December 19, 200817 yr Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's widow and a fixture of nearly every incarnation of the space travel franchise, died on Thursday. She was 76. Roddenberry, who suffered from leukemia, died at home in Bel Air, Calif., according to a spokesperson. Before Star Trek, the Ohio-born actress worked on a range of television shows, including Bonanza and Leave it to Beaver. She was romantically involved with Roddenberry when he launched Star Trek in the mid-1960s. Though he cast her as the USS Enterprise's unnamed first officer in his pilot, she would go on to fame as the secondary character Nurse Chapel in the original series and in subsequent films. The couple married in 1969. Roddenberry reappeared in the revamped Star Trek: The Next Generation as one of its beloved recurring characters: Betazoid ambassador Lwaxana Troi and as the voice of the starship's onboard computer — a job she would also hold on spin-offs Deep Space Nine and Voyager, audio books, animated series, video games as well as on the forthcoming J.J. Abrams prequel film. After her husband's death in 1991, Roddenberry continued his legacy by helping bring to life other TV projects he had been working on, including the television series Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda. Roddenberry is survived by her son, Eugene Roddenberry Jr.
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