‘Star Trek’ Actor Robert Walker Jr. Dies at 79

07/12/2019 - Robert Walker Jr., son of actors Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones, died Thursday, his family confirmed to the official website for the television show “Star Trek.” He was 79.

Walker Jr. is best remembered for playing the titular Charlie Evans in the “Star Trek” episode “Charlie X” from the show’s first season in 1966. His character was a teenage social misfit with psychic powers. The episode was written by D.C. Fontana who also died earlier this week. Walker Jr. also starred in a handful of 1960s pictures including “Ensign Pulver” with Burl Ives and Walter Matthau, and “Young Billy Young.” He was born in Queens, New York in 1940, by which time his father was just launching his career as an actor. Walker Sr. was of course best known for playing the role of murderous psychopath Bruno Antony in Alfred Hitchcok’s “Strangers on a Train.”

The film was released shortly before his death of a suspected overdose in 1951. Jones was also a highly successful actress who was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one for playing Bernadette Soubirous in 1943’s “The Song of Bernadette.” Walker Sr. and Jones divorced in 1945, with the latter re-marrying “Gone With the Wind” and “Rebecca” producer David O. Selznick.

In 1967, Walker Jr. starred in “The War Dragon” with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas. His career throughout the ’80s and ’90s mostly consisted of guest appearances in TV shows, including two cameos in “Murder, She Wrote” opposite Angela Lansbury. Later on in his TV career, Walker Jr. appeared in “L.A. Law” and “In the Heat of the Night,” both in 1991. His final screen credit was a small role in the 2018 thriller “Beyond the Darkness.”

(VARIETY)