The actor who played the Greek god Apollo on “Star Trek” and worked in Hollywood for seven decades has died.
Michael Forest died Oct. 14, 2026, in Sparks, Nev., at 97.
His friend James A. Brown announced the death Friday, Oct. 16, in a Facebook post. “It is with great sadness that I report that we have lost Michael Forest. I knew him as an actor and loved him as a friend. I’m sure others will share, but that’s all I’m capable of right now,” Brown wrote.
Brown’s post carried a photo of himself with the actor and a picture of the nameplate outside Forest’s room at MorningStar Senior Living in Sparks, his recent residence. The nameplate read “Jerry Charlebois” — a nod to the name he was born with, Gerald Michael Charlebois.
A cause of death has not been disclosed. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Forest built more than 200 credits across seven decades, and the one that followed him everywhere lasted a single hour of television.
Three Auditions for One Episode
He appeared in exactly one episode of “Star Trek: The Original Series,” and it is the one fans remember. “Who Mourns for Adonais?” aired in 1967 and cast him as a towering being who claimed to be Apollo and demanded worship from the crew of the USS Enterprise. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy starred alongside him.
Forest told StarTrek.com in a 2012 interview that producers made him audition three times before handing him the part. They asked him to take his shirt off so they could check whether he had the build they wanted. They also wanted a British accent, and he said that would not work for him, offering instead mid-Atlantic theater speech. He read the part that way, and the role was his.
The episode, he said in that interview, had “really given [him his] 15 minutes of fame.”
Leslie Parrish played Lt. Carolyn Palamas opposite him in the episode. She died at 90 in late 2025.
Boxing Plans, Then a Stage
He was born April 17, 1929, in Harvey, N.D., and moved with his family to Seattle as a young child. He considered boxing for a living and changed course after watching a friend perform on stage.
Forest earned a bachelor’s degree in English and drama from San Jose State University, then moved to Los Angeles in 1955, where an acting class introduced him to director Roger Corman. Corman cast him in “The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent,” “Beast From Haunted Cave” in 1959 and “Ski Troop Attack” in 1960.
He took the title role in the 1961 sword-and-sandal adventure “Atlas,” appeared in “100 Rifles” with Burt Reynolds, Raquel Welch and Jim Brown, and played Khalid bin Walid in “The Message.” Later came “King Kong Lives,” the 1993 thriller “Body of Evidence” with Madonna, and a pilot in the 2000 Tom Hanks film “Cast Away.”
Television kept him busier still. He turned up on “Zorro,” “Have Gun – Will Travel,” “Maverick,” “Rawhide,” “Wagon Train,” “Gunsmoke” and three episodes of “Bonanza.”
In 1964 he played a former boyfriend of Laura Petrie, played by Mary Tyler Moore, on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — a man who had become a priest. That same year he turned up as a member of an alien biker gang in “The Twilight Zone” episode “Black Leather Jackets.” He also played a character named Lupesh in the first season of “Mission: Impossible,” broadcast in 1967.
Forest worked in soaps as well, among them “As the World Turns,” “Days of Our Lives” and “The Young and the Restless,” and he appeared on “Silk Stalkings.”
From Rome Dubbing to Anime
He lived in Rome between 1968 and 1978 and dubbed hundreds of films there, sometimes credited as Alfred Thor. That work started a second career that made him one of anime’s busiest voices in English-language dubbing.
He voiced Alex Rosewater in “The Big O,” Kubota in “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex,” Inuyama in “Samurai Champloo,” Lurald in “Trigun,” Doctor Seijiro Inui in “Paprika” and Captain Paolo in the “Mobile Suit Gundam” movie trilogy. He also played Dorai, Chun-Li’s father, in “Street Fighter II: V,” and worked on the “Dynasty Warriors” video game franchise.
At 71, he played the villainous Prince Olympius in “Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue.”
Apollo Again, Nearly 46 Years
Forest put the role back on in 2013, returning as Apollo in the fan-made web series “Star Trek Continues” in the episode “Pilgrim of Eternity,” nearly 46 years after the original. His wife, the actress and acting coach Diana Hale, played the goddess Athena in that episode. The two married in 1970 and were together 52 years, until her death in 2022.
His 1967 performance surfaced again in footage used in 2016’s “X-Men: Apocalypse.” In 2020 he was one of 40 “Star Trek” actors in Snoop Dogg’s sci-fi parody “Unbelievable!!!!!”
He met fans at The Hollywood Show in Los Angeles in 2014 and 2017, and at the 17th annual “Star Trek” convention in Las Vegas in 2018. About eight months before his death, he received a collection of more than 600 letters from fans thanking him for his work.
Forest himself never treated the Apollo episode as the summit. He rated much of his other work alongside it, or above it.
