Walter Koenig, the boyish actor who remains an integral part of Star Trek lore thanks to his portrayal of the Russian crewman Pavel Chekov, has died. He was 90.
Koenig, also known for playing the scoundrel Alfred Bester on another sci-fi space series, Warner Bros. Television’s Babylon 5, died Sunday of natural causes in his home in North Hollywood, his rep announced.
Raised in Manhattan as a son of Lithuanian immigrants, Koenig joined Gene Roddenberry’s 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.
In a 2013 interview for the TV Academy Foundation, Koenig said he didn’t watch Star Trek before he came aboard. “I’d flip through the channels and I’d see Styrofoam rocks — they were so obviously Styrofoam — and I said, ‘This has got to be phony.’ I didn’t give it a chance,” he recalled.
The actor portrayed a Russian for the first time in his career — a student who had defected to the U.S. — on a 1963 episode of the NBC drama Mr. Novak.
He 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.
After 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.
“He drops on his knees in front of me,” Koenig said, “and takes my crotch in his hand, and I’m saying, ‘What are you doing?!” I didn’t 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, ‘You do have to have a costume, don’t you?’
“And that’s the auspicious way I learned I was on Star Trek and it was going to change my life.”
Marvin Walter Koenig was born in Chicago on Sept. 14, 1936. His father, a translator for RCA Victor and later an entrepreneur, was a “dyed-in-the wool commie,” Koenig said. He noted that FBI agents once searched his family’s apartment.
Koenig starred in productions of Peer Gynt and The Devil’s 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.
However, 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, Christopher Lloyd and Dabney Coleman.
The boyish actor returned to L.A. to claim a role in the 1961 Burt Lancaster 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.
At 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 — later, two prominent behind-the-scenes players on Star Trek.
In fact, Pevney was one of the people for whom Koenig auditioned for Chekov.
“He really liked my work, he kept telling me, ‘You’re going to be a big star,’” Koenig recalled. “When I came in to read for Star Trek, he was very enthusiastic and one of the reasons I got the part.”
Koenig 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 of The Monkees did — kids 8- to 14-years-old.
“And indeed, my [fan] mail was from people who were 8- to 14-years-old,” he said. “They said, “I think you’re groovy, I love your hair’ — which was a wig, by the way. I got hundreds and hundreds of letters, the third most after Bill [Shatner] and Leonard [Nimoy].”
He said Chekov would eventually become less popular because of three things — “the hair wasn’t real; I wasn’t really Russian, and that exotic flavor was gone; and [viewers found out] that I was married, and they couldn’t fantasize about being with Chekov. Things then started to take a nosedive.”
On the series, Chekov really didn’t have much to do; the actor knew he was there to “set out the bones of the plot and let McCoy, Spock and Kirk fill in it.”
Koenig 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).
In 1976, Koenig and Shatner both appeared on an episode of Columbo, but the Star Trek veterans didn’t share any scenes and didn’t talk during production. “It was between the series and the movies, and I don’t think he remembered my name,” Koenig said.
He also said he “really upset” 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.
He played Chekov again as “The Admiral,” age 143, in the two-part, crowdsourced Renegades series that debuted online in 2017.
Worried 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.
Koenig 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.
He wrote the memoir Warped Factors‚ A Neurotic’s Guide to the Universe, published in 1998, then expanded on that for Beaming Up and Getting Off, released in 2020.
Koenig 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 “Boner” Stabone on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains, died by suicide in 2010 at age 41.
Survivors include his daughter, actress and screenwriter Danielle Koenig (Star vs. the Forces of Evil).