A navigator added to draw younger viewers
Koenig's Chekov arrived in the original series as an arrogant young navigation officer, a character introduced to attract teenage audiences; his hairstyle was modeled on that of the Monkees' Davy Jones. Born in Chicago to a family of Russian Jewish heritage originally named Koenigsberg, the fictional Chekov was Russian, and the show used him to mock Soviet claims of inventing every significant human achievement.[S1]
The character was absent from the early 1970s animated series because of its constrained budget, though Koenig wrote an episode for it titled The Infinite Vulcan. Chekov was central to the plot of 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, giving Koenig substantial screen time in the film widely regarded as the strongest of the franchise's movies.[S1]
Koenig returned to the role in the 2015 television movie Star Trek: Renegades, set at a point when Chekov has become an admiral; the project, intended as a backdoor pilot for a new series, was financed through crowdsourcing. He also voiced Chekov in various Star Trek video games, among them 1998's Starfleet Academy: Chekov's Lost Missions.[S1]
Beyond the Enterprise: Babylon 5 and a wide career
Koenig was tied to a second science fiction franchise, J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5, where he played the villainous Psi Cop Alfred Bester, a character the show's creators named after the science fiction author. He appeared in 12 episodes of that series between 1994 and 1998.[S1]
Walter Marvin Koenig attended Fieldston High School in Fieldston, New York, where he did stage work, then began at Grinnell College in Iowa as a pre-med student before transferring to UCLA, where he earned a psychology degree. After a professor encouraged him toward acting, he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where his classmates included Christopher Lloyd, later his co-star in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock as the Klingon Commander Kruge, along with James Caan and Dabney Coleman.[S1]
His screen debut came in an uncredited 1962 episode of Combat!, followed by guest roles on The Untouchables, General Hospital, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Ben Casey, Gidget and I Spy. After the original Star Trek ended in 1969 he appeared on The Virginian, Ironside and Columbo, the last in an episode featuring William Shatner, and played a deputy sheriff in the low-budget film Nightmare Honeymoon opposite Dack Rambo.[S1]
Stage work, writing and later recognition
During the 1980s, while making the Star Trek films, Koenig played Pompey in a 1984 television adaptation of Antony & Cleopatra that also featured Nichelle Nichols and James Avery, later of Star Trek: Enterprise. His film credits included the 1989 features Moontrap, which he headlined, and Deadly Weapon, as well as Cynthia Rothrock's Sworn to Justice in 1996 and the independent horror film Mad Cowgirl in 2006.[S1]
Koenig wrote and performed a one-character film, You're Never Alone When You're a Schizophrenic, screened at the 1996 New York Film Festival, and penned the 2008 science fiction legal thriller InAlienable, in which he also appeared. On television he guest-starred on the CBS sitcom Almost Perfect in a 1997 episode titled Where No Woman Has Gone Before and voiced himself in a 2002 Futurama episode, Where No Fan Has Gone Before, which also featured William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.[S1]
Over a career on stage that lasted roughly thirty years, he went on tour in the early 1990s alongside Mark Lenard — the actor behind Spock's father, Sarek — in The Boys in Autumn, in which he played a grown-up Tom Sawyer meeting Lenard's Huckleberry Finn again after a long separation. Koenig likewise took on directing duties in the theater, staging Hotel Parsadiso with Company of Angels, Becket with Theatre 40, America Hurrah! at the Oxford Theater, Twelve Angry Men at the Rita Hayworth Theatre, and Matrix at the Gascon Theatre.[S1]
