American actor and acting teacher (1928–2021) who played the unnamed Romulan Commander outwitted by Kirk and Spock in the third-season espionage episode The Enterprise Incident.
Joanne Linville was an American actor, born in 1928, who worked widely in television drama from the 1950s onwards, including The Twilight Zone episode The Passersby.
She guest stars in The Enterprise Incident (1968) as the Romulan Commander, the first female Romulan seen in Star Trek. Commanding a flagship equipped with a new cloaking device, she captures the Enterprise after it strays across the Neutral Zone and tries to persuade Spock to defect, unaware that he and Kirk are carrying out a Starfleet plan to steal the device.
Her intelligent, dignified performance made the Commander one of the most admired adversaries of the original series. Linville later became a respected acting teacher in Los Angeles. She died in 2021.