Deaths 2022

Deaths 2021

Deaths 2020

Deaths 2019

Deaths 2018

Deaths 2017

Deaths 2016

Deaths 2015

Deaths 2014

Deaths 2013

Deaths 2012

Deaths 2011

Deaths 2010

Deaths 2009


Full list by date of death

Grace Lee Whitney

Actress

Born - 1 April 1928, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Died - 1 May 2015

Tall, determined-looking blonde American actress and sometime singer (born Mary Ann Chase - and what was wrong with that?) who will be best remembered as Yeoman Janice Rand in the Star Trek TV series and its subsequent film spin-offs, at the end of which her character had been promoted to lieutenant. Beginning her career as a teenage radio singer, she made her first film, Mystery Range (1947) before she was 20, billed, as she continued to be through the 1950s, as Ruth Whitney. Subsequent credits included The Texan Meets Calamity Jane (1950), Hannah Lee/Outlaw Territory (1953), Top Banana (1954), Women's Prison (1955), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Some Like It Hot (1959), Pocketful of Miracles (1961), A Public Affair (1962). The Man from Galveston (1963), Irma La Douce (1964), then a huge amount of TV (and a successful battle against alcoholism) until Star Trek the Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV (1986) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), her last, although she continued playing her Janice Rand character on TV and video until 2011.