Martha Hackett

I’m going to be honest with you—one of the hardest things about writing any series on Star Trek actors is finding enough women to fill it out that I have five paragraphs’ worth of writing in me about. Everyone would get mad at me if I left out various of the men, but here we are a scant five weeks into Voyager and I’m already thinking, “I don’t know what to say about her.” Her character was important to the early episodes of the show, but she’s only on thirteen episodes, and the rest of her career has been made up of even less interesting fare.

Hackett’s own personal website doesn’t even provide me with much of a hook. She does have a full page about her time on Star Trek, both as Seska and as the other characters she’s played on the series (T’rul on two episodes of DS9, the voice of K’Tar in the video game Star Trek: Klingon, and a Terrellian apparently cut from the final episode of TNG), but her personal page is less interesting. She graduated from Harvard. She’s done a lot of theatre. And it mentions an appearance in Cocktail that must be so fleeting that it doesn’t even appear on her IMDb page.

And yet she comes up every time I mention that I’m having a hard time finding women for my Voyager series. Not always by name; often it’s “the woman who played Seska.” And I’m sure Hackett herself knows that she’s “the woman who played Seska” to more people than she is Martha Hackett. I’m sure she comforts herself knowing that a lot of the more noteworthy Star Trek performers have the same challenge, and at least she isn’t known from a series of clips from an obscure not-Trek TV show. Some people have better careers than others, and that’s true of people in Star Trek as well.

I will often watch at least clips of what else people have appeared in other than the thing I know them from, or something, if I don’t know them at all. She’s fourteenth-billed in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as “Pistol Woman,” and I do like that movie quite a lot. But so much of what she’s done is just not anything I’d care about. She’s fifteenth-billed in Leprechaun 2 and it’s still one of the dozen things mentioned on her website. As is fourteenth-billed Carnosaur. (Both of which feature Clint Howard; who knew?) I’m kind of at a loss.

Being me, I’m more interested in the fact that she was, for some years, married to Tim Disney, Roy E. Disney’s son. They’re divorced now, but she was for a while a Disney-in-law and has two sons who are Disney descendants. She appeared in a movie he directed which has different names on her IMDb and Wikipedia pages. I haven’t seen it; it’s iffy as to how well it handles its trans them because it always is, but at least the trans woman is played by Hackett?