Antoinette Bower spent decades amassing credits across Hollywood’s most iconic shows, including across “Star Trek” and “The Twilight Zone.” Bower passed at 93 on April 30, 2026.
Remembering Antoinette Bower
Bower’s friend Carlotta Glackin, great-niece of “Golden Age” actor Edward Everett Horton, shared the news with The Hollywood Reporter. Glackin described her as a woman who kept building, creating, and reinventing herself well beyond her years in Hollywood. Bower’s “Star Trek” costar William Shatner also shared his condolences, according to Glackin.
Between 1959 and the 1980s, Bower added nearly 90 screen appearances to her resume.
Genre fans will remember her best from two classic roles: as Eva Norda opposite Richard Basehart in “The Twilight Zone” episode “Probe 7, Over and Out” and as the cunning alien captain Sylvia in the second season episode “Catspaw” of “Star Trek.” Bower is one of the 20 women on “Star Trek” known for kissing Captain Kirk (William Shatner.) Glackin shared that Bower still received mail from fans of her role in the iconic sci-fi show.
Most recently, Bower held a recurring role on “Neon Rider” from 1990 to 1992 as Fox Devlin, a vital right-hand to the show’s protagonist Dr. Michael Terry, portrayed by the creator of the show Winston Rekert.
Beyond science fiction, Bower showed up everywhere television needed a memorable guest star through the 1960s and ’70s. Her extensive credits range from television’s “Bonanza,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” “Kojak,” and “Murder, She Wrote” to film roles in “Prom Night” alongside Jamie Lee Curtis as her mother and Leslie Nielsen and “The Evil That Men Do” with Charles Bronson as his character’s kidnapping victim.
A Winding Road to Hollywood
Bower was born in Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1932 to a German mother and English father. Her path to Hollywood wound its way through some unlikely places first. She worked as a field language supervisor and welfare counselor for the United Nations’ International Refugee Organization in Germany, where she helped resettle people who had been displaced across Europe and Asia after World War II. Later, she moved to Canada, where she found her way into broadcasting with CBC. She wrote scripts and conducted live television interviews before acting pulled her fully into the limelight.
Though her acting career is one for the ages, what she chose to do after her acting career settled down is particularly impressive. After her run on the Canadian drama “Neon Rider” in the early ’90s, she stepped away from the industry largely for good. She found new creative outlets in studying carpentry at Santa Monica College and became a valued Home Depot employee known for custom-building cabinets and bookshelves. Stepping back toward the film industry, she also shot, directed, edited, and narrated her own documentary about chuckwagon racing in Canada.
To see someone with the richness of life that Bower had is inspiring beyond stars in Hollywood. Few can boast the variety and longevity of a career such as Bower’s, but even fewer can aspire to the ways Bower engaged with the world around her.
