Born: April 29, 1955, Dubuque, IA Education: Wahlert High School; Northwestern University; University of Iowa; New York University; Stella Adler Conservatory

Occupation: Actress

Kate's career took hold in the mid-1970s, where she established herself as a remarkably commanding leading lady, mostly in TV, who brought authority to her portrayals of no-nonsense professional women.

Entertainment Weekly perceptively noted: "With her clear Irish features and throaty, resonant voice, she bears an eerie resemblance to a young Katharine Hepburn." Kate made her TV debut with a two-year stint (1975-77) as Mary Ryan, the strong-willed daughter on the ABC daytime soap "Ryan's Hope."  As age 23, she was approached by NBC programming head Fred Silverman with a role intended to keep a valuable property alive.  Kate became a primetime star as the wife to whom Peter Falk's master detective, LAPD Lt Columbo had always referred but whom audiences had never seen.

As Kate Columbo, Kate was the mother of a seven year-old daughter who divided her time between homemaking, reporting for a suburban weekly paper and solving murders, while waiting for her husband to come home.  "Mrs Columbo" (NBC, 1979) was fairly well-received critically but failed to catch on with audiences, despite several changes in title ("Kate Columbo", "Kate The Detective", "Kate Loves A Mystery") and concept (a divorcee in later episodes, she went under her maiden name Callahan.)  Kate was more widely seen as Sam Malone's (Ted Danson) love interest, a political aspirant who becomes a Boston councilwoman, in a memorable three-part storyline on "Cheers" in 1986.  She returned to series TV starring in the feminist medical drama "HeartBeat" (ABC, 1988-89) as a dedicated gynaecologist.  In a supporting role, Kate again wielded authority playing the unscrupulous mayor in James Garner's sitcom vehicle "Man of the People" (NBC, 1991).  She remained a familiar TV face with numerous assignments in TV-movies, miniseries and guest shots, notably playing an alcoholic anchor in a memorable episode of "Murphy Brown."

Kate's had mixed success in features since her inauspicious debut, playing an imperiled newscaster, in the low-budget thriller "A Stranger is Watching" (1982).  She also appeared as an army major who functions as the romantic interest of Fred Ward in "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins..." (1985).  Mulgrew's most memorable film role may be in Danny De Vito's "Throw Momma From the Train" (1987) as the shrewish wife of Billy Crystal.  She starred in the 1992 comedy "Round Numbers", playing a woman who joins a health spa in order to keep her straying husband.  However, the film went straight to video.

Kate has had much better experience in the theatre.  Her substantial stage work includes stints with the American Shakespeare Festival, the O'Neill Festival and at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A.

Mulgrew instantly earned a place in pop culture when she signed on to command a Federation starship that is unexpectedly propelled to an uncharted realm of space.  As Captain Kathryn Janeway on "Star Trek: Voyager" (UPN, 1995-), Mulgrew became the first woman to head a series in the astounding Star Trek universe.  She demonstrated that she had the right stuff - a charismatic combination of toughness, tenderness and brains.
 

I remember it with the utmost of clarity.  I had just come back from Ireland, having just spent the summer there with my sons, and my agent called me.  Apparently the role was still open - I had taped it in my New York audition, and I had done very, very poorly.  My heart was not in it - I was not focussed, and it was pouring rain - 5:00 PM rush hour traffic in Manhattan, and I just wasn't there.  So I threw it away in New York, yet it was still open.  Genevieve Bujold, the actress they hired for the role, had quit suddenly. So I came in, and I wouldn't say that Rick Berman was a long-standing fan or a supporter of mine, but I think he liked me.  I think he liked my sensibility as an actress, and had seen me over the years.  So I think I really nailed that audition, however, my competition was pretty stiff and I was asked to come back again, either the next day or the day after, to go to network.  There were four other actresses, with some reputation, up against me, and I was not feeling well because of the 'flu, and I remember just transcending the whole thing.  I didn't try to make jokes, which is my usual approach.  I didn't try to lighten it up.  I didn't try to connect with everybody in the room.  I just went for Janeway. I remember thinking that this character was a very good fit.  Surely they will see that - and they did.  I felt very joyful.  However, there were a couple of days when I didn't hear anything - it was Yom Kippur and the town dies [laughing].  Then I came home from the market the second day, and I'll never forget it.  My housekeeper, who never gets excited by calls, said I must listen to my messages.  So I listened, and there was Rick Berman saying "this is Rick Berman.  I am the executive producer of Star Trek: Voyager, and I just wanted to welcome you aboard, captain." I broke out the champagne.  It was very thrilling, and it was my last ... moment of peaceful recollection.  I was just thrown into it - I think I started the next day. There was no looking back.  There was no possibility of contemplating the ramifications of this decision.  It was a total immersion into a planet, so unfamiliar to me, that all I did was say to myself that I am going to go 100% - I will be devoted - and I was. In that first season I was particularly devoted to surviving the scrutiny, which was not only extensive, but overwhelming.  The suits were down here every day.  The press was swarming all over the place, and I was shooting 8-10 pages a day of technobabble, that was like learning Japanese every night.  For some reason, God gave me the constitution of a horse, so I managed it.  I won't say I managed it with aplomb, but I believe I managed it with some grace.  I certainly was very happy, and there is no adrenaline or gift like happiness to get you through what could have been a very difficult time.

I must have a very interesting mix in my nature and in my character, because of course it affected me - it affected me tremendously.  I was on a petri dish, but for some reason, it challenged me and at the same time encouraged me somehow, to succeed.  Grace under pressure is one thing, but I like to fight when the going gets tough, for what I want, and I was determined to make this work. First of all, I needed this job. Secondly, I loved her - I loved Janeway. Thirdly, I knew I had to do a great deal of study to penetrate this world of science fiction - which was terrifically unfamiliar to me.  I also knew I had to be gracious to the press - there is no other way to deal with it - that hasn't always been easy for me, as I am an inherently private person.  So that was an adjustment, and dealing with 70 people every day was probably the hardest part.  Not the company.  Not the press.  Not even management - but the crew. One way - the only way to make a job like this really fly, is to get to know each member of the crew on a personal level, and to assure them that you are a normal, healthy, rather kind woman who is very serious about her work, but who has time to ask questions and become involved.  So at the end of the day, there were a lot of times I would stay here, which meant that often I would have 4-5 hours to get it together and face another day. I was exhausted.  This is the closest parallel to men at war.  I was in the trenches that first season, and it only got progressively easier.  Now, it's a - I wouldn't say a cakewalk - but it is a joy.

Relaxed.  Relaxed is the word.  It is the only word, and it is the key to good acting - great acting, which I don't know if it is possible to take place in this kind of venue. Relaxation only happens when the character and the actor are happily married.  There is trust, commitment and dedication.  I think that I have worked very hard to invest this character with Kate Mulgrew.  Conversely, Kate Mulgrew has worked very hard to understand, welcome and embrace Janeway. I have endowed her.  I have given her nuances.  I have filled her with subtleties.  I have had to fight this technobabble to understand it.  I have studied it and studied it hard.  I have never prepared so hard for a role in my life, which I do on a daily basis.  My disciplines as an actress have stood me in good stead here.  I am a very disciplined actress - I believe in preparation.  I don't know how some of the others do it, but that has allowed me to really explore Janeway. Finally, in the third and fourth season, one can make the breakthroughs that make acting joyful.  I say the first three years were the setup.  It is very difficult to build the foundation of anything.  It is not particularly rewarding.  You are putting the stonework in, you are pouring the cement - the skeleton of the thing.  When you begin to flesh it out, there is a marvellous feeling of ... liberation.  It is as if God said this is where you should be, but you have to do the other things first.  That is the work of acting.

It is not that hard, unless we are wildly all over the place, jumping out of sequence by days at a time.  Then is difficult - you have to pace yourself and do the script work, but general speaking, Janeway is who she is, and I find the real work here is making it better, by a degree, than the one before.  Is possible to be even more unpredictable?  I am working within some constraints here - she is the captain after all - I can't be wild and wacky cadet [laughing].  I am the captain, with a certain personality and character - everyone knows that, but I think within those guidelines, I am allowed to go wherever I want to go.  So each tiny take, as you put it, presents a thrilling possibility to me.  Can I run the full gamut, even though it may only be from A to D - can I get there?  Like a musical note - measure - in this scene - can I reach it, without disrupting the meaning of the scene. I enjoy the piecemeal aspect of the work - that has been the challenge.  I am a theatre actress, so it has been, in that regard, yes, very difficult.  I am used to the arc that when I walk on the stage, I get to contemplate the idea - there is a first, second, third act, the climax, the resolution and we're done.  Here, indeed, sometimes I start with the tag and end up with the teaser.  It is disconcerting but it is fun - it's camera work.

This is often asked, because the world thinks of Star Trek as potentially stigmatising to an actor.  I don't.  I've been at this for twenty-five years.  I have been acting on these feet since I was sixteen years of age, and nothing short of a volcanic eruption is going to alter the fact that I am an actress by livelihood and by nature.  The fact that this point in my life, a rather late point perhaps, is such a stellar one, is only providential, and can only work really, to my advantage.  It is wonderful to have played a character like Kathryn Janeway.  It is even more wonderful to have some security at the age of forty-two, and in the highly unpredictable crap shoot of acting. It is a lovely way to prepare me for the character roles I will be playing when this is over.  I'll be forty-six when this gig is over, and I would intend to go back to the theatre, where I always was, and do my stuff.  Now I see it only as enhancing - I learned a lot about the camera.  This is a laboratory for me, and the day it is not will be a sad day.  I have turned almost all of it to my advantage.  Every day there is something else I can learn about the camera, the lighting, the take - something, somewhere.  This will all add up to where I will take it when this is over.

No.  Not really.  I was married to a director, and I am involved with a director right now - I guess there must be something I like about them!  I lack the spacial sense for directing.  I am a subjective creature.  The odd thing about it is that I see it when I am acting - I am sort of notorious for directing my own stuff - I'll go my own way and will have a keen sense of where my partners should be, and in fact how it should be played - but, I don't see the whole. Frankly, I don't want to do it.  It is too much.  It is not fulfilling.  The real meat and potatoes satisfaction comes from the acting for me.  These other people - Bob Picardo, Robby McNeill and Tim Russ coming up shortly - they have a real propensity for it.  I hesitate to say it's a male thing, God knows it's not, but there is something 'takeover' about directing.  There is some conviction that one must have, about seeing it all and knowing it all.  I really don't have that. I worked with Robby [McNeill] on "Sacred Ground", and he is very good - I think he should go for it.  A lot of actors find their true calling later on - for a lot of them it is directing.  I just feel very blessed to be one of those odd creatures whose loved the same thing her whole life.  I have been spared that angst - all that awful insecurity.  I have friends my own age who ask what they will be when they grow up!

When I was twelve.  I made the nuns cry at school!  I read a poem - "The White Cliffs" by Alice Miller.  I though I was just horsing around (I come from a very big Irish Catholic family, and we were very dramatic at home) and I looked up and they were all sobbing - it was a love story.  I felt I wanted to do that again - to make people feel so moved.  It just sort of bit me - there and then.  So I went home and told my mother and she pointed out that there were seven other kids in the family who all wanted to be something, and that if I was serious, I would read Shakespeare's Canon, and then she would discuss it further. So I did - not in total, but sufficiently though to impress her, and I went to work.  I was working outside of the house at twelve - waiting tables and under the tables I was serving cocktails.  I was doing all sorts of odd jobs, because my father was a tough guy, and he said I could do acting, but I had to pay for it.  So I sent myself to summer school - he helped but he was pushing me.  My parents really wanted to see if I was serious.  You can't, in such a big family, be giving everyone their dream.  My father was a contractor - he ran a boat business.  Someone in the family wanted to be a big tennis player, someone wanted to do ballet - his philosophy was to see who had the mettle to succeed.  So at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen I sent myself away to school. At sixteen I made the semi-finals at the Royal Academy in London and my parents sent me.  I had jumped two grades in high school, and I went over fully intending to stay and I was not accepted.  Probably because I was so young.  So I came back and went to New York University and the Stella Adler Conservatory and became a professional actor at eighteen. That was it. I was devastated about LAMDA [London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts].  I really wanted to go to school there.  My life would have been very different if I had gone there.  I was just reflecting and discussing this recently.

I think I would have stayed in the theatre.  I am curious as I dwell on it more and more. I was warned against television by all of my mentors, and all the theatre people who were fond of me.

You could say that, but my great teacher and mentor, Stella Adler did say to me that her greatest fear was that I would just skate into television, when the work was in the theatre for me. Perhaps that was fear.  As I approach my middle forties, I can take the skeletons out of the closet in a way I simply couldn't do before now - and survive - I have the ego to survive.  You look at the decisions you made, and I often wonder why did I do "Mrs Columbo", why did I take it?  I was twenty-two.  I told them I wanted to say in New York, but I did take it.  And you see I did take this job, and the four or five other series that I was offered.  Of course I would go back [to NYC] and do the theatre there all the time, but I was living here - another decision I made - very strange. So my boyfriend and I were talking about it the other day, and maybe it was about failing, at the one thing so important to me - so big and so deep which was the fear, "I'll go on television and no-one will notice". So I have to deal with all of this and grapple with it.  When this is all over I'll have to go back and see.  This is still television, and whereas another actress could never do this - it is bloody hard work, requiring a different sensibility - I am the sort of actress who tests her merit in front of a live audience.  That's the liquid pulse for me. The camera is challenging, the work is sometimes thrilling - it is always engaging, but that heart-racing knock at the door comes when I am on the stage.  I am not quite sure if I will put myself on the front line yet.

Doesn't it stand to reason?  We've lived.  We've borne our children.  We've suffered defeat - all kinds of sorrows.  Menopause alone is a veil of tears.  It is hard to say goodbye to your youth and your beauty, but it is ennobling to be able to raise sons; to love and lose; to love and win.  If you have any dignity and grace at all, this is the age when you can really give something back to an art as beautiful as this one.  This is why Hollywood is a little treacherous - it still wants you to be pretty at forty-five and at forty-five you are what you are, and pretty damn good.

That's right, though I am not sure that that is the philosophy that reigns around here.  It is not a judgement call - Hollywood has been very kind to me, but I think that, unless you can get some very good character work in film, it is probably best to go back to New York, where you can work in theatre, in those wonderful character roles that Anton Chekov knows how to write. I went to Titanic and I thought if they want to throw away $350 million on a special effects picture, that's fine, but I didn't buy the love story.  Those kids were too young to know the first thing about love.  Show me Meryl Streep or Joan Allen working at a love story and it becomes quite fascinating. There is a feeling of immortality and vitality at twenty and twenty-two, that is so extraordinary, that you feel you can do anything.  You were young and beautiful and you were going to be young, beautiful and talented forever.  Suddenly, bing, you're middle aged, and then just as suddenly you're old.  There is very little time there, unless you grab it, to get ready for the reflective, noble self you want to be when you are seventy.  I certainly don't want to be some bleach-blonde harrowed actress going "where's my agent, and where's my job?" I'd like to be looking at my grandchildren; occasionally preparing to do a play; reading my books and serving somebody a good meal - I hope.

I think so.  A tough adjustment. First of all, as I'm sure you're aware, the loss of any family member is a shattering thing, and one can argue that her character wasn't working and so forth, but she was still a member of this ensemble.  And this was an *extremely* happy ensemble.  The personal chemistry between us is unparalleled, certainly in my experience.  To be told that she was going to be leaving was one thing, and then to be notified that she was going to be *replaced* was quite another. Because, as you know, Seven of Nine is a bombshell isn't she?  A beautiful, blonde bombshell of a Borg.  Quite a good idea, and the numbers say that it is working very well, but it broke my heart about Jenn [Lien], I'll tell you right now.  It also affected my approach to Jeri [Ryan], which was not cool, but cautious because I was hurt.  I had said goodbye to the baby and had to make my way slowly until it evolved into a nice working relationship.  I think it is only human to have had a settling period. The idea of a Borg finding or seeking her humanity was intriguing, was it not, and Captain Janeway could be her mentor which would add an element of unpredictability, and excitement.  It has worked.  Her dynamic with everybody seems to work very well, but I'm always watching to beat the personal ramifications of these decisions.  I think it is very hard to say goodbye to someone that you love, and then fully embrace the foster child.  It takes time.

No there wasn't, and for two of the episodes they were together, side-by-side on the bridge.  It was awful, and they wrote a scene where I had to say goodbye to her - I could hardly blabber my way through it.  These are the difficult things in this kind of work, because a part of you wants to do anything to avoid those changes.  Some other business part of you knows that they have to be made, but you still wonder why - and we have to go on.

It has been a fascinating season so far.  A real learning experience.  Particularly about myself,  the context of losing someone and accepting someone else.  It is always interesting. Finding a way to make that work for Janeway and Kate and Seven of Nine.  Really work it to my advantage.  Once again going down deep to the actress and seeing how Janeway would react.  Now when I work with Seven, it is just fun, because I think Janeway is constantly alert to Seven, and I became very engaged with that emotion. It's been a little rocky.  I am keeping my eye out for my ensemble, and sometimes I lose sight of this season.  It seems to me that it has been a great deal of Janeway with Seven of Nine this season.  Introduction and establishment of the character is very important, but I think to them she was a numbers getter and she got them.

It is always difficult for the executive producers and the writers.  They have to move with what seems to work, and Seven, so far this season, has proven to be interesting, so far this season, has proven to be interesting, so naturally, the writers will have a predilection to write for the character.  There was so much heat around the character, which they provided.  I mean the press were in a frenzy, and so the focus became huge. I am sure it will all balance out by the end of this fourth season.

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