What a gorgeous hunk o' woman!

She's got legs!!!!!

That would be Yeoman Rand? If so, I agree! Every guy should get a Yeoman Rand ;-)

Was she on the bridge of the Excelsior in ST:VI?

Yes, she was the communications officer on the Excelsior during Star Trek VI and the Voyager episode "Flashback" (I think...). She was a commander in these I believe. She was also the transporter operator in ST:TMP

And she was on the space station in ST3 when the damaged Enterprise came home. Or am I wrong?

Electron, you're not wrong. That is GLW in Spacedock.

She was also at Starfleet Command in ST4. I think.

Thats right, she was in the lounge looking pained at the damage to the ship.

Considering she was dropped from the show midway through TOS season one, its interesting that she was brought back and included somehow in almost all of the TOS movies. In some ways, that rights the wrong she was dealt when she was fired in the first place.

Some years ago, in an interview (with Starlog perhaps) she said she was axed so that the writers could free up Kirk for more romantic possibilities. Apparently, the cumulative effect of Miri, Enemy Within, Balance of Terror, etc., had pretty much established a presumptive relationship between Rand and Kirk, straightjacketing the writers.

In the same article she described her immediate state of mind as "suicidal."

In retrospect, I think the series would have been more interesting if Kirk had some romantic anchor on the ship and couldn't try to overcome every female adversary by seducing her.

I should note, GLW said she was suicidal after she was fired, not when she was interviewed. -- amh

"In some ways, that rights the wrong she was dealt when she was fired in the first place."

She say's herself, in her book, she was fired because she was a drunk.

Not that I couldn't be wrong about this Kail, but I thought she drank because she had been fired, not the other way around.

She wrote a book?

Who knew?

Who's next?

Eddie Paskey?

The book is called The Longest Trek - My Tour of the Galaxy.
Having looked through it, I can verify that she goes into great - and occasionally horrific - detail on the personal problems that got her bumped from Trek (beginning with an addiction to weight-loss pills in order to look better in the mini-uniform...)

"(Whitney) wrote a book?

Who knew?

Who's next?

Eddie Paskey?"

I would buy it.

For John A. Lang:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20020912

Look at the picture hanging in the background.

Thanx, ScottN.

She was in Voyager as well I believe.

The episode "Flashback", to be specific. She was an officer serving under Captain Sulu aboard the Excelsior.

I heard that Grace Lee Whitney is a Jewish believer in Jesus,
yet because of this she is not listed on the superb website Jewhoo.com
Which lists other Star Trek Jewish Celebrities like
Shatner,Nimoy,Koenig,etc
To Hitler's Nazis it didn't matter

What is the deal with people stating that certain cast members are Jewish and that Star Trek has "wronged" them? I see all these posts here and there, yet I feel like I am missing what brought this topic up in the first place and what makes it continue. Is there a board which explains what all these come from? or could someone just summarize what instigated this topic?

Is Star Trek guilty of some anti-religion dealings? (I know that Roddenberry wasn't one for religion, but I thought that he was anti-religious in general, not anti Jewish...)

Polls Voice, you are correct that Rodenberry was anti-religion in general. The majority of these posts have originated with a person/persons posting under the assorted names Michelle/Matt/Martin/Anonymous. This person/persons seems to view everything through a strongly Jewish perspective. When the posts have a reasonable link to Trek, such as the one above, they are left up. Ones that are tenuous or more political/religious are removed or the thread is closed. It is something that is dealt with by the appropriate board moderator as he or she sees fit. I don't wish to appear to be against freedom of thought here, that is not my intent. However, this is the board for the discussion of ClassicTrek. It is NOT Religious Musings or Political Musings and I have no interest in moderating such topics. I try to keep things from straying into these areas.

Also, Anonymous' post above is saying that the Jewhoo site is discriminating against Ms. Whitney, not Trek.

I read an interview with Leonard Nimoy in which he opined that Gene Roddenberry was not merely anti-religion in general, but antisemitic as well.

I've created a Gene Roddenberry topic here in The Cast section. Please put any further discussion about him there.

What's interesting was how much Rand was played up in early promotional material. I wish I had a copy of Blish's "Star Trek [1]" handy -- the back cover copy has this incredibly funny description of Rand.

Saw her in the pictures taken at Doohan's farewell. She's still gorgeous!

I've just finished her biography, and thought I'd straighten out a few facts.
While she was on Star Trek, she says that she never drank on the job and wasn't taking drugs. She was separated from her husband, and was a bit of a partier, after the cameras stopped rolling, during weekly wrap parties, but so were several others in the cast. During one of these parties an executive, (whom she refuses to name because time has passed and hurting him, whether he's still alive or not, isn't something she wanted to do), approached her and talked her into coming to his office to ostensibly discuss developments in the character of Rand. He told her to remove her clothing, but she refused. She was alone, it was late, and he was a high-ranking executive. She eventually did so, once trapped with him in a locked office with nobody around to hear her even if she screamed. The following week she was informed by her agent that the role of Rand was being dropped. The executive didn't even apologise for his behavior, in what was essentially a sexual assault. Roddenberry couldn't override this executive and had to stick with the story that they wanted Kirk to fool around with alien women instead of having something like a wife back on the ship.
It was such a horrible time in Grace's life that that was when she starting drinking heavily, and years later did drugs, re-married, got divorced, slept around, had a miscarriage, and hit rock bottom.
Eventually in the '80's she joined AA, found religion, and has been spreading the word of clean living and God at conventions, prisons, AA meetings and such.
Also, the reason she doesn't look that great in Star Trek The Motion Picture was because Roddenberry talked her into playing a gag on director Robert Wise, who apparently has absolutely no sense of humor (Grace dressed like the secretary in the Carol Burnett Show, and freaked out old man Wise). To get her back he refused to allow her to look remotely attractive, so that's why she looks so frumpy and without make-up.
She was having more personal problems when Star Trek II came out, so she wasn't in that one, but she was in Star Trek III, and by that time she was, indeed, a red-head, working at a talent agency as a receptionist.
Don't read her book expecting to read page after page of humorous Star Trek annecdotes, but do so if you want to understand alcoholics, and learn some more tid-bits of Trek and her career, and what I believe is the true Trek history where Grace Lee is concerned.
Roddenberry manufactured the story about the Russian government wanting a Russian in Trek to explain Chekov, so he probably did the same thing to explain Rand's departure.

I thought that "the Executive" that demanded that she strip and dance for him was Roddenberry himself. And it was Roddenberry himself who got rid of her. That was always my understanding.

The way she worded it made it seem like it was a different high-ranking executive from the show or NBC. I suspected it could have been Roddenberry, too, but now I'm not so sure. Grace also states in her book that she wouldn't have anything to gain by naming names, so she keeps the reader guessing.
If it wasn't Roddenberry, then it was somebody with enough authority to tell him who he had to fire, in this case, Grace.

By the way, his identity is known to Leonard Nimoy. He and Grace had a close friendship while she was on the series, and she told him what happened. The executive came into the make-up room when they were both there, and he apologized right in front of Nimoy (but didn't go into detail), and gave her a lame present (some sort of fancy rock). He would have helped her take action, had she realized that she was going to be fired a few days later.

Grace actually made an appearance at one of the Star Trek conventions I went to a few years ago. There wasn't as much hype around her as there would have been like with Marina Sirtis or Robert Picardo (I can't remember which time it was, but she was there the same day as one of those two) so the people that wanted to talk to her could get fairly close. As we were leaving, some strange looking guy got into a religious debate (presumably about her Jewish/Jesus beliefs) and caught him mentioning something about Jesus never saying he was the messiah, something like that. Just an interesting tidbit, I didn't stick around for the whole conversation. And also, she IS still really hot!

sorry, that should have said I caught him mentioning it.

Grace Lee Whitney has passed away.

Born on April 1 1930, Whitney played Yeoman Janice Rand in eight episodes of the original Star Trek.
She lasted for a short time on the series when she got fired. Various reasons have been cited for her dismissal including budget cuts and suffering from alcoholism, but she has rejected the latter for the reason for her dismissal.

She did however reprise the character again in Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a transporter operator and non-commissioned officer, then in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where she was promoted to Chief Petty Officer.
She then appeared in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country where she was the communications officer on the USS Excelsior under the command of Captain Sulu.
She then made her last appearance as Rand in official Star Trek in the Voyager episode Flashback in which she appeared in flashback sequences (hence the episode’s name) on the Excelsior during the events of Star Trek VI.

Whitney also had a cameo in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock although the credits listed her as a red-haired “woman in cafeteria” and in her autobiography she maintained she wasn’t playing Rand in that movie.

After Flashback, she reprised Rand in Star Trek fan productions including New Voyages & Of Gods and Men.

Outside of Star Trek her work included the 1960s Batman series & Diagnosis Murder in the episode Alienated in which she was among many Star Trek alums who guested in that episode.

She died on May 1 2015 exactly a month after her 85th birthday.

I also remember her in the original Outer Limits episode "Controlled Experiment", where she played a woman trying to murder her husband, while two martians (played by Barry Morse and Carroll O'Connor) where studying the event using a device that allowed them to control the flow of time at will.

With the passing of Grace Lee Whitney, the roster of Classic cast grows smaller still.

Only William Shatner, Nichelle Nicols, George Takai, and Walter Koenig are left.

and all of them will most likely be dead in the next 5-10 years....

Grace apparently left because the suits at NBC didn't want Kirk tied down to one woman. Was there a plan to get Kirk and Rand together?

I don't know if I'd call it a plan per se, but it does seem like various writers were trying to build on a relationship there. You can see it in some Rand episodes and even episodes that were written or developed before Grace got fired. Several yeomans of the week were probably intended to be Rand, but had their names changed afterwards.

Kind of interesting to imagine Grace in Dagger Of The Mind or Mirror, Mirror.

Kind of interesting to imagine Grace in Dagger Of The Mind or Mirror, Mirror.

Yeah, Alt-Rand would have probably been the Captain's Woman in the Mirror Universe.