Watch the Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles, directed by Joseph Pevney

Joseph Pevney’s showbusiness career began as a boy soprano in vaudeville in New York in the early 20th century. He went on to become a film director in Hollywood, working with stars including Jimmy Cagney and Joan Crawford, but enjoyed his greatest success on television, directing no fewer than 14 episodes in the early Star Trek series in the 1960s and becoming one of the most revered names in the Trekkie universe.

No one directed more episodes of the original classic incarnation of Gene Roddenberry’s space drama than Pevney. He tied with the late Marc Daniels on 14 and was responsible for such highly regarded instalments as The City on the Edge of Forever, in which Captain Kirk and Mr Spock must travel back in time to stop Dr McCoy from changing history, and The Trouble with Tribbles, a comic episode in which furball-type pets start multiplying furiously and threaten to overrun the Starship Enterprise.

Pevney directed more than 30 films and hundreds of episodes of television shows, contributing to several other classic series, including Wagon Train (1963-64), the series that provided Roddenberry with the template for Star Trek, The Munsters (1964-66), Mission: Impossible (1967) and Bonanza (1968-72).

He was born in New York City in 1911, began in vaudeville and graduated to Broadway as an actor. During the Second World War he served in the US Army Signal Corps and helped to organise shows for troops in Europe.

After the war he settled in California with his first wife, the actress and singer Mitzi Green, and appeared in supporting roles in several highly rated thrillers in the film noir genre, including Body and Soul (1947) and The Street with No Name (1948).

His first film as director was another noir, Shakedown (1950), with Howard Duff, Brian Donlevy and Lawrence Tierney. Rock Hudson had a tiny role as a doorman. Pevney built a solid career as a director, though never of the first rank. He worked with Alan Ladd on Desert Legion (1953), Joan Crawford on Female on the Beach (1955), Debbie Reynolds on Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), Cagney on Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) and Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine on Torpedo Run (1958).

By the early 1960s he had given up the cinema and was working regularly in television. He directed five episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour but those Star Trek episodes from the first two series remain his most significant legacy. The show was conceived by Roddenberry as “Wagon Train in space”, focusing on a multiracial crew on a 23rd-century spaceship.

The format was sufficiently flexible to accommodate both high drama and occasional comedy. Within its futuristic, sci-fi setting, it was able to address social issues of the day, including most obviously race relations — though it was not alone in doing so.

Star Trek famously flopped on initial transmission and NBC bosses took a lot of persuading to keep it going for three series before cancelling it. It had finished its original run in the US by the time it was first shown on the BBC in 1969.

However, the show quickly picked up converts when stations began showing repeats in the early 1970s, it acquired a new audience on video (and subsequently DVD) and became a genuine social phenomenon. It can claim to be the single most successful TV series, spawning feature films, several spin-off TV series and books, comics and other merchandise, and influencing social attitudes and everyday language.

Pevney retired in the mid-1980s. He was predeceased by two wives and a son and is survived by his third wife and three children.

Joseph Pevney, film and television director, was born on September 15, 1911. He died on May 18, 2008, aged 96