Arlene Martel

Martel was born Arline Greta Sax on April 14, 1936 in The Bronx. She was the daughter of Austrian Jewish immigrants. Martel attended the Performing Arts High School in New York, on which the movie Fame was based, graduating in 1953. She later studied method acting and was a member of The Actors Studio.

Martel was billed as "Arline Sax" during the early years of her television career.

Two of her earliest appearances were in The Twilight Zone TV series. The first was the episode "What You Need" as a woman in the bar. The second was the episode "Twenty Two", as a nurse who repeatedly utters the sinister phrase "Room for one more, Honey!" at the entrance to a hospital morgue and at the door of a doomed airplane.

Martel appeared in a 1960 episode of The Rebel, "The Hunted", in which she had a scene with Leonard Nimoy, before they were reunited in an iconic episode of Star Trek. She was also featured in two 1961 episodes of Route 66: "Legacy for Lucia", in which she had the title role of a Sicilian girl who inherits an American soldier's estate, and "The Newborn", in which she played a mother who dies in childbirth. She appeared in an episode of the TV series Hong Kong in 1961, opposite Rod Taylor.

In 1962, she made the first of two appearances on Perry Mason, as Fiona Cregan in "The Case of the Absent Artist". In 1966 she guest-starred as Sandra Dunkel in "The Case of the Dead Ringer", in which, aside from his role as Mason, Raymond Burr played the murderer, Grimes.

Other roles includes the princess Sarafina on Have Gun – Will Travel, the evil witch Malvina on Bewitched, the French Resistance contact Tiger in five episodes of Hogan's Heroes (1965–71), a female cosmonaut on I Dream of Jeannie, and a Hungarian immigrant on The Fugitive episode "The Blessings of Liberty" (1966).

Martel's best-known science fiction roles were in The Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand" (1964) and in the Star Trek episode "Amok Time" (1967) as the scheming and duplicitous, but extremely logical, T'Pring, who is betrothed to Mr. Spock and expected to become his consort.

On Columbo, Martel played Gloria West, mistress of murder victim Tony Goodland (Bradford Dillman), in season 2, episode 2, "The Greenhouse Jungle" (1972), and the Salesgirl in the episode "A Friend in Deed" (1974).

In 1974, she was billed as "Tasha Martelle" for the role of secretary Marty Bach in The Rockford Files episode "Trouble in Chapter 17." She appeared as a featured actress in the Gunsmoke episode "The Squaw" (1975).

Other shows on which Martel appeared included The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, Here Come the Brides, The Wild Wild West, Battlestar Galactica, The Monkees, Mannix, and The Six Million Dollar Man.[3] In the fourth season of "Mission: Impossible" she was reunited with Leonard Nimoy in the episode "Terror," where she played an imprisoned terrorist's ruthless wife.

Martel also appeared in feature films, including Angels from Hell (1968) and Chatterbox (1977). She received top billing as the commandant in charge of a Russian road crew in Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1978), although it was only a bit part, lasting less than five minutes.

Martel semi-retired from acting in the mid-1980s, but continued to act sporadically. She appeared in several TV episodes and some unsold TV pilots in the early 2000s. She said that even in her early career, she got most of her work by word of mouth, not through talent agents. In her later years, she often said, "I don't have a good agent who will get me the plum roles."

Late-life roles included a Vulcan priestess in the Star Trek fan film "Of Gods and Men" in a scene with her "Amok Time" suitor Lawrence Montaigne reprising his role as Stonn, and as one of the narrators of the 2015 documentary film Unity, which was released a year after her death.[4]

Martel married and divorced three times. Her first marriage was to Robert Palmer, with whom she had one son, Adam Palmer. Her second marriage was to actor Jerry Douglas, with whom she had two children, Avra Douglas and journalist and designer Jod Kaftan. Her third marriage was to Matthew Schoen. She had three grandchildren.

In her later years, Martel wrote a screenplay, Whisper Into My Good Ear, based on William Hanley's one-act play of the same title. She began work on a second screenplay, Mrs. Dally Has a Lover, also based on a Hanley play. Neither was produced.

Martel was a regular at Star Trek conventions worldwide from 1972 to 2014. Her last convention appearance was at TrekTrax Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 25–27, 2014, four months before her death.[5]

Martel battled breast cancer for the last five years of her life.[1] On August 12, 2014, she died from heart bypass surgical complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, California. She was 78.

• Arlene Martel at IMDb
• Arlene Martel at the Internet Broadway Database