Michael Forest, Star Trek’s Apollo, Dies at 97. He Dubbed Hundreds of Films in Rome Before Decades of Anime
Michael Forest, who played the god Apollo on Star Trek in 1967, has died at 97. Trekkies knew the face. Anime fans knew the voice, often without knowing whose it was: he spent a decade dubbing films in Rome and then decades more in Los Angeles dubbing booths, sometimes under the name Alfred Thor.
Michael Forest died on Wednesday, October 14, at a seniors’ facility in Sparks, Nevada, where he had lived in recent years. He was 97.
His friend James A. Brown shared the news on Facebook. “It is with great sadness that I report that we have lost Michael Forest,” Brown wrote, as quoted by Page Six. “I knew him as an actor and loved him as a friend.”
Most obituaries lead with one hour of television. This one should too, but it’s worth staying for what came after, because few screen actors of his generation built a second career out of their voice the way he did.
Apollo, and a voice that got him the part
Forest played Apollo in “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, the 1967 Star Trek episode in which a Greek god turns up in orbit and demands the Enterprise crew worship him. He was a giant in a gold tunic with a laurel crown, and the role followed him for the rest of his life.
He didn’t expect it to. “My understanding was that they wanted Jon Voight, but he’d been cast in something else,” he told StarTrek.com in 2012.
The audition, as he recalled it, came down to his voice as much as his build. “They had me take my shirt off to see if I had the muscles they were looking for,” Forest said in that interview, quoted by Page Six. “Then they wanted me to do it in a British accent.”
Image: Paramount, Star Trek (1967), as shown in Star Trek Continues' video A message from Michael
He offered something else. “I can give you Mid-Atlantic theater speech, which I think will work for this character.” That was the reading that got him the job, and it’s the voice of Apollo people still quote.
Before Star Trek, Forest had already spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in westerns and Roger Corman’s low-budget films. He turns up in Bonanza, Gunsmoke and The Rifleman, and as one of three alien brothers in The Twilight Zone episode “Black Leather Jackets.”
Ten years in Rome, speaking for other actors
The year after Apollo, Forest left Hollywood. He lived in Rome from 1968 to 1978, fluent in Italian, and worked steadily as a dubbing actor there. High On Films puts the count at more than 500 films. Other outlets say hundreds.
Rome was a busy place for an English-speaking voice in those years. Italian productions were made for export, and their English versions were recorded in Roman studios by a small pool of actors who could match the lips of someone else’s performance and make it sound like the original.
He acted on camera there too. “I did a few films in Italy, which were comedies, and I’ve had people come up to me about one of them,” he told StarTrek.com. “I’m not really a comedian, but that was fun.”
Back in the United States, the experience fit straight into the next boom in dubbing. When English versions of Japanese animation took off in the 1980s and 1990s, Los Angeles studios needed actors who could fit a line into someone else’s timing. Forest could.
Alfred Thor and the anime years
In anime credits he was sometimes listed as Alfred Thor, which is why plenty of fans who heard him for years never connected the voice to the Star Trek god.
VoiceEditSuiteNewAuto Clean Up now learns you.Learns from numbers, never your audio. Never used to train AI.See how it worksHe played Alex Rosewater in The Big O, Kubota in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Inuyama in Samurai Champloo and the Emperor of Anatoray in Last Exile. He was Lurald in Trigun, Dr. Gnomm in Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise and Doctor Seijiro Inui in Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. In video games he voiced Huang Gai in Dynasty Warriors 4.
And at 71 he became a villain for a new generation of children, as Prince Olympius in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue. That is a booth career most working voice actors would be glad to have, and most of it came after he turned 60.
His screen work never stopped completely either. He played the general Khalid bin Walid in The Message and turned up in King Kong Lives, Body of Evidence and Cast Away.
Back on the bridge, with his wife beside him
In 2013, at 84, Forest put the gold costume back on. The fan-produced series Star Trek Continues opened its first episode, “Pilgrim of Eternity”, with an aged Apollo, almost 46 years after the original. His wife, the actress and acting coach Diana Hale, appeared alongside him.
They had married in 1970 and were together for more than 50 years. Hale died in 2022.
Image: Star Trek Continues, Pilgrim of Eternity
Star Trek Continues kept him close afterwards. In 2016 he recorded a video message from his home for the series’ crowdfunding campaign, sitting in front of shelves of books and framed photographs, still with that voice.
He was modest about the whole thing. “I’ve done other work that was as good, if not better,” he told StarTrek.com, and an interview quoted by The Hollywood Reporter has him summing it up this way: “I look back, and it certainly hasn’t been what you might call a distinguished career, but on the other hand, it hasn’t been bad.”
Image: Star Trek Continues, A message from Michael (2016)
For voice actors, it’s a career worth looking at closely. A B-movie leading man built a working life in other people’s mouths, in two languages and on two continents, and was still finding new audiences in his seventies.
Sources: Page Six (via Yahoo), StarTrek.com (2012 interview), High On Films, CBR, That Eric Alper, Hello! (via Yahoo), Wikipedia, Star Trek Continues. Hero image: Star Trek Continues, “Pilgrim of Eternity”.
Lee este artículo en español: Muere Michael Forest, el Apolo de Star Trek, a los 97 años. Dobló cientos de películas en Roma antes de décadas de anime
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