Heading into the weeks and then days before her seven years on Star Trek Voyager ended, Kate Mulgrew felt no fear. She worried not about typecasting or life after so long a time spent in one place, on one show, playing one character. "Fear?" Mulgrew asks. "I felt none at all. First of all, I was so tired and very much looking forward to the rest. I was just too tired to fear anything. Also, I felt very proud of the work, and when you're filled with that sense of well-being you're hardly looking at the dark side. It's only since the show ended that I've realised I'm getting older and things are going to get tougher. But that's just life. You deal with it or you don't, and I choose to deal with it.

"Personally and professionally, I dealt with it and I continue to deal with it every single day," she continues. "My play, Tea at Five, was a huge success and I still have it on the road. I went to Phoenix recently and we sold out a 1,500-seat house every night. They loved it. I did this show in New York and in several other cities. People love it. That, to me, is very rewarding. Do I want to do other things? Absolutely. Will I need to do other things? Of course. Are offers flying through the door or the fax machine or the email? No, they are not. But I don't think they're doing that for anybody out there.

"This business gets tougher as you get older, especially for women as we age," Mulgrew explains. "Television and film are selling beauty and sex and all those things that are now passing me by. And it's appropriate. They should be passing me by. I am aging, and I accept that. But just like Judi Dench and so many other actresses of a certain age that I respect I think and I say, 'I have so much more to offer now.' I have to be honest and say that I don't have the edge that I used to, that sort of primitive ambition that I used to have when I was younger.

"I must also say that some of this is by choice," she continues. "I spent seven years on Star Trek, and that was a very large chunk of my life and the lives of my loved ones. I've made certain that I've reconnected with them, especially my husband. My marriage sorely needed some time and attention. And it's had it. I've spent time with my children, with my siblings and with my mother, who, as many fans know, is very sick with Alzheimer's. I buried my father, and that was tough. My husband, [Ohio politician Tim Hagan] had a heart attack, and that was a great scare for me, for us. But he's doing well now. He'll need to lose some weight and quit smoking and take much better care of himself. It was a wake-up call. So it hasn't been a banner year for love, but I think all of us around my age, all of us Baby Boomers, are experiencing similar things now. I used to talk about this when I was a little more full of it, but if you look at my past interviews [in Star Trek Magazine] you'll see that I always asked, can we age, can we deal with grief with any kind of grace and wisdom? How does grief really define us and change us? And I'm learning that for every horrible sorrow you must give that much more back. That's the only way to make it work."

As noted, Mulgrew has been taking Tea at Five on the road across America. The one-woman show casts Mulgrew as Katharine Hepburn, as the great Kate recounts the highs and lows of her own life and career, from her romance with Spencer Tracy to her days as either box office poison or acting legend. Mulgrew acknowledges it's sometimes between tough to have Hepburn - who died in the midst of a Tea at Five run - rattling around in her head for the past two or three years.

"At times it's been hard and I didn't want to go on with it," says Mulgrew, who's also made time for other play readings, charity functions and a good deal of politicking on her husband's behalf since Star Trek:Voyager beamed off the air three years ago. "Then, mysteriously and suddenly, the huge satisfaction of finding her would get me through that. I'm playing her. I'm not impersonating her. There's a great reward to that, and the audience loves that. That's a terrific connection, and it continues to feed me very well on a creative level.

"So I'm still doing the show. Matthrew Lombardo, the playwright, now owns all of the rights. He is the producer and for next season he would like to form a real national tour, and possibly we'd even go into international venues. But for right now, I am taking the show to Hartford and then to Boston in December and possibly Baltimore in January.

"I must tell you, when we first went into this I thought it would be a great annuity," the actress reveals, "something I could pull out every few years, much as Hal Holbrook does with his one-man Mark Twain show. The only problem here is that in Tea at Five I play Hepburn at age 31 in Act One. How can I possibly pull that off for years and years? I can't. So this show, or at least Kate Mulgrew in Tea at Five, is going to have a shelf life. Maybe I can do this for another three to five years. But if for those three to five years I could do the play for four to six months of the year and could devote the rest of the time to another play or a movie or a series, that would be perfectly fine. I do want to do more film and TV, but it's not that easy and I don't want to do [rubbish]. And the stage, acting in New York, that is my priority. I am financially secure enough from having done Voyager - and for that I will be forever grateful - to spend the rest of my life on stage if I choose to. So I am very happy."

Speaking of Star Trek:Voyager, it's now 10 years since th show kicked off. Mulgrew, as every Trekker worth his or her weight in Tribbles knows, replaced Genevieve Bujold in the Captain's chair after Bujold bowed out following just a couple of days of production on the pilot, Caretaker. Mulgrew, who had been the producers' second choice, immediately stepped in and made the role her own. Captain Kathryn Janeway was tough but human, and unflinching so far as doing whatever necessary to get her crew home safely. "Ten years," Mulgrew marvels. "That's a wonderful pill to swallow. Time marches on and it's over. I look back on Voyager and we all did a good job there. I did a good job. The producers did a good job. The cast did a good job. We had and have something to be proud of. I feel confident that I worked as hard as I possibly could. At the time, there were days I thought it would never end. That's another good lesson in life: things end, and then end quickly. It sneaks up on you.

"When I look back on the show, what stands out most for me are the rigorous challenges and how we met them," Kate muses. "Neck and neck for me, and I've said this many times, are the personal relationships that I formed. That cast and crew really are very dear to me, and when I see any of them, there's a real tenderness and a real understanding that we went through something together that will not be repeated and cannot be explained, really. Seven years on one show is extraordinarily rare in the life of an actor, and we experienced that, most of us, together."

Janeway herself grew and changed as the show progressed. The woman, the Starfleet captain audiences first encountered in Caretaker was a far cry form the one who bid adieu in Endgame. Even so, Mulgrew wanted more. "I always want more," she says with a laugh. "I wanted Janeway to be the best Captain ever, in the deepest sense of the word. And in that way, I think I delivered, but in other ways I'm not sure. As I say, I was proud of the work. Others can debate the merits of my work, the merits of Janway's captaincy. But that's not for me to worry about. I gave Janeway everything I had, and that's all I could do."

Paramount Home Entertainment is in the process of releasing Star Trek:Voyager DVD's, one at a time, season by season. All seven years will have hit stores by the end of 2005. Mulgrew admits that she's not sat and watched them, nor does she sound likely to do so anytime soon. "I did it," she notes. "And while I did it I watched it plenty to see the work, to see how everything around the work was coming together. Sometimes I catch an episode on TV as I'm walking through the living room or something, or through a hotel. It's almost with a sort of bemusement that I see myself. But I'm not one to sit down and put on a DVD to watch myself. I am glad they're there for the fans, though, so they can watch something they enjoy, so they can see them in such a high-quality way, and so that Voyager lives on for them."

That said, Mulgrew stull jumps on stage at the occasional Star Trek convention. They're an excuse to interact with the fan base, to meet the members of her fan clubs and to spend some time with her fellow ST:Voy actors. "I don't do many, but I do enjoy them," Mulgrew explains. "I drive the discussion when I'm on the stage. I like to talk about politics. They know that. I like to talk about Alzheimer's. They know that, too. That's my cause. I'm a member of the national board and I'm very passionate about that. I love to talk about what we discussed earlier, aging with grace in a business that doesn't handle aging very well at all. It's funny; interests change. My interests now  are very political and humanitarian. They weren's as much so just 10 years ago, when I started with the show, and when I did my first convention appearance."

It would be very easy for Mulgrew to say, 'Star Trek, been there, done that, time to move on.' She'd be within her rights not to ever attend another convention, within her rights to ignore the fans and even to not regularly check in with Star Trek Magazine. Yet, she's not done that. Why?

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