Crew Profile: Doctor Pulaski

The behind-the-scenes story of Season Two's unsung heroine, Diana Muldaur

Diana Muldaur has the strange and wonderful honour of being the only person to have played three different roles in Trek shows where every one was a doctor. Actually, that’s slightly misleading, as it makes her sound like she was always playing a medical doctor, whereas her role in the classic Star Trek season 3 episode “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” was a psychologist. It’s still noteworthy that something about Muldaur’s resume has ‘doctor’ stamped all over it. All in all, she has played eight different doctor roles in seven different TV shows.

Her first brush with doctors was in the long running daytime soap, The Doctors, which ran from 1963 all the way through to 1983, but this was just a couple of bit parts, building on her breakthrough into daytime soaps via her first ever acting job on The Secret Storm. More substantial was her appearance in the popular 60s TV show Dr. Kildare, in which she played Jeannie Orloff for five episodes in its final and only colour season, in 1966. “She must have been a child star…” you may be thinking. Well take a look: here she is with the title character, played by Richard Chamberlain.

Doctor Kildare, meet the future Doctor Pulaski!

She was 28, and she looks pretty much as she does throughout her entire career! The same year she got her first role as an M.D., Doctor Jean Winters in the TV series Run For Your Life, starring Ben Gazzara, who is perhaps best known as the villain in the 1989 film Road House starring the late Patrick Swayze.

Two years later, she was to get her first role in Star Trek…