TODAY IN STAR TREK HISTORY: Alfre Woodard is Born

Alfre Woodard as Lily in STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT. Image: Paramount.

NOVEMBER 8, 2022 - Her list of awards and nominations is long enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page. Among those are an Academy Award nomination and four Primetime Emmy wins. She has been appearing on stage, film, and television since the mid-70s, and she begins her eighth decade today. Alfre Woodard was born on this date in 1952.

Woodard was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and had decided to go into acting by the time she was sixteen. She graduated in drama from Boston University and made her theatrical debut in 1974 at the Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C. Woodard’s earliest television and film appearances both came in 1978, the former being The Trial of the Moke, with Samuel L. Jackson, and the latter Remember My Name, with Geraldine Chaplain, Anthony Perkins, and Moses Gunn.

By 1983, Woodard had made the film appearance, in Cross Creek, with Mary Steenburgen, that garnered her the Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Her four Emmy wins, among eighteen nominations, came between 1984 and 2003, for supporting, lead, and guest roles in Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Miss Evers’ Boys, and The Practice.

Of course, Star Trek fans know Woodard as Lily Sloane in Star Trek: First Contact, from 1996. According to Memory Alpha, Woodard was the immediate choice for casting Lily. They quote First Contact director, Jonathan Frakes, as saying, “The first time we got through the script, I think everyone's first words were 'Alfre Woodard'.”

Although she had been a Star Trek fan since the mid-70s, Woodard told Ian Spelling in a 1997 Starlog interview that she hadn’t done a science fiction film before First Contact "because none of them had ever made me respond to them the way First Contact did. And I must say that Lily is a character closer to me than any other character I have ever played before. That's how I always choose my roles: Do I respond to the story and the character in an organic way? And I did to this film and to Lily."

And perhaps Frakes, et al. were a not so surprising exception to some of Woodard’s other experiences in Hollywood. She told Spelling, "I've only been asked to reveal just a tiny little slice of who I am and what I can do. And that is because I am a black woman. This industry wants to stereotype, catalog and identify every actor, no matter what color, no matter what sex, but they especially target black women. The [powers that be in the industry] are the slowest to come around that way."

At the end of First Contact, Lily and Picard have the following exchange:

"I envy you, the world you're going to."

"I envy you, taking these first steps into a new frontier."

We’re happy that Alfre Woodard took the steps she did to bring her into the Star Trek universe. Please join us in wishing her a very happy 70thbirthday!