‘Star Trek’ Alum Dies After Illness: Jill Jacobson Was 70

Jill Jacobson, an actress best known for her roles on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the primetime soap Falcon Crest, has died. She was 70. Jacobson passed away at Cedars-Sinai’s Culver West Health Center on Sunday, Dec. 8 following “a long illness,” her friend Dan Harary told The Hollywood Reporter.

“She will be deeply missed by numerous relatives, friends and her beloved dogs, Benny and Kowalski,” he said.

After graduating with a B.S. in Radio, TV and Film Performance from the University of Texas in Austin, and relocating to Los Angeles, Jacobson began her acting career with the title role in Nurse Sherri, a slasher horror film. She followed it with roles in Harper Valley PTA, The Devlin Connection, and Splash before landing one of her most memorable roles on Falcon Crest. The actress starred as Erin Jones across more than 20 episodes of the hit CBS soap opera, which was created by Earl Hammer Jr. and aired for nine seasons.

At the same time she was starring on Falcon Crest, Jacobson also appeared in the recurring role of Larue Wilson on eight episodes of The New Gidget. Her The New Gidget co-star, Caryn Richman, said Jacobsons’ “comic timing was brilliant. And her enthusiasm and love of life made our time together on set joyful.”

Jacobson also starred as Vanessa in Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1989 episode “The Royale,” and as Chalan Aroya in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Broken Link” in 1996, per her IMDb profile. Her other credits include Days of Our Lives, Castle, Hung, Newhart, Who’s the Boss?, Quantum Leap, and Murphy Brown, among many others. Her last credited role was in the 2020 series Etheria.

“We are incredibly sad to say goodbye to our beautiful, soulful, hysterically funny, elegantly raunchy client, Jill Jacobson,” Ben Padula, her manager, added in a statement shared with Forbes. “Jill was a total spitfire of an actress with comedic timing straight out of a Marx Brothers’ flick and Hollywood glamor right from its golden age. Jill took us on so many adventures and she was an absolute blast. Thank you, Jill. We’ll see you in our dreams.”

Outside of acting, Jacobson was a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society, for which she received an award. Deadline reports that earlier this year, she revealed she overcame a two-and-a-half-year struggle with esophageal cancer that “kind of took me out of the game for a while.”