William Shatner, 77, has just released his autobiography Up Till Now, and that’s a good excuse to dust down the Star Trek Where Are They Now? files.

Jeffrey Hunter - the original Captain Kirk This former radio star was hired for Star Trek’s 1966 pilot to play Captain Christopher Pike. The show was rejected by NBC as “too cerebral”, and sadly Hunter was unavailable when it was eventually commissioned. He died of a stroke in 1969.

Leonard Nimoy - Spock The same age as Shatner, he’s about to reprise his original half-Vulcan role in the forthcoming Star Trek movie. In 1977 he released his autobiography, I Am Not Spock, which confused fans, so in 1995 he wrote another called I Am Spock.

Nichelle Nichols - Uhura Before Star Trek, Kirk’s foxy black lieutenant sang with Duke Ellington. Afterwards, she was a Nasa volunteer, helping to recruit women and ethnic minorities. Achieving fame of a different sort, her brother was one of the Heaven’s Gate cult and died as part of a mass suicide in 1997.

Walter Koenig - Chekov In his 1998 autobiography Warped Factors, Koenig paints himself as a neurotic chancer, but this New Yorker with a dodgy Russian accent has doggedness.

He is still working today: his new movie, Inaliable, has just been given a release on the internet.

James Doohan - Scotty The Starship’s “Scottish” chief engineer was a Canadian who lost a finger fighting for his country in the D-Day landings. He was a chirpy ambassador for Star Trek at fan conventions until he was “beamed up” for the last time in 2005, suffering from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

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