She played the stoic captain of “Star Trek: Voyager” and the volatile Russian convict, Red, of “Orange Is the New Black.”
Judging from her memoir “Born With Teeth,” out this month, Kate Mulgrew’s off-screen life hasn’t lacked for drama, passion and heartache — including her sense of loss when, after becoming pregnant at 22, her acting career on the rise, she gave up her baby girl for adoption.
“I am about to turn 60,” Mulgrew tells The Post, “and it seems to me that I wrote this book because, after 40 years of playing other people, I thought it time that I stepped forward as myself.”
She and Rosie O’Donnell will speak about that life May 3 at the Vineyard Theatre.
Here are four books she loves:
When Paris Went Dark by Ronald C. Rosbottom
A riveting, often shocking and continually moving account of Paris under German occupation. It was both elucidating and bracing to learn that many Parisians found the German presence intolerable and discovered myriad ingenious ways of making the interlopers excruciatingly uncomfortable.
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín
First and most important, the writer is Irish and therefore his style is at once lyrical and confrontational. This character study of a woman in grief is superb because Tóibín never apologizes, never equivocates — he explores with the skill of a great hunter: While showing compassion for his prey, he means to kill. And so my heart, while reading, was racing.
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee
Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t publish a book until she was nearly 60 years old. Lee shows us why, with elegance, sympathy and an uncanny understanding of [Fitzgerald’s] principles and her willingness to live a good part of her life in a houseboat on the Thames.
Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
Having fallen in love with “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” I wanted to learn about the mind behind these masterpieces, and ordered this memoir. I wasn’t disappointed. Mantel is sharp, but there’s poetry at the tip of her knife. Life seems mysterious, but reality is often cruel and misleading. Mantel documents what she observes with honesty and goes (with precision) for the jugular.