10 Star Trek Scenes Even More Impressive When You Know The Truth

The immensely talented, and multi-award-winning, actress Louise Fletcher, who we sadly lost in September 2022, was iconic in Star Trek for her role as the devious Vedek/Kai Winn Adami in Deep Space Nine. She will be deeply missed, and in this entry, we will discover another reason as to why.

In the DS9 episode Life Support, Vedek Bareil is critically injured during a crucial peace negotiation with the Cardassians. Winn is forced to take over but insists that she needs Bareil’s counsel for the talks to be a success. She strong-arms Bareil and Doctor Bashir into more and more medical procedures to ensure this.

Winn appears in the vast majority of scenes, therefore, and it’s Louise Fletcher so they’re all already impressive. What you probably didn’t know, however, is that Fletcher was suffering from a rather bad bout of laryngitis at the time of filming. The actress had to loop all of her lines in post-production, which she recalled simply with humour. As producer Ira Steven Behr noted, "We would look at her and say 'Jesus, she has no business being up. She should be in bed.' But she was a real trooper".

This is an absolute credit to Fletcher – that her performance remains so nuanced when she was so ill. Her head-to-head scene with Bashir in the wardroom, for example, is an acting masterclass on how to play duplicity with merely the tilt of the head.