Star Trek and Twilight Zone actress Antoinette Bower dies at 93

Antoinette Bower, the German-born actor whose guest turns in Star Trek and The Twilight Zone kept her name alive across generations of sci-fi fans, died April 30 at a retirement home in the Eagle Rock area of Los Angeles. She was 93.

Carlotta Glackin, Bower’s longtime friend, confirmed the death and said William Shatner emailed condolences after learning Bower had died. Glackin also said Bower was still receiving fan mail from Star Trek viewers decades after her episode first aired, a sign of how strongly supporting players from the franchise’s early years stayed embedded in fandom.

Bower was born Sept. 30, 1932, in Baden-Baden, Germany, to a German mother and an English father. She lived in England, Vienna and Monte Carlo before moving to Canada in 1953, and her screen career stretched from roughly 1954 to 1992. Over those years, she built nearly 90 screen appearances in film and television, moving comfortably between genre work and mainstream drama.

Her most durable television credit came in Star Trek’s second-season episode Catspaw, which first aired in October 1967, where she played Sylvia. She also appeared in The Twilight Zone as Eve Norda in Probe 7, Over and Out, which aired Nov. 29, 1963 and starred Richard Basehart, Harold Gould and Barton Heyman. Those two episodes tied Bower to the twin franchises that helped define American science-fiction television, both in first-run broadcasts and in the much longer afterlife of syndication, reruns and collector culture.

Bower’s credits also included Prom Night, The Evil That Men Do, Neon Rider, Mission: Impossible, Murder, She Wrote and The Fugitive. For actors of her era, that kind of résumé mattered: the role might have been small, but the reach was enormous, and a single memorable appearance could echo for decades through reruns, conventions and fan correspondence. Bower’s career became part of that history, carried forward by the shows that kept finding new audiences long after the original air dates had passed.