George Takei

Overview

Born
April 20, 1937 · Los Angeles, California, USA
Birth name
Hosato Takei
Nickname
- Uncle George
Height
5′ 8″ (1.73 m)

Biography

Family

Spouse
Parents

Trademarks

Deep smooth voice
Catchphrase: "Oh my!"
Unique clipped manner of speaking

Trivia

During World War II, Takei lived with his family in several government internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the applicable Executive Order No. 9066, on February 19th 1942. In December 1944, President Roosevelt suspended Executive Order 9066. Incarcerees were released, often to resettlement facilities and temporary housing, and the camps were shut down by 1946. Ironically, George shares a birthday with Adolf Hitler; he was born on Hitler's 48th birthday so he was still alive.
When he met with Gene Roddenberry about a role on Star Trek (1966), Roddenberry called him Takei (pronouncing it "Ta-KAI"), which translates from the Japanese as "expensive" or "tall" (his name is actually pronounced "Ta-KAY", which rhymes with "okay"). This is how Roddenberry remembered his name.
His family was incarcerated at an internment camp in Arkansas when he was 4 to 8 years old. He learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance while surrounded by guard towers and barbed-wire fences.
Has initially objected to the scene in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) where the tall Starfleet guard calls him "tiny". When the scene was screened for audiences, the audiences cheered Sulu (Takei) when he defeated the tall guard, and Takei later apologized to writer Harve Bennett for it.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, he and classmate Francis Ford Coppola made a student film together called "Christopher".

Quotes

[on William Shatner]: He's just a wonderful actor who created a singular character. No one could have done Kirk the way Bill did. His energy and his determination, that's Bill. And that's also Captain Kirk.
(2005) The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay. The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young.
[during a 2006 interview with Scott Simon on National Public Radio] I went to school in a black tar-paper barrack [as a child in internment camps] and began the day seeing the barbed-wire fence, and thank god those barbed-wire fences are now long gone for Japanese Americans. But I still see an invisible, legalistic barbed-wire that keeps me, my partner of 19 years, Brad Altman, and another group of Americans separated from a normal life. That's what I've been advocating on the Human Rights Campaign Equality Tour--I call it the "Equality Trek".
[on the Occupy Wall Street movement] The struggle is not only social, economic and political - it is *structural*. No matter what side you are on, it is worth listening to what they have to say.
John D.F. Black who wrote The Naked Time (1966) came to me and said he was thinking of having Sulu use a Samurai sword. I told him, "It certainly is ethnically appropriate because I am of Japanese ancestry but what about a rapier? I was born in this country and when I was a kid I didn't play Samurai. I played Robin Hood." He asked me if I know how to fence to which I replied, "Of course." That night I grabbed the phonebook and was furiously trying to find fencing schools so I could learn at least the basics.