Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Beverly Crusher

"Voulez-vous m'apprendre à danser ? [Would you teach me to dance?]" Data famously asked Doctor Crusher in the French (dubbed) version of Data's Day (Une journée de Data). The scene on the holodeck that eventually followed the question is now the stuff of Star Trek legend, and if Brent Spiner didn't quite do all of the tap dancing (claquettes), Gates McFadden did.

What you probably know by now is that the chaotic comedy, or at least the semblance of chaos, of that scene was choreographed by Gates McFadden. What you perhaps didn't know is that McFadden learnt the art, in part, by studying with renowned French actor/choreographer/mime, movement, and mask artist Jacques Lecoq in Paris (on a scholarship, no less) for over two years, and also returned to the States as Lecoq's assistant at Harvard University.

McFadden speaks French and has given interviews (about Star Trek) in the language. In 2018, she was guest star, for example, at 'Planet Fiction Convention [sic]' in Marseille alongside Battlestar Galactica's equally francophone Jamie Bamber. She could probably teach Jean-Luc a thing or two!

Before the dancing didactics with Data, McFadden was already pulling the strings as Director of choreography and Puppet Movement for Jim Henson on the film Labyrinth starring David Bowie. Before that, she had acted in the film The Muppets Take Manhattan and choreographed all the scenes that used Henson's Creature Shop creatures in the film Dreamchild. Fittingly, Doctor Crusher then appeared in parodic puppet form in Sesame Street's Spaceship Surprise: The Next Generation in 1994.