She is best known for her roles as Captain Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager and Red in Orange Is the New Black.

She is a member of the Alzheimer's Association National Advisory Council and the voice of Cleveland's MetroHealth System.

Beginning in 2021, Mulgrew reprised her role as Janeway in the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy.

She remained friends with former co-star Ilene Kristen and presented a special Soap Opera Digest Award to Ryan's Hope creator Claire Labine in 1995.

While in Ryan's Hope, she also played Emily Webb in the American Shakespeare Theatre production of Our Town in Stratford, Connecticut.

In 1981, Mulgrew co-starred with Richard Burton and Nicholas Clay in the Arthurian love triangle Lovespell as Irish princess Isolt, who casts a spell on Mark, King of Cornwall, and his surrogate son, Tristan.

Also in 1992, Mulgrew had a guest-starring role as a soap opera star in Murder, She Wrote, episode number 170, "Ever After".

In 1994, Mulgrew received a call to take the part of Captain Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager.

[10] Mulgrew made history in the Star Trek franchise when she became the first female captain as a series regular in a leading role.

I grew to really love Star Trek: Voyager, and out of a cast of nine, I've made three great friends, I managed to raise two children.

[13][14] When Voyager came to an end after seven full seasons, Mulgrew returned to theater, and in 2003 starred in a one-woman play called Tea at Five, a monologue reminiscence based on Katharine Hepburn's memoir Me: Stories of My Life.

[16] Mulgrew returned to television in 2006, guest-starring in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

[19] Also in 2008, Mulgrew filmed the 30-minute courtroom drama The Response, which is based on actual transcripts of the Guantanamo Bay tribunals.

It was researched and fully vetted in conjunction with the University of Maryland School of Law and was shot in three days.

Mulgrew portrays Colonel Sims and the other cast members, the crew, and she agreed to defer their salaries to cover the production costs.

[20] In 2009, Mulgrew appeared in the NBC medical series Mercy, playing the recurring role of Jeannie Flanagan (the mother of the show's lead, Veronica).

[21] Released in 2010, the film The Best and Brightest, a comedy based in the world of New York City's elite private kindergartens, featured Mulgrew as the Player's wife.

[24] From July 2011 to December 2013, Mulgrew appeared as the main cast member on Adult Swim's NTSF:SD:SUV:: as Kove, the leader of the titular terrorism-fighting unit and ex-wife of series lead Paul Scheer's character.

Mulgrew starred as inmate Galina "Red" Reznikov in the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black, the role for which she was nominated for her first Primetime Emmy Award in 2014.

In 2014, Mulgrew narrated a documentary film, The Principle, that aims to promote the discredited idea of the geocentric model.

"[26][27] Mulgrew starred in the fall 2024 Off-Broadway production by the Irish Repertory Theatre of The Beacon by playwright Nancy Harris.

For myself, abortion was not an alternative, but neither was the possibility of living in a society and under the jurisdiction of a coterie of aging Republican men who somehow think they can understand what it is to have a womb.