Kellerman, who was born June 2, 1937 in Long Beach, California, was afforded a bit of pop culture immortality when she was cast as Dr. Elizabeth Dehner in the 1965 second pilot for Star Trek — and the one that sold the series — “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” In it, she and another Enterprise crewmember, played by Gary Lockwood, are transformed into god-like beings. “I knew nothing about Star Trek,” she admitted in the pages of the Star Trek oral history, The Fifty-Year Mission. “I didn’t read any of the famous science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, and I’d been guest starring on every show in the sixties. I’d just finished Kraft Theatre with Gary Lockwood, and the one time we were shooting our scene and he didn’t know his lines, I thought, ‘Oh, what an amateur.’ Next thing I know, I’m cast in the pilot of Star Trek with Gary Lockwood, The Amateur. When I saw him staging all the fight scenes, I got over that amateur stuff! I was swooning offstage. But, anyway, we had no idea what it was and that awful outfit, with the pants that didn’t quite fit.
“I was always playing the hard-bitten drunk or beaten up, and now I’m in this outfit and wondering what the heck it was all about,” Sally elaborated. “Of course, Bill Shatner has a great sense of humor, so it was a lot of fun around him. Leonard Nimoy had directed me in a play before this, for which I came late probably more than once to rehearsal. The last time I came there he said, ‘Please step outside,’ and so we were outside and he said, ‘Why is it that all you talented people are always the ones who come late?’ Of course, I didn’t hear anything about being late, I just heard the word talented. One time someone came up to me and said, ‘You are the reason the pilot sold’ and I said, ‘I always felt that was true. Of course it was me.'”