When Kate Mulgrew was cast as Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager, in 1995, she was well aware she was making history as the first woman to lead a Star Trek series as commander of a starship, but she had no idea how profoundly the job would change her life.
“I will forever be Captain Janeway,” she says. “That will be the obit too. ‘Kate Mulgrew, Captain Janeway, dies.’”
Janeway made her globally famous, and the role continues to define her, in ways both positive and frustrating.
She suspects it has cost her acting jobs: she walks into an audition and all anyone sees is the woman in the red-and-black jumpsuit who led the USS Voyager on its mission through deep space three decades ago. Mulgrew is, she says, sometimes ambivalent, “when I know that it’s informing somebody else’s decision whether or not to hire me”.
But “85 or 90 per cent” of the time she is immensely proud of Janeway, who’s a role model for generations of women going into science and engineering.
“I feel very lucky, very privileged to have played her. And to have changed so many women’s lives,” Mulgrew says on a sunny New York morning from her elegant Upper West Side apartment, with its out-of-this-world views over the Hudson.
“Especially women in Stem. I know this for a fact because I see them all the time. She had a wide and deep impact on, particularly, women and brought a lot of men, I think, to the understanding that a woman can certainly command a ship.
“A lot of dents were put in that glass ceiling in the 1990s when I took on Kathryn Janeway, and I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. But occasionally it’s been one of those things I just have to jump over.”
Mulgrew suspects she was cast as Janeway because Star Trek’s producers saw something of the steely, intrepid starship captain in her. On our video-link Mulgrew is warm, but there is no mistaking her commanding presence. She is not, one suspects, a person to suffer fools.
The actor is firmly back on Earth in her new role as a hard-bitten New York cop in The Galway Bay Murders, a new RTÉ thriller. She’s also a producer on the project, which arose out of her friendship with the first-time TV writer Eithne Verling, whom she met on a working holiday in Oughterard, in Connemara, while she was writing her second volume of memoirs and Verling was director of a key local museum.
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“I was instantly drawn to her,” she says of Verling. “I knew there was a much deeper calling for her. I said, ‘I know you’re the curator of the Galway City Museum. Do you write? I can sense it. I’m intuiting you’re a writer and an artist.’ I said, ‘Come on over to the house – let’s have a chat. What would you think about trying to write for television’?”
Encouraged by Mulgrew, Verling set to work on what would become The Galway Bay Murders, a brisk and picturesque thriller that is a centrepiece of RTÉ’s winter schedule and that the broadcaster hopes to market internationally. (ITV has already acquired the UK rights.)
RTÉ’s confidence in the drama looks justified. Opening with the discovery of a body in the scenic Galway bog lands, the show is both an efficient murder mystery and an impressive showcase for the dramatic and mournful west of Ireland landscape.
It is also a showcase for Mulgrew. Her character in The Galway Bay Murders, Detective Nora Savage, is a deeply broken character who is in Ireland to escape a bereavement back in New York; her policing expertise is required as it becomes clear that a serial killer may be on the loose.
Mulgrew says that Savage is a heightened version of her real self. She is referring to their no-nonsense personalities but also, perhaps, to a history of shared trauma. When she was in her late teens the actor gave up her daughter for adoption – they met for the first time since then in 1999 – and it is tempting to conclude that she drew on this in playing the detective.
“Her son, her only child, had died six months earlier,” she says of her character. “She can’t cope and she blames herself for his death. The only place to go was Ireland on this exchange programme – which is a real thing. And it is there that her most familiar Pavlovian muscle is revitalised, and she finds a dead body in a bog, and she’s off to the races.”
Mulgrew first travelled to Ireland when she was 17, in pursuit of her father, who had upped sticks for Dingle and then contacted his family back home to announce that he had fallen in love with a local – a surprise and also an awkward development, given that he was still married to Mulgrew’s mother.
“I need to return to Ireland regularly to reinforce everything that’s good in myself,” the actor says. “I love Ireland and its people, and when I get there I feel as at home as I do here – in an entirely different way. I’ve always felt this way since I was 17 and went to meet my father at the Thomas Ashe pub in Dingle.”
Mulgrew was born into an Irish-American family in Dubuque, Iowa, an archetypal small town in the American Midwest. After high school she moved to New York to study at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting, the prestigious stage school whose graduates include Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken.
It was while she was in New York that she became pregnant and subsequently gave up her daughter to a Catholic adoption agency. When she later tried to contact her daughter, the nuns initially rebuffed her – an experience that will chime with many Irish women.
Mulgrew says that her encounters with the sisters and her memories of the adoption helped her bond with the Irish cast of The Galway Bay Murders, particularly John Connors, who plays a garda with a Traveller background, and who has had his own share of trauma, including the early death of his father.
“When I found John sitting next to me in the cop car and we found ourselves talking about Christ … I said to myself, this is going to be absolutely delicious. And I found that man fascinating, from the moment I shook his hand to the moment I kissed him goodbye. I learned a lot from John Connors. He’s a considered person, a very self-examined person.”
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Mulgrew had had a fascinating career well before Star Trek. After early roles that included a prominent part in Ryan’s Hope, an ABC soap opera, in 1981, when she was in her mid-20s, she starred opposite Richard Burton and Niall Tóibín in Lovespell, a retelling of the story of Tristan and Iseult that was filmed at Cahir Castle, in Co Tipperary.
Later she appeared alongside another confirmed Hibernophile, Angela Lansbury – who lived on and off in east Co Cork from the 1970s – in Murder, She Wrote.
Mulgrew’s post-Star Trek career has been varied. She played the Russian inmate Galina “Red” Reznikov in the Netflix prison drama Orange Is the New Black and, in 2019, appeared opposite Brendan Gleeson in the Stephen King adaptation Mr Mercedes.
But, while she has thrived, Star Trek has had its ups and downs, and attempts to make the franchise appealing to younger generations have been largely disastrous. As of late 2026 it seems to be drifting in space slightly, with no new films in production.
This saddens Mulgrew, but she believes it won’t cause long-term harm for it to take a timeout.
“Without putting too fine a point on it – because I’m not in the room with these guys who call all the shots – I think sometimes it’s important to take a breath, review it retrospectively and refresh it.
“We’ve had a lot of Star Trek. I think there will be a minute here, and then it will come back, as it always does, and as it always must. It will come back in all its glory, looking different, looking better, looking very compelling.”
A common criticism of recent series, including Discovery and Starfleet Academy, is that they have worn their progressive credentials a bit too conspicuously – some might say preachily. That Star Trek has, in other words, become Woke Trek.
“When you’re too woke, sometimes it can obfuscate the beauty of the creativity, so there has to be a compromise here,” Mulgrew says. “Star Trek, thematically, will never die. Gene Roddenberry understood this vision, and it will never change as long as human nature remains hopeful.
“But we’re in a little bit of a slough. We need to take a breath, rest in the slough a bit, then climb out and start again.”
The Galway Bay Murders begins on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player at 9.30pm on Sunday, November 8th
Source: The Irish Times · Ed Power
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