Walter Koenig, Star Trek's Chekov, dies at 90
The actor who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek series and seven films died on Sunday 25 October at his home in North Hollywood, aged 90. His representative said he died of natural causes. He was also the telepath Alfred Bester in Babylon 5.
Walter Koenig, who spent half a century being stopped in the street as Star Trek’s Ensign Pavel Chekov, died on Sunday 25 October at his home in North Hollywood, California. He was 90. His representative confirmed the death and said he died of natural causes.
Koenig stepped onto the Enterprise bridge at the start of the original series’ second season, in 1967. Chekov was young, Russian and proud of it, in an American show made at the height of the Cold War. He stayed to the end of the run, 36 episodes in all, and returned to the role in every film the original crew made, from The Motion Picture (1979) to Generations (1994).
A second act as a villain
His other great part came in the 1990s. In Babylon 5 he played Alfred Bester, a cold, commanding officer of the telepath police, across 12 episodes between 1994 and 1998. Plenty of science-fiction fans found out there that the likeable Chekov could do menace very well indeed.
He wrote, too. He had script credits on shows including The Incredible Hulk and Land of the Lost, and told his side of life behind the scenes of Star Trek in the 1998 memoir Warped Factors. He was also given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a ceremony the official Star Trek site covered at the time.
His family
He was born in Chicago on 14 September 1936 to Lithuanian immigrant parents and grew up in Manhattan. In 1965 he married the actress Judy Levitt, who died in December 2022. Their son, the actor Andrew Koenig, died in 2010. He is survived by his daughter, Danielle.
It is another hard goodbye for film and TV fans in a matter of days, coming soon after the death of Tom Skerritt, the Nostromo’s captain in Alien.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Mike Muegel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
