Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we continue our series on actors who played multiple roles in Star Trek, with a look at Brock Peters.
https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp279
Peters was born in New York City to immigrant parents who came from Africa and West India, so he's kind of like a modern day Alexander Hamilton. He studied acting in high school and quickly landed a role in the opera Porgy and Bess coming into college.
That led to roles in several movies and on Broadway shows, most notably as the black man unjustly accused and convicted suspect in the rape of a white woman in the classic 1962 film To Kill A Mockingbird. He also became friends with Charlton Heston in this time period and that led to roles in several of this famous actor's films, including Major Dundee and Soylent Green.
He eventually became a regular TV show guest star, with credits on shows spanning from Gunsmoke to Murder, She Wrote. In this middle of this span, he was a regular on the soap opera The Young and The Restless, playing a character for seven years. While on this soap opera, he started in Trek and became Admiral Cartwright from the TOS movies The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country. We covered the Admiral in detail on our movie villains series of this segment.
QUOTE (from Star Trek VI)
Admiral Cartwright: Arrest those men!
Spock: Arrest yourself.
The Star Trek production team couldn't just leave such a good actor as a villain, so Peters was brought back to play Commander Sisko's father Joseph Sisko, a restaurant owner in New Orleans on Earth, in several latter season episodes of Deep Space 9. He was the only actor to portray a parent of a commanding officer, at least before the events of Star Trek Discovery. That allowed the writers to add more depth and complexity to the main character of Ben Sisko, as a result of his interactions with Joseph.
QUOTE (from Joseph Sisko)
More detail on this character can be found in last year's segment dedicated to Joseph Sisko. Peters adds one additional Trek credit in one of these Joseph Sisko episodes, as he also appears as a 20th Century preacher in the episode Far Beyond the Stars.
Brock Peters is like other actors we have profiled in this series in that he brought multiple highly memorable characters to life for Star Trek. His contributions to the tapestry of characters will not soon be forgotten. Peters continued acting until his death of pancreatic cancer in 2005. His many characters live on, however, thanks to his broad reach and depth of experience in movies, television, and stage shows.
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