Walter Koenig, the child actor who remains an integral part of Star Trek lore thanks to its portrayal of Russian crew member Pavel Chekov, has died. He was 90 years old.
Koenig, also known for playing the villain Alfred Bester in another sci-fi space series, Warner Bros. Television’s Babylon 5died Sunday of natural causes at his home in North Hollywood, his spokesperson announced.
Raised in Manhattan as the son of Lithuanian immigrants, Koenig joined Gene Roddenberry’s team. Star Trek for the start of its second season and appeared in 36 of the 50 episodes broadcast in 1967-68 and 1968-69. He also played Pavel Andreievich Chekov in the first seven Paramount films, released from 1979 to 1991, emanating from the NBC series.
In a 2013 interview with the TV Academy Foundation, Koenig said he did not watch Star Trek before boarding. “I was going through the channels and seeing Styrofoam rocks – it was so obviously Styrofoam – and I was like, ‘That must be fake.’ I didn’t give him a chance,” he recalls.
The actor played a Russian for the first time in his career – a student who had defected to the United States – in an episode of the 1963 NBC television series. Mr Novak.
He next starred as a young sergeant whose goal of being promoted to officer is complicated by the fact that his mother is a communist in a 1964 episode of The lieutenantanother series created by Roddenberry.
After his Star Trek Audition Koenig spent a few hours alone in an outer office wondering if he got the job when a man approached him and asked him to follow him into the locker room.
“He gets on his knees in front of me,” Koenig said, “and takes my crotch in his hand, and I say, ‘What are you doing?!’ I didn’t see the measuring ruler in his other hand, and he was measuring from my crotch to my cuff to decide the length of my pants. He said, “You must have a suit, right?”
“And it was in this auspicious way that I learned that I was on Star Trek and it would change my life.
Marvin Walter Koenig was born in Chicago on September 14, 1936. His father, a translator for RCA Victor and later an entrepreneur, was a “hard-core communist,” Koenig said. He noted that FBI agents searched his family’s apartment.
Koenig has performed in productions of Peer Gynt And The Devil’s Disciple After attending Fieldston High School in New York, he went to Grinnell (Iowa) College to study pre-med, then transferred to UCLA after his sophomore year to earn a degree in psychology.
However, he took an acting class and received a letter of recommendation from his teacher, who in 1958 took him to the famous Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where he studied alongside James Caan, Christopher Lloyd and Dabney Coleman.
The child actor returned to Los Angeles to land a role in Burt Lancaster’s 1961 film. The young wild ones (1961), but this work failed. He then made his on-screen debut in the afternoon show Day in court and appeared in the pilot and first two episodes of General Hospital in 1963.
At the time, Koenig excelled in various dialects, portraying French, Armenian, Swedish and German characters, as well as playing juvenile delinquents, as he did in 1964 in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The episode was directed by Joseph Pevney and written by Harlan Ellison – later two prominent behind-the-scenes actors in Star Trek.
In fact, Pevney was one of the people Koenig auditioned for for Chekov.
“He really loved my work, he kept telling me, ‘You’re going to be a big star,’” Koenig recalls. “When I came to read for Star Trekhe was very enthusiastic and that’s one of the reasons I got the role.
Koenig said the character he was to play was first named Jones because the producers wanted an actor who would appeal to the same demographic as The Monkees’ Davy Jones — kids ages 8 to 14.
“And indeed, my (fan) mail was from people ages 8 to 14,” he said. “They said, ‘I think you’re groovy, I love your hair’ – which happened to be a wig. I received hundreds and hundreds of letters, the third after Bill (Shatner) and Leonard (Nimoy).
He said Chekov would eventually become less popular because of three things: “the hair wasn’t real; I wasn’t really Russian and that exotic flavor was gone; and (viewers discovered) I was married and they couldn’t fantasize about being with Chekov. Then things started to take a nosedive.”
In the series, Chekov really didn’t have much to do; the actor knew he was there to “lay out the basics of the plot and let McCoy, Spock and Kirk fill it in.”
Koenig was more important to the Star Trek films, nominated by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror for his work on Khan’s Wrath (1982) and The journey home (1986).
In 1976, Koenig and Shatner both appeared in an episode of Columbobut the Star Trek the veterans did not share any scenes and did not speak during production. “It was between the show and the movies, and I don’t think he remembers my name,” Koenig said.
He also said he was “really upset” when he was excluded from Star Trek: The Animated Series for budgetary reasons. Koenig wrote an episode for the 1973-74 NBC cartoon.
He once again played Chekov as the 143-year-old “The Admiral” in the crowdsourced two-part film. Renegades series that debuted online in 2017.
Worried about not finding a job afterwards Star Trek was canceled, he began writing and writing episodes for Matthew Star’s powers, Family, Land of the Lost And The Incredible Hulk. He also wrote, produced and starred in the science fiction film Inalienable (2010), with Richard Hatch.
Koenig lost a chance to appear in Babylon 5 when he suffered a heart attack and underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 1993, but series creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote the role of Bester for him when he was healthy enough to play again. Unlike Chekov, this character was multidimensional and key to several plots.
He wrote the memoirs Distorted Factors‚ A Neurotic’s Guide to the Universepublished in 1998, then developed for Teleport and descendreleased in 2020.
Koenig married actress Judy Levitt, who appeared with him in three Star Trek movies and others Babylon 5in July 1965, and they were together until his death in December 2022 at the age of 83. Their son, Andrew, who played Richard “Boner” Stabone on the ABC sitcom Growing painscommitted suicide in 2010 at the age of 41.
Survivors include his daughter, actress and screenwriter Danielle Koenig (Star against the forces of evil).
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