Tuesday, May 12, 2009

TV Stars together

With the recent premiere of the new Star Trek movie, and TCM's showing a William Shatner movie, I started thinking about the other cast members of Star Trek and what movies they've done. I knew DeForrest Kelly appeared in the overblown Civil War movie Raintree County, and have previously recommended George Takei in Walk, Don't Run, along with Majel Barrett in Westworld.

Leonard Nimoy, on the other hand, did a lot more TV work than movie appearances. Most of his earlier stuff is listed as "uncredited" according to IMDb, and other stuff is obscure foreign or independent stuff. I had never heard of Deathwatch before, although when I looked the IMDb page, what jumped out at me was the presence of Gavin MacLeod in the cast. I've mentioned before that one of the fun things in watching classic movies is looking for people who went on to TV work and are best known for the roles they played on TV, and MacLeod, who appeared on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Love Boat, is certainly one such person.

Interestingly enough, speaking of Gavin MacLeod on a boat, and appearing in a movie with another TV star, those two bits of trivia come together in the 1959 movie Operation Petticoat. MacLeod plays a member of a submarine crew in World War II that, amongst other things, picks up a group of stranded Navy nurses. In the group of nurses is one Marion Ross, who would of course go on to play Marion Cunningham in the long-running TV series Happy Days.

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