{"id":895514,"date":"2026-10-26T18:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T18:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/895514\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T18:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T18:50:10","slug":"walter-koenig-dead-star-treks-pavel-chekov-was-90","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/895514\/","title":{"rendered":"Walter Koenig Dead: ‘Star Trek’s’ Pavel Chekov Was 90"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWalter Koenig, the boyish actor who remains an integral part of Star Trek<\/a> lore thanks to his portrayal of the Russian crewman Pavel Chekov, has died. He was 90. <\/p>\n

\n\tKoenig, also known for playing the scoundrel Alfred Bester on another sci-fi space series, Warner Bros. Television\u2019s Babylon 5, died Sunday of natural causes in his home in North Hollywood, his rep announced.<\/p>\n

\n\tRaised in Manhattan as a son of Lithuanian immigrants, Koenig joined Gene Roddenberry\u2019s Star Trek for the start of its second season and appeared on 36 of the 50 episodes that aired in 1967-68 and 1968-69. He also portrayed Pavel Andreievich Chekov in the first seven Paramount movies, released from 1979 through 1991, that emanated from the NBC show.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a 2013 interview<\/a> for the TV Academy Foundation, Koenig said he didn\u2019t watch Star Trek before he came aboard. \u201cI\u2019d flip through the channels and I\u2019d see Styrofoam rocks \u2014 they were so obviously Styrofoam \u2014 and I said, \u2018This has got to be phony.\u2019 I didn\u2019t give it a chance,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe actor portrayed a Russian for the first time in his career \u2014 a student who had defected to the U.S. \u2014 on a 1963 episode of the NBC drama Mr. Novak.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe then guest-starred as a young sergeant whose goal of being promoted to officer is complicated by the fact that his mother is a communist on a 1964 installment of The Lieutenant, another series created by Roddenberry.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter his Star Trek audition, Koenig spent a couple of lonely hours in an outer office wondering if he had gotten the job when he was approached by a man and asked to follow him into the wardrobe room.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe drops on his knees in front of me,\u201d Koenig said, \u201cand takes my crotch in his hand, and I\u2019m saying, \u2018What are you doing?!\u201d I didn\u2019t see the tape-measuring ruler in his other hand, and he was measuring from my crotch to my cuff to decide how long my pants should be. He says, \u2018You do have to have a costume, don\u2019t you?\u2019<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnd that\u2019s the auspicious way I learned I was on Star Trek and it was going to change my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMarvin Walter Koenig was born in Chicago on Sept. 14, 1936. His father, a translator for RCA Victor and later an entrepreneur, was a \u201cdyed-in-the wool commie,\u201d Koenig said. He noted that FBI agents once searched his family\u2019s apartment.<\/p>\n

\n\tKoenig starred in productions of Peer Gynt and The Devil\u2019s Disciple at Fieldston High School in New York, went to Grinnell (Iowa) College to study pre-med and then transferred to UCLA after his sophomore year, pursuing a degree in psychology.<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, he took an acting class and received a letter of recommendation from his teacher that in 1958 got him into the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where he studied alongside James Caan<\/a>, Christopher Lloyd and Dabney Coleman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe boyish actor returned to L.A. to claim a role in the 1961 Burt Lancaster<\/a> film The Young Savages (1961), but that job fell through. He then made his onscreen debut on the afternoon show Day in Court and appeared in the pilot and the first two episodes of General Hospital in 1963.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the time, Koenig excelled at doing various dialects, portraying French, Armenian, Swedish and German characters, as well as playing juvenile delinquents, as he did in 1964 on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The episode was directed by Joseph Pevney and written by Harlan Ellison<\/a> \u2014 later, two prominent behind-the-scenes players on Star Trek.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn fact, Pevney was one of the people for whom Koenig auditioned for Chekov.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe really liked my work, he kept telling me, \u2018You\u2019re going to be a big star,’\u201d Koenig recalled. \u201cWhen I came in to read for Star Trek, he was very enthusiastic and one of the reasons I got the part.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKoenig said the character he was to play was at first named Jones because producers wanted an actor that would appeal to the same demographic that Davy Jones<\/a> of The Monkees did \u2014 kids 8- to 14-years-old.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnd indeed, my [fan] mail was from people who were 8- to 14-years-old,\u201d he said. \u201cThey said, \u201cI think you\u2019re groovy, I love your hair\u2019 \u2014 which was a wig, by the way. I got hundreds and hundreds of letters, the third most after Bill [Shatner] and Leonard [Nimoy<\/a>].\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe said Chekov would eventually become less popular because of three things \u2014 \u201cthe hair wasn\u2019t real; I wasn\u2019t really Russian, and that exotic flavor was gone; and [viewers found out] that I was married, and they couldn\u2019t fantasize about being with Chekov. Things then started to take a nosedive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the series, Chekov really didn\u2019t have much to do; the actor knew he was there to \u201cset out the bones of the plot and let McCoy, Spock and Kirk fill in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKoenig was more important to the Star Trek movies, being nominated by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror for his work on The Wrath of Khan (1982) and The Voyage Home (1986).<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1976, Koenig and Shatner both appeared on an episode of Columbo, but the Star Trek veterans didn\u2019t share any scenes and didn\u2019t talk during production. \u201cIt was between the series and the movies, and I don\u2019t think he remembered my name,\u201d Koenig said.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also said he \u201creally upset\u201d when he was left out of Star Trek: The Animated Series because of budgetary reasons. Koenig did write an episode for the 1973-74 NBC cartoon.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe played Chekov again as \u201cThe Admiral,\u201d age 143, in the two-part, crowdsourced Renegades series that debuted online in 2017.<\/p>\n

\n\tWorried about not getting work after Star Trek was canceled, he began writing and penned episodes for The Powers of Matthew Star, Family, Land of the Lost and The Incredible Hulk. He also wrote, produced and starred in the sci-fi film InAlienable (2010), starring Richard Hatch.<\/p>\n

\n\tKoenig lost out on a chance to appear in Babylon 5 when he suffered a heart attack and had a quadruple bypass in 1993, but series creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote the part of Bester for him when he was healthy enough to act again. Unlike Chekov, that character was multidimensional and key to several storylines.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe wrote the memoir\u00a0Warped Factors\u201a A Neurotic\u2019s Guide to the Universe, published in 1998, then expanded on that for Beaming Up and Getting Off, released in 2020.<\/p>\n

\n\tKoenig married actress Judy Levitt, who appeared with him in three Star Trek movies and on Babylon 5, in July 1965, and they were together until her death in December 2022 at age 83. Their son, Andrew, who played Richard \u201cBoner\u201d Stabone on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains, died by suicide in 2010 at age 41.<\/p>\n

\n\tSurvivors include his daughter, actress and screenwriter Danielle Koenig (Star vs. the Forces of Evil).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Walter Koenig, the boyish actor who remains an integral part of Star Trek lore thanks to his portrayal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":895515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[343614,88,10756,11878],"class_list":["post-895514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-burt-lancaster","tag-entertainment","tag-obituaries","tag-star-trek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=895514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/895515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=895514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=895514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=895514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}