While watching an episode of Star Trek, I started thinking about the post-Trek careers of the actors. With some notable exceptions, many of them had faded into obscurity, even if they had good careers before being cast for Star Trek. Is Star Trek poison for an actor’s career?
Looking at IMDB, and just using the main actors - who one would assume would be the ones who suffered most from a ‘Trek Curse’.
Of the original cast:
William Shatner is still working steadily, Walter Koenig is still working steadily. Majel Barret is still working steadily (albeit, a lot of her work is on Star Trek related productions). George Takai is still working steadily. Nichelle Nichols is still working steadily.
Leonard Nimoy has some years without work in the 90s and 2000s, but worked steadily through the 70s and 80s, and had not insignificant amounts of work even in the 90s.
James Doohan worked steadily until 1999. At which point I’d guess his poor health was a bigger problem than having been a Star Trek cast member.
Of the main actors, only DeForest Kelly had anything resembling a serious work drought, and that didn’t start until the 80s.
TNG:
Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, Colm Meaney and Wil Wheaton - working constantly.
Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton- working steadily, if not constantly as both actors and directors.
Marina Sirtis, Denise Crosby and Gates McFadden - working steadily if not constantly.
Again, only the actor who played a transporter-phobic doctor (Diane Muldar) has a noticable lack of work (hasn’t worked since 1993, according to IMDB.) And she was a stock actor used several times in the original series, and worked steadily between the two.
DS9 is a better case, albeit only marginally so:
Avery Brooks, Marc Alaimo - slow career since DS9 ended, good one before doing it.
Rene Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman - working constantly.
Ciroc Lofton, Alexander Siddig, Nana Visitor, Nichole DeBoer - working regularly, if not constantly. (Which is about what their careers were like before DS9.)
Terry Farrel - worked pretty constantly until 2003, when things seem to have dried up.
Aaron Eisenberg - career seems to have dried up after DS9 - although he wasn’t exactly a hot commodity before that, either.
Andrew Robinson - works steadily, if not frequently. Seems to currently be not working.
Max Grodenchik - continuing a slow but reliable career.
Jeffrey Combs - continuing a long and steady career in genre films.
I’m starting to get a headache, so I won’t bother going through Voyager or Enterprise, and Enterprise is too recent to get a good read on, anyway.
Now, few of them have had anything that was ‘Star Trek’ big - Stewart in the X-Men movies, Shatner’s post-Trek self-parody, and that’s about it - but that’s mostly because lightning rarely strikes the same place twice. It’s hard to have two series that are hits, or Star Trek level cultural icons, even if you don’t get typecast.
Most of the actors in the various Star Trek series have carreers that are as good, or better, than they had before Trek, and those few who’ve had their carreer cool off, it’s generally been years after their time on Trek ended, so trek can’t be blamed for it - in fact, it could arguably be credited with keeping them working for a while before the cool hit, in several cases. Brooks and Alaimo are the only ones who had a sudden drop-off in non-Trek related work after they stopped working in Trek.
Don’t most of them all work on Boston Legal now?
Generally, it sucks the credibility out of any actor associated with it. Few people go on to bigger/better things after their “five year mission.”
One big exception, though, is Patrick Stewart. Star Trek made him a star, and his post-Trek career has been more than respectable. I’d never heard of him before Next Generation. He’d be well-known and in demand if he never played Picard or Xavier again.
I think Avery Brooks and Kate Mulgrew have at least one really good non-Trek movie apiece ahead of them. I bet Jeri Ryan has two or three. And you just know Robert Picardo will have a sitcom or quirky detective show built around him at some point.
No, they all became voice actors on “Gargoyles” 
Brian
With respect to Tengu, just looking to see if an actor has a lot of credits in IMDb doesn’t tell the story, nor does it answer the OP, which pointed out the relative obscurity of people after Trek work who had their 15 min. of fame with Trek.
To take an example:
Majel Barrett has had plenty of work after no longer being nurse Christine Chapel on the original series.
Almost all of that work comes from the Star Trek franchise, and other Gene Roddenberry works (such as Earth: Final Conflict). If you remove that work from her resume, she has had almost nothing to do. And most of her later Trek work was as computer voices, not real appearances (you will note the fanatacism of Trek fans from the fact she has an IMDb entry for having done the computer voice on the Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual :rolleyes: ).
Look at Walter Koenig: Again, after his role as Pavel Chekov, you find him picking up bit parts here and there, along with a fair amount of work on Trek related things (mostly the movies). At no time did he become a regular on a show again, although he did appear in 12 episodes over a few years on Babylon 5.
Brent Spiner: Same story; from being an icon of the series to bit parts and nothing steady, until Threshold.
Most of the actors have had the same pattern. As the OP noted, they simply become bit actors with no real presence outside the Trek world.
But this isn’t a peculiarly Trek phenomenom. Look at Mike Farrell, for example, who was iconic as B. J. Hunnicut on MASH*, and became a bit part actor afterwards. Or most of the cast of Hill Street Blues. It is very rare for an actor to parlay a long-running part on a series into either movie stardom or more long-running parts on series. Ignoring the cast of Friends for a minute, a person like Doris Roberts is unusual. And, as Tengu points out, it isn’t like most of them simply didn’t get any work at all. And while much of their later work was on Trek-related stuff, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have gotten other work had they wanted to, they simply sucked on the teat they were used to.
That’s the case with most TV series. As as been said, for most actors, a starring role in a TV series is the high point of a career, not the beginning.
Well, according to old Bones, that’s because he didn’t actively seek a lot of roles.
I always thought he was one of the better TOS actors. I suspect that he could have had a more vibrant career if he had so chosen.
Y’forgot about the irrepressibly cute Nicole DeBoer, who has continued to act in TV’s The Dead Zone and various small TV and movie roles.
Another thing that doesn’t show up on IMDB is stage work. I have no idea how many former Trek actors have thriving theatrical careers, but a few might have.
Granted that off-off-Broadway and small regional theater productions aren’t as high-profile as even small film roles, but Brent Spiner played John Adams in the recent Broadway revival of “1776”, which is nothing to sneeze at.
If I had to make an off-the-cuff guess (and that, basically, is what 90% of the SDMB is for 
), typecasting is far more prevalent for actors on shows considered “classics” in their day and age (you only get typecast if a lot of people become very familiar with the role you’re playing, and a cult or high-rated/long running TV program is the petri dish for this). That, and when a show becomes a hit, the acting talent involved is often overestimated; Kelsey Grammar is NOT good actor (watch “Down Periscope” or “15 minutes” if you disbelieve this), but he has made a solid career out of playing a single character (“Sideshow Bob” is an animated version of Frasier Crane).
Aside from Alan Alda, none of the actors on "MASH" had great careers after 1983, even those that left early in the run (and you could argue that Alda’s stage and hollywood connections nursed his career through the decade after MASH). “Cheers”–Ted Danson excepted–is another example, although John Ratzenberger has found modest success as a voice talent (as an unseen voice, he’s not a susceptible to typecasting; Kelsey Grammar has also gotten some good voice work). The “Seinfeld” curse is legendary (and her Emmy win aside, I don’t really expect Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ new role on that CBS sitcom to last very long). I expect we’ll be wondering whatever happened to those actors on “Lost” and “CSI” ten years from now; the better actors ones will suffer from typecasting, and some of the ones we think are so great now (Jorge Garcia, anyone?) will likely reveal how bad or one-note they are in follow-up projects.
Maybe not, but he did do a solid (albeit small) dramatic role as JFK in-law *Stephen Smith in the 1983 miniseries “Kennedy.”
*Father of former Palm Beach partyer William Kennedy Smith.
Yes, but some work’s better than others.
Wheaton’s career, for instance, has been video game voice work and fringe parts in fringe movies. Given that he was quite successful before and during the series, I’d say his career has been in a downtown. He’s worked steadily, but in B stuff.
As actors, the only TNG cast members who’ve actually gotten consistent A-list acting work are Patrick Stewart and Colm Meaney.
Shatner, of course, got his own cop series, T.J. Hooker.
Check out Stweart as the foul-mouthed bad guy in Gunmen, a B so big it has its own apiary.
And interestingly, in 1997 he played the bad guy in Conspiracy Theory (to Mel Gibson’s paranoid protagonist) and then played a more nuanced version of Gibson’s character type in 1998’s Safe House.
I guess it helps if, when one comes across a performance of his unexpectedly, to say “Hey, it’s Patrick Stewart!” instead of “Hey, it’s Captain Picard!”
Diana Muldaur, after her (IMHO underappreciated) Next Gen appearances, had a star turn as Rosalind Shays on LA Law. Per her Wikipedia page she has retired from acting.
Acting doesn’t seem to be his priority, though - and he’s become quite a successful geek.
The fact is that lightning rarely strikes twice for television actors. Go back to most successful shows and follow the subsequent careers of their casts and you’ll find that the majority of them quickly faded away.
RE: Enterprise: Scott Bakula worked quite a lot before the show and probably still is.
Connor Trinneer has gotten the most post-Enterprise work in TV.
John Billingsley had already been working in movies and TV before the show and continues to do so.
Voyager’s Roxann Dawson does quite a bit of directing these days.
I’m going off-topic here, but while I agree with most of your post, I do not with respect to Kelsey Grammar. I disagree that he is not a good actor. In my view he is a good actor, but with a narrow range. He is completely believable in neurotic, urbane intellectual roles like that of Frasier Crane. There are others who are simply not good actors in being able to portray and sustain a character in a way that the audience believes. Personally, I’d put Keanu Reeves into that category, but that’s just me.
Wasn’t there someone named Woody Harrelson in Cheers? He’s gotten some pretty high profile work since then.