John Colicos

John Colicos's claim to fame amongst science fiction aficionados is playing the Kor, the first Klingon to appear on "Star Trek" in 1967. Most others know him as the swarthy villain Mikkos Cassadine from the Luke and Laura phenomenon of the soap "General Hospital" in the early 1980s. But he started out as a classically trained Shakespearean actor in Canada (his home country) in the late 1940s, continuing until the 1960s when the limelight of TV and film drew him to Hollywood. On the big screen, he was Thomas Cromwell, alongside Richard Burton's Henry VIII, in 1969's "Anne of the Thousand Days" and played the cuckolded, murdered husband in the 1981 remake of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. On television he found success with recurring roles on "Mannix," "Battlestar Galactica," as a voice actor for the animated series "X-Men," and even reprised the role of Kor some 27 years later on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." He summed up his acting style and slant on the industry in a 1989 interview thusly, "I've always remained a 19th-century, slightly hammy, overblown actor. I prefer gigantic parts with huge emotions to playing kitchen drama. All this realism is just tedious and boring." He died in 2000 after a series of heart attacks.