trek in recurring supporting roles. Nichols co-wrote the song “Gene” for Roddenberry while his health was failing, and she performed it at his funeral.
Kyle Johnson, her son, requested conservatorship in 2018 after a legal disagreement over the conduct of her manager-turned-caretaker Gilbert Bell. Before a judge accepted Johnson’s petition in January 2019, Nichols’ friend Angelique Fawcette pushed for visitation privileges, including by opposing Johnson’s petition. She had previously expressed worry in 2017 about Bell’s control over her access to her. As of August 2021, the disagreement and Bell’s 2019 court lawsuit for being evicted from the guesthouse on Nichols’ property were still ongoing.
Nichelle Nichols’ husband had two marriages. Foster Johnson, a dancer, was her first spouse (1917–1981). They got hitched in 1951 and got divorced the following year. Kyle Johnson was born on August 14, 1951, and was the only child Johnson and Nichols had together. In 1968, she got hitched to Duke Mondy, her second husband. They split up in 1972. Nichelle Nichols was not yet married as of the middle of 2022.
Death due to
In June 2015, Nichelle Nichols experienced a minor stroke at her Los Angeles home and required admission to a local hospital. She started receiving inpatient therapy after a magnetic resonance imaging scan revealed she had suffered a minor stroke. After receiving a dementia diagnosis at the beginning of 2018, Nichols announced her retirement from convention appearances. On July 30, 2022, Nichols, then 89 years old, passed away in Silver City, New Mexico, from natural causes.
The Net worth of Nichelle Nichols
Nichelle Nichols’ estimated net worth According to estimates, Nichelle Nichols has a net worth of about $10 million. Her work as an actress, singer, and dancer was her primary source of money. The annual income from Nichelle Nichols’s movie remuneration and other sources is more than $1.2 million. She was able to live a luxury lifestyle and take expensive excursions because of her successful profession. She was one of the most wealthy and well-known American actresses. Nichelle Nichols had a terrific body weight that suited her personality and an attractive 1.68m height.
