Patti Yasutake, Beef and Star Trek actress was 70

Patti Yasutake, the stage and screen actress best known for her roles as Alyssa Ogawa in the Star Trek franchise and Fumi Nakai on Beef, has died at the age of 70.

Patti Yasutake on ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’.

Everett

Yasutake passed peacefully surrounded by family and friends on Monday after “a long brave battle with cancer,” her manager Kyle Fritz confirmed to Entertainment Weekly.

“Patti was my first client when I began over thirty years ago,” Fritz said in a statement. “We enjoyed every day we got to work together, and I will miss her spirit, talent, and tenacity, but most of all, her friendship.”

Yasutake began her career at East West Players, the Asian American theatre organization co-founded by legendary actors Mako Iwamatsu and James Hong, after graduating from UCLA with a degree in theater in the 1970s.

“There [were] really no opportunities to have a career as an Asian American actress,” she recalled to Netflix’s Tudum last year of those early days of her career. “I didn’t do martial arts, I didn’t speak a second language. Especially back then, that’s all they saw you as.”

She made her feature film debut in Ron Howard‘s 1986 comedy Gung Ho, playing the wife of Gedde Watanabe‘s Japanese plant manager clashing with western corporate culture at a Pennsylvania auto plant. Yasutake reprised her role in the short-lived ABC sitcom sequel before making countless guest spots in shows like Take Five, Mr. Belvedere, Murphy Brown, and Picket Fences.

Her most memorable role came as nurse Alyssa Ogawa in the 1990s series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which she would reprise for 1994’s Star Trek: Generations and 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact.

Notable film credits include Drop Dead Gorgeous and The Wash, the latter of which earned her a Best Supporting Female nomination at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in 1989. Other TV credits include Grey’s Anatomy, Cold Case, Bones, the Young and the Restless, NCIS: Los Angeles, The Closer, and Pretty Little Liars.

Yasutake’s final role before her death was as Fumi Nakai on Lee Sung Jin‘s Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning series Beef. She played the domineering mother of Joseph Lee’s George who finds herself wrapped up in her daughter-in-law’s (played by Ali Wong) escalating feud with a down-on-his-luck contractor (Steven Yeun).

“It was like the clouds parted and the sun came through,” she told Tudum of her first read of the script. “I was just elated, this many decades into my career, that a role like this would come along.”

Yasutake is survived by siblings Linda Hayashi and Steven Yasutake and a large extended family of nephews and nieces.