![\"Star](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/OQV3LBYZHRAA7IHP7UL7FM5JT4.jpg\")
Star Trek: Voyager; Kate Mulgrew (front) as Captain Kathryn Janeway with fellow cast members. Photograph: United Paramount Network\/Getty <\/p>\nWhen Kate Mulgrew was cast as Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager, in 1995, she was well aware she was making history as the first woman to lead a Star Trek series as commander of a starship, but she had no idea how profoundly the job would change her life. <\/p>\n
\u201cI will forever be Captain Janeway,\u201d she says. \u201cThat will be the obit too. \u2018Kate Mulgrew, Captain Janeway, dies.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Janeway made her globally famous, and the role continues to define her, in ways both positive and frustrating. <\/p>\n
She suspects it has cost her acting jobs: she walks into an audition and all anyone sees is the woman in the red-and-black jumpsuit who led the USS Voyager on its mission through deep space three decades ago. Mulgrew is, she says, sometimes ambivalent, \u201cwhen I know that it\u2019s informing somebody else\u2019s decision whether or not to hire me\u201d. <\/p>\n
But \u201c85 or 90 per cent\u201d of the time she is immensely proud of Janeway, who\u2019s a role model for generations of women going into science and engineering.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel very lucky, very privileged to have played her. And to have changed so many women\u2019s lives,\u201d Mulgrew says on a sunny New York morning from her elegant Upper West Side apartment, with its out-of-this-world views over the Hudson.<\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially women in Stem. I know this for a fact because I see them all the time. She had a wide and deep impact on, particularly, women and brought a lot of men, I think, to the understanding that a woman can certainly command a ship. <\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of dents were put in that glass ceiling in the 1990s when I took on Kathryn Janeway, and I wouldn\u2019t change it for anything in the world. But occasionally it\u2019s been one of those things I just have to jump over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mulgrew suspects she was cast as Janeway because Star Trek\u2019s producers saw something of the steely, intrepid starship captain in her. On our video-link Mulgrew is warm, but there is no mistaking her commanding presence. She is not, one suspects, a person to suffer fools.<\/p>\n
Star Trek: Voyager; Kate Mulgrew (front) as Captain Kathryn Janeway with fellow cast members. Photograph: United Paramount Network\/Getty <\/p>\n
The actor is firmly back on Earth in her new role as a hard-bitten New York cop in The Galway Bay Murders, a new RT\u00c9 thriller. She\u2019s also a producer on the project, which arose out of her friendship with the first-time TV writer Eithne Verling, whom she met on a working holiday in Oughterard, in Connemara, while she was writing her second volume of memoirs and Verling was director of a key local museum.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0Walter Koenig: Actor known for playing Star Trek\u2019s Chekov dies aged 90Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n \u201cI was instantly drawn to her,\u201d she says of Verling. \u201cI knew there was a much deeper calling for her. I said, \u2018I know you\u2019re the curator of the Galway City Museum. Do you write? I can sense it. I\u2019m intuiting you\u2019re a writer and an artist.\u2019 I said, \u2018Come on over to the house \u2013 let\u2019s have a chat. What would you think about trying to write for television\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n Encouraged by Mulgrew, Verling set to work on what would become The Galway Bay Murders, a brisk and picturesque thriller that is a centrepiece of RT\u00c9\u2019s winter schedule and that the broadcaster hopes to market internationally. (ITV has already acquired the UK rights.)<\/p>\n RT\u00c9\u2019s confidence in the drama looks justified. Opening with the discovery of a body in the scenic Galway bog lands, the show is both an efficient murder mystery and an impressive showcase for the dramatic and mournful west of Ireland landscape.<\/p>\n It is also a showcase for Mulgrew. Her character in The Galway Bay Murders, Detective Nora Savage, is a deeply broken character who is in Ireland to escape a bereavement back in New York; her policing expertise is required as it becomes clear that a serial killer may be on the loose.<\/p>\n Mulgrew says that Savage is a heightened version of her real self. She is referring to their no-nonsense personalities but also, perhaps, to a history of shared trauma. When she was in her late teens the actor gave up her daughter for adoption \u2013 they met for the first time since then in 1999 \u2013 and it is tempting to conclude that she drew on this in playing the detective.<\/p>\n \u201cHer son, her only child, had died six months earlier,\u201d she says of her character. \u201cShe can\u2019t cope and she blames herself for his death. The only place to go was Ireland on this exchange programme \u2013 which is a real thing. And it is there that her most familiar Pavlovian muscle is revitalised, and she finds a dead body in a bog, and she\u2019s off to the races.\u201d<\/p>\n Mulgrew first travelled to Ireland when she was 17, in pursuit of her father, who had upped sticks for Dingle and then contacted his family back home to announce that he had fallen in love with a local \u2013 a surprise and also an awkward development, given that he was still married to Mulgrew\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n \u201cI need to return to Ireland regularly to reinforce everything that\u2019s good in myself,\u201d the actor says. \u201cI love Ireland and its people, and when I get there I feel as at home as I do here \u2013 in an entirely different way. I\u2019ve always felt this way since I was 17 and went to meet my father at the Thomas Ashe pub in Dingle.\u201d<\/p>\n Mulgrew was born into an Irish-American family in Dubuque, Iowa, an archetypal small town in the American Midwest. After high school she moved to New York to study at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting, the prestigious stage school whose graduates include Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken. <\/p>\n It was while she was in New York that she became pregnant and subsequently gave up her daughter to a Catholic adoption agency. When she later tried to contact her daughter, the nuns initially rebuffed her \u2013 an experience that will chime with many Irish women.<\/p>\n Mulgrew says that her encounters with the sisters and her memories of the adoption helped her bond with the Irish cast of The Galway Bay Murders, particularly John Connors, who plays a garda with a Traveller background, and who has had his own share of trauma<\/a>, including the early death of his father.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I found John sitting next to me in the cop car and we found ourselves talking about Christ \u2026 I said to myself, this is going to be absolutely delicious. And I found that man fascinating, from the moment I shook his hand to the moment I kissed him goodbye. I learned a lot from John Connors. He\u2019s a considered person, a very self-examined person.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PLPCCR77P5CDNKOLDGUBOXDTZY.jpg\")
The Galway Bay Murders: Kate Mulgrew as NYPD lieutenant Nora Savage. Photograph: Martin Maguire\/RT\u00c9 <\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/D7ZJGKNVOVGW7PUUHHBZOT6EHI.jpg\")
The Galway Bay Murders: John Connors as Det Eddie McDonagh and Kate Mulgrew as NYPD lieutenant Nora Savage. Photograph: Martin Maguire\/RT\u00c9 <\/p>\n
![\"Orange](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/VOJN3ZHZANACFPYBH2HNXI5Y4I.jpg\")
Orange Is the New Black: Kate Mulgrew, Laura Prepon and Taylor Schilling. Photograph: Jojo Whilden\/Netflix <\/p>\n