I think many of us keeled over when we posted this Snark Week meme:
Now, I admit to being only a sort-of Star Trek fan, and I never really watched Voyager and didn’t have strong opinions on American actress Kate Mulgrew until she knocked my socks off in modern-set Orange Is the New Black. At age 70, she’s been in a LOT of films/TV series, and I am now surprised to learn that a number of them have been historical! So, let’s count ’em down.
Deborah Sampson in The American Woman: Portraits of Courage (1976)
A TV movie that “recreates historical moments and women who fought for equality and freedom over the span of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries” (IMDB).
Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton in A Time for Miracles (1980)
A TV movie about the US’s first saint; Seton (1774-1821) was an educator known as a founder of the parochial school system.
Isolt in Lovespell (1981)
A fantasy film based on the Irish Tristan and Isolde legend.
Rachel Clement in The Manions of America (1981)
A TV miniseries that could be a Snark Week recap contender, except will it just be more North & South? An Irish farmer escapes the potato famine by coming to the US, when the Civil War breaks out.
Hattie Carraway in Roots: The Gift (1988)
The third installment of the Roots series, the adaptations of Alex Haley’s book about his enslaved ancestors… although this has different writers, so I’m guessing it’s “loosely based”? It takes place in the 18th century, in between the two previous Roots installments.
Antonia Doyle in For Love and Glory (1993)
Per IMDB: “A failed pilot about a rich Virginia plantation owner and his family caught up in the American Civil War. He has a slave for a mistress, his older son is to marry a working class Irish girl and his younger son promotes the Confederacy.”
Capt. Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
It’s sci-fi, but thanks to the holodeck, there are several historically themed episodes!
Edith Morse Robb in Drawing Home (2016)
In the 1920s, a young woman is engaged to a Rockefeller but meets a painter from Canada. It got very terrible reviews.
Mrs. Steiner in Flowers in the Attic: The Origin (2022)
The TV miniseries adaptation of the 1910s-50s-set Flowers in the Attic prequel. Mulgrew plays the scary housekeeper.
What’s your favorite of Kate Mulgrew’s surprising number of historical performances?
![Portrait of a lady said to be Jeanne de Valois, comtesse de la Motte [I would be shocked if this was accurate] by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, c. 1780 [I'd say post-1783], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/frockflicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Jeanne_lamotte_valois.jpg?fit=300%2C175&ssl=1)
I remember watching the Mannions of America because a) Agnes Nixon based it on her family history supposedly, b) Kate Mulgrew was the original Mary Ryan on Ryan’s Hope, one of my favorite soaps, and c) it introduced the world to Pierce Brosnan. It’s not great, but my standards were low in high school.
Pierce Brosnan makes his fans watch strange, strange things – including DIE ANOTHER DAY – so I don’t feel you have anything to apologise for.
Mr Brosnan, on the other hand, really ought to learn to use his powers for Good! (Or at least ‘above average’).
The bonnet she wears as Elizabeth Ann Seton was part of the habit of the American Sisters of Charity which she founded. It was based on her clothing as a widow in the early 19th century. I remember as a child always being interested that the Sisters of Charity had such a different habit from the more traditional veil and wimple (based on medieval female clothing)
Interesting, thanks! It’s definitely a look ;)
The only people surprised to see STAR TREK actors in Frock Flicks are those fans too casual to recognise the Franchise’s abiding love of frocking up it’s main credits cast in every series.
There was, in fact, something of a running joke on the long running Tor.com STAR TREK review series about it being a statutory requirement that a STAR TREK main cast member absolutely must look fetching in Period costume.
…
Also, as a sometime fan of VOYAGER some of those looks on the younger Ms Mulgrew are inducing the same confused admiration I felt when DOCTOR WHO suddenly started looking like the lovely Jodie Whittaker (“But it’s CAPTAIN JANEWAY, what the heck am I thinking, how can I be so disrespectful, what even is this?!? OH LORDY, Bounty Hunter Mulgrew…”).
No love for her outfit as ARACHNIA, QUEEN OF THE SPIDER PEOPLE in the Captain Proton holodeck episodes in Star Trek: Voyager? I mean it’s technically historical in that it’s based on something an actress playing a villainess/anti-heroine in a 1930s space opera serial might wear…
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Arachnia
She does the Civil War yet again in Star Trek, The Q and the Grey. Always love a good Q episode. Pics: https://themiscollection.com/image.php?sid=201305070003&pid=3&setname=Star%20Trek%20Voyager%20-%20The%20Q%20and%20the%20Grey