Ricardo Montalban, the Mexican-born television star and all-time great Star Trek screen villain from The Wrath of Khan, died Wednesday in Los Angeles at the age of 88.
Beginning his career in Mexican movies, Montalban arrived in Hollywood in the mid-1940s, quickly rising to leading-man status in the musicals of the era before embarking on an acting career spanning more than five decades.
Perhaps best known in pop-culture circles as white-suited man of mystery Mr. Roarke on ABC’s Fantasy Island, Montalban also played the honorable animal trainer Armando in Escape From the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
But sci-fi movie fans will always remember his epic, villainous turn as Khan Noonien Singh — driving Capt. James T. Kirk to near-insanity in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.
While Montalban’s TV appearance as Khan in the original Star Trek episode "Space Seed" was based on controlled menace, his older, angrier big-screen version was bat-dropping crazy — a raging force of nature.
Deliberately operatic in scope, Montalban’s Star Trek II performance was pointedly over the top, meeting William Shatner’s always larger-than-life Kirk head-on in a classic Hollywood screen battle.
The resulting story is not just the best Star Trek movie by far — it’s a film good enough to recommend to any cinema buff as a classic adventure yarn.
Always classy and dignified both on and off screen, Montalban is survived by two sons, two daughters and six grandchildren.
Image courtesy Paramount Pictures
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