Crew Profile: Deanna Troi

How London-born actress Marina Sirtis tried out for one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time... and didn't get the role - twice!

At not one point in the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation do we hear Marina Sirtis talk in her own accent. Sirtis was born in London to Greek Cypriot parents, John and Despina Sirtis. Her parents did not want her to go into acting, so she secretly auditioned for the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama. This put her in conflict with her parents, who wished for her to take a more conventional career, but Sirtis persisted. In 1976, at the age of 21, she joined the Connaught Theatre in Worthing, about fifty miles south of London, where she appeared in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw and as Ophelia (the female lead) in a production of Hamlet.

She managed to land a few TV roles in the 1970s, first appearing in 1977 in an episode of the Yorkshire Television adaptation of E.W. Hornung’s gentlemen thief novels, Raffles. She played Faustina, Raffles’ love interest, and her character was swiftly murdered, so that was that for her debut. She went on to appear in other classic British TV shows like Who Pays the Ferryman? (as ‘Ariadne’), Hazell (as ‘Melina Stassinopolus’), and Minder (as ‘Stella’).

Sirtis had no idea that science fiction was going to change the course of her life when she first auditioned for a role in one of the most iconic sci-fi TV shows of all time… and it wasn’t Star Trek…