Maggie Thrett attended a 2021 Star Trek convention in Las Vegas.
Courtesy of Scott Ray
Maggie Thrett, the actress and singer who portrayed one of the three glamorous humanoids who require pills to keep them from aging on the early Star Trek episode “Mudd’s Women,” has died. She was 76.
Thrett died Sunday of natural causes in a hospital on Long Island, her rep Scott Ray told The Hollywood Reporter.
Thrett also starred as a flower child alongside Yvette Mimieux, Christopher Jones and Judy Pace in the sex revenge romp Three in the Attic (1968), a box office hit for indie distributor AIP. She and the film received a mention on a TV spot that played in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).
On “Mudd’s Women,” which premiered on Oct. 13, 1966, as the sixth episode of NBC’s Star Trek — it was shot as the series’ second installment — Thrett, with her long brown hair, dazzled in a sparkling emerald green gown as Ruth Bonaventure.
She and fellow aliens Eve McHuron (Karen Steele) and Magda Kovacs (Susan Denberg) play prospective brides pimped out by Roger C. Carmel’s Harry Mudd, but they need a Venus drug to preserve their illusion of beauty. (In real life, Thrett and Carmel were next-door neighbors in Hollywood.)
Diane Pine was born on Nov. 18, 1946, in New York City. She attended the High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan and as a model appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.
In 1964, she recorded the single “Your Love Is Mine” with the B-side “Lucky Girl,” then had a minor hit a year later with the song “Soupy,” produced by Bob Crewe, best known for his work with The Four Seasons.
Crewe advised her to change her name to Maggie Thrett because “he thought it sounded British and more with it for the time,” she told author Tom Lisanti for his 2017 book, Talking Sixties Drive-In Movies.
Thrett signed with Universal Pictures and in 1966 appeared in the sci-fi film Dimension 5 and as a surfing assassin named Wipeout in the secret agent comedy Out of Sight. The year also saw her show up on television on Run for Your Life, The Wild Wild West and Star Trek.
She went to appear in other films including The Devil’s Brigade (1968) and Cover Me Babe (1970) and on such TV shows as Cimarron Strip, The Most Deadly Game, I Dream of Jeannie, McCloud and Run, Joe, Run.
Thrett quit acting in 1974 and worked as a backup singer in studios and on stages through the ’80s. She also was a nurse.
She was married to Canadian actor Donnelly Rhodes — they met on Run, Joe, Run — from 1975 until their 1977 divorce. She had three children with her first husband.