Today in Star Trek history: Actor Alan Scarfe is born
Alan Scarfe played the Romulan Mendak in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION's "Birthright, Part II"; Alan Scarfe image, by Jeff Hitchcock from Vancouver, BC, Canada, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
JUNE 8, 2022 - Actor Alan Scarfe has played two Romulans and a Magistrate on an unnamed Delta Quadrant planet. But his career spans far more than his Star Trek appearances, and today we celebrate his 76th birthday.
Click for a larger view
Born on this day in 1946 in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, Scarfe was the child of two university professors. In fact, his father Neville was the Founding Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia.
Scarfe studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, graduating in 1966 (only a few months before the premiere of a certain science fiction franchise.) Upon graduation, he began his career on the stage.
If it is true that actors with a background in stage performance have an advantage when auditioning for Star Trek, then Alan Scarfe is a prime example. He has been seen in over 100 major roles across Europe and in Canada and the United States, including King Lear, Othello, Iago, Hamlet, Brutus, Cassius, Cyrano de Bergerac, Doctor Faustus, and Uncle Vanya. He is also an excellent director, taking on some of the greatest playwrights in history: Shakespeare, Albee, Beckett, Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, to name a few. He has performed many times at the Shaw Festival, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, and also at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, where he was the Associate Director from 1976-1977.
Scarfe has appeared in a select number of television shows, including the time travel series Seven Days and the 2004 TV film Burn: The Robert Wraight Story, in which he co-starred with his son Jonathan. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, he played Romulan Admiral Mendak in “Data’s Day.” The duplicitous Mandak feigned willingness to begin Federation-Romulan negotiations, but it was all just a ploy to extract the spy Sub-Commander Selok, who had been living as the Vulcan T’Pel for years, collecting Federation secrets. Scarfe wasn’t finished playing Romulans; in “Birthright, Part II” he portrayed Tokath, a former Romulan commander who was in command of a concentration camp full of Klingons who had been captured during the Khitmer massacre.
Augris (Alan Scarfe) imprisons B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) and Tuvok (Tim Russ)
Scarfe was next cast in the Star Trek: Voyager pilot as Kazon-Ogla First Mage Jabin and spent two days filming his scenes. Sharp-eyed VOY fans will note that Alan Scarfe is not Gavin O’Herlihy, who played Jabin. Apparently, Scarfe was unable to finish out his contract, and O’Herlihy took over the role, filming the rest of Jabin’s scenes and picking up the scenes Scarfe had already filmed. Scarfe did eventually appear in VOY’s second season as Augris, the Third Magistrate of the Mokra Order on an unnamed planet in the Delta Quadrant. The sinister alien had Tuvok and Torres imprisoned as suspected members of a resistance movement in the episode appropriately entitled, “Resistance.”
In 2002, Scarfe returned to Canada from Los Angeles, California and began writing novels using the pseudonym Clanash Farjeon. An unusal name, to be sure, but if you take its letters and mix them around a bit, you discover that they are an anagrom of “Alan John Scarfe.” Farjeon’s first novel, A Handbook for Attendants on the Insane: the Autobiography of Jack the Ripper, has been referred to as “one of the finest books on historical crime ever published.” He has also written a trilogy of books about vampires which follow in the footsteps of Star Trek, using a fictional story to comment on real-world events. The first two books in the trilogy won the Best Indie Book Award in 2018 and 2019, respectively and the third in the series won the BIBA for Satire in 2020.
In 1979, Scarfe married Barbara March, well known to Trek fans as the Klingon Lursa, a thorn in the USS Enterprise’s side for three episodes (and DS9’s for one) until she was destroyed, along with her sister B’Etor and their Bird-of-Prey above Veridian III in Star Trek: Generations. Scarfe and March were married until her death from cancer on August 11, 2019.
Please join us here at DSTN in raising a glass of Romulan Ale to Alan Scarfe on his birthday. If you’d like more information on him, you can check out his page on Wikipedia.
T is the Managing Editor for Daily Star Trek News and a contributing writer for Sherlock Holmes Magazine and a Shakespeare nerd. He may have been the last professional Stage Manager to work with Leonard Nimoy, has worked Off-Broadway and regionally, and is the union Stage Manager for Legacy Theatre, where he is currently working with Julie Andrews. after which he’ll be working on Richard III at Elm Shakespeare Company.
