There’s so much more to George Takei, beyond his role as Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise. Born Hosato Takei in Los Angeles to Japanese-American parents, he was renamed George by his father after King George VI’s coronation. He and his family were forced to live in various US Japanese concentration camps during the second world war, after which Takei went on to study architecture and theatre, including time at the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon.
Takei’s early acting career included providing English dubbing voices for 1950s Japanese monster films, including Rodan and Godzilla Raids Again. He got a few small roles on the big screen, largely in war films (including Never So Few and Hell to Eternity), but was more successful on TV, getting cast in a number of popular shows including Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, My Three Sons and Mission: Impossible. In the same year as his M:I role – 1966 – Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry cast him as physicist Hikaru Sulu in the second pilot episode, leading him to play Lieutenant (later Captain) Sulu in all three seasons of the original 1960s Star Trek series and in the first six Star Trek films between 1979 and 1991.
