American actor, author and activist who played Hikaru Sulu in The Original Series, The Animated Series, six films and Voyager.
George Takei (born 1937) is an American actor, author and activist. As a child he and his Japanese American family were held in internment camps during the Second World War, an experience he has spoken and written about throughout his public life. He studied architecture before turning to acting and appeared in film and television through the early 1960s.
Takei first appeared in the second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, as a ship's physicist, and became the Enterprise's helmsman, Hikaru Sulu, for the rest of the series. He voiced Sulu in The Animated Series and played him in all six original-cast films; in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Sulu commands his own ship, the USS Excelsior.
He reprised the role as Captain Sulu in the Voyager episode Flashback (1996). Takei later became a prominent advocate for civil rights and LGBT equality, and his family's wartime experience inspired the Broadway musical Allegiance, in which he starred.