Was Antoinette Bower married? What we know about Star Trek actress as she dies at 93

Antoinette Bower, the German-born British actress who played a catlike alien on Star Trek and featured in an Adam and Eve-themed episode of The Twilight Zone, has passed away at ninety-three. As per a report shared by The Hollywood Reporter, Bower died on April 30 at a retirement home in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, with the confirmation coming from her friend Carlotta Glackin, the great-niece of Golden Age character actor Edward Everett Horton.

Antoinette Bower had married James Gill, a pop artist from Texas, back in 1963. However the marriage did not last. On the film side, she took the lead role in Superbeast, a horror picture shot in the Philippines in 1972, and later showed up in Prom Night in 1980 alongside Leslie Nielsen, with Jamie Lee Curtis playing her daughter on screen.

Charles Bronson's 1984 action thriller The Evil That Men Do also featured her in a notable role. For three seasons between 1989 and 1992, Bower recurred on the Canadian drama Neon Rider, which followed life on a British Columbia ranch that took in troubled teenagers.

Her Twilight Zone appearance came in a Rod Serling-written episode from the show's fifth and final season in November 1963, where she played a woman stranded on a distant planet alongside an astronaut, the two characters serving as a retelling of Adam and Eve.

Before the cameras, Antoinette Bower spent years helping displaced families:

As per the report shared by The Hollywood Reporter, Antoinette Alexandra Jane Bower was born on September 30, 1932, in Baden-Baden, Germany, to a German mother and an English father. She was educated in England.

Before any of the television credits, there was something else entirely. In the late 1940s, Antoinette Bower took on dual roles with the United Nations' International Refugee Organization, serving as both a language supervisor in the field and a welfare counselor. The organization was at that point working to support the millions of people across Europe and Asia who had been left without homes in the wake of World War II. It was not a glamorous job. It was serious, difficult work, and she did it while still in her teens.

Antoinette Bower came back to her family in Canada in 1953, settling in Toronto, where she found her way into the early days of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. She wrote scripts there, covered public affairs, and got in front of a live camera to conduct interviews. Some acting came along too, including a 1958 television production of The Tell-Tale Heart and a year later a recurring appearance on the syndicated series Hudson's Bay.

A visit to Los Angeles in the early 1960s turned into something more permanent. A small uncredited part in Mutiny on the Bounty, the 1962 Marlon Brando picture, was enough of a foothold. Guest appearances followed on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Perry Mason, Wagon Train, Thriller and several others, and just like that, Hollywood had her.

Antoinette Bower's remarkable life after the cameras stopped rolling:

Before Neon Rider wrapped up in 1992, Bower had logged an extraordinary run of guest appearances across some of the biggest shows on American television. Bonanza, Columbo, Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, The Fugitive, Mannix, Kojak, Hogan's Heroes, Murder, She Wrote and The Thorn Birds miniseries in 1983 were among the credits that kept her working steadily through that era, along with Combat!, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, Get Smart, The Wild Wild West and others. When Neon Rider ended, so did her acting career, more or less.

What came next was not what anyone would have predicted. Antoinette Bower enrolled in a carpentry programme at Santa Monica College. As per the report shared by The Hollywood Reporter, her friend Carlotta Glackin noted that Bower went on to work at Home Depot, where she was well regarded, and that she handcrafted cabinets and tall bookshelves for her own home in Beverly Glen.

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She also turned filmmaker. Roughly a decade ago, Antoinette Bower put together a full documentary on chuckwagon racing in Canada, a project she wrote, shot, cut and narrated herself, having spent a number of summers living alongside the people she was making it about.

The Star Trek letters never stopped coming. Glackin shared that Antoinette Bower was still hearing from fans of the show right up until the end, and that William Shatner reached out personally by email once news of her passing reached him. She was predeceased by her half-brother Roger.

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