Leonard Nimoy - # 100

Leonard Nimoy dies at 83

He was the 100th person on the list in just under three years.

Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.

His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Mr. Nimoy announced last year that he had the disease, attributing it to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.

His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: “Live long and prosper” (from the Vulcan “Dif-tor heh smusma”).

As part of the Yiddish Book Center Wexler Oral History Project, Leonard Nimoy explains the origin of the Vulcan hand signal used by Spock, his character in the “Star Trek” series. Video by Yiddish Book Center on Publish Date February 27, 2015. Photo by Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project.

Mr. Nimoy, who was teaching Method acting at his own studio when he was cast in the original “Star Trek” television series in the mid-1960s, relished playing outsiders, and he developed what he later admitted was a mystical identification with Spock, the lone alien on the starship’s bridge.

Yet he also acknowledged ambivalence about being tethered to the character, expressing it most plainly in the titles of two autobiographies: “I Am Not Spock,” published in 1975, and “I Am Spock,” published in 1995.

In the first, he wrote, “In Spock, I finally found the best of both worlds: to be widely accepted in public approval and yet be able to continue to play the insulated alien through the Vulcan character.”

“Star Trek,” which had its premiere on NBC on Sept. 8, 1966, made Mr. Nimoy a star. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, called him “the conscience of ‘Star Trek’ ” — an often earnest, sometimes campy show that employed the distant future (as well as some special effects that appear primitive by today’s standards) to take on social issues of the 1960s.

His stardom would endure. Though the series was canceled after three seasons because of low ratings, a cultlike following — the conference-holding, costume-wearing Trekkies, or Trekkers (the designation Mr. Nimoy preferred) — coalesced soon after “Star Trek” went into syndication.

The fans’ devotion only deepened when “Star Trek” was spun off into an animated show, various new series and an uneven parade of movies starring much of the original television cast, including — besides Mr. Nimoy — William Shatner (as Captain Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), George Takei (the helmsman, Sulu), James Doohan (the chief engineer, Scott), Nichelle Nichols (the chief communications officer, Uhura) and Walter Koenig (the navigator, Chekov).

When the director J. J. Abrams revived the “Star Trek” film franchise in 2009, with an all-new cast including Zachary Quinto as Spock, he included a cameo part for Mr. Nimoy, as an older version of the same character. Mr. Nimoy also appeared in the 2013 follow-up, “Star Trek Into Darkness.”

His zeal to entertain and enlighten reached beyond “Star Trek” and crossed genres. He had a starring role in the dramatic television series “Mission: Impossible” and frequently performed onstage, notably as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” His poetry was voluminous, and he published books of his photography.

He also directed movies, including two from the “Star Trek” franchise, and television shows. He directed the ride films for the Epcot attraction Body Wars. And he made records, singing pop songs as well as original songs about “Star Trek,” and gave spoken-word performances — to the delight of his fans and the bewilderment of critics.

But all that was subsidiary to Mr. Spock, the most complex member of the Enterprise crew, who was both one of the gang and a creature apart, engaged at times in a lonely struggle with his warring racial halves.

In one of his most memorable “Star Trek” performances, Mr. Nimoy tried to follow in the tradition of two actors he admired, Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, who each played a monstrous character — Quasimodo and the Frankenstein monster — who is transformed by love.

In Episode 24, which was first shown on March 2, 1967, Mr. Spock is indeed transformed. Under the influence of aphrodisiacal spores he discovers on the planet Omicron Ceti III, he lets free his human side and announces his love for Leila Kalomi (Jill Ireland), a woman he had once known on Earth. In this episode, Mr. Nimoy brought to Spock’s metamorphosis not only warmth, compassion and playfulness, but also a rarefied concept of alienation.

“I am what I am, Leila,” Mr. Spock declares after the spores’ effect has worn off and his emotions are again in check. “And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.”

Born in Boston on March 26, 1931, Leonard Simon Nimoy was the second son of Max and Dora Nimoy, Ukrainian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. His father worked as a barber.

From the age of 8, Leonard acted in local productions, winning parts at a community college, where he performed through his high school years. In 1949, after taking a summer course at Boston College, he traveled to Hollywood, though it wasn’t until 1951 that he landed small parts in two movies, “Queen for a Day” and “Rhubarb.”

He continued to be cast in little-known movies, although he did presciently play an alien invader in a cult serial called “Zombies of the Stratosphere,” and in 1961 he had a minor role on an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” His first starring movie role came in 1952 with “Kid Monk Baroni,” in which he played a disfigured Italian street-gang leader who becomes a boxer.

Mr. Nimoy served in the Army for two years, rising to sergeant and spending 18 months at Fort McPherson in Georgia, where he presided over shows for the Army’s Special Services branch. He also directed and starred as Stanley in the Atlanta Theater Guild’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” before receiving his final discharge in November 1955.

He then returned to California, where he worked as a soda jerk, movie usher and cabdriver while studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He achieved wide visibility in the late 1950s and early 1960s on television shows like “Wagon Train,” “Rawhide” and “Perry Mason.” Then came “Star Trek.”

Mr. Nimoy returned to college in his 40s and earned a master’s degree in Spanish from Antioch University Austin, an affiliate of Antioch College in Ohio, in 1978. Antioch University later awarded Mr. Nimoy an honorary doctorate.

Mr. Nimoy directed the movies “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” (1984) and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986), which he helped write. In 1991, the same year that he resurrected Mr. Spock on two episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Mr. Nimoy was also the executive producer and a writer of the movie “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”

He then directed the hugely successful comedy “Three Men and a Baby” (1987), a far cry from his science-fiction work, and appeared in made-for-television movies. He received an Emmy nomination for the 1982 movie “A Woman Called Golda,” in which he portrayed the husband of Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, who was played by Ingrid Bergman. It was the fourth Emmy nomination of his career — the other three were for his “Star Trek” work — although he never won.

Mr. Nimoy’s marriage to the actress Sandi Zober ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, Adam and Julie Nimoy; a stepson, Aaron Bay Schuck; six grandchildren and one great-grandchild; and an older brother, Melvin.

Though his speaking voice was among his chief assets as an actor, the critical consensus was that his music was mortifying. Mr. Nimoy, however, was undaunted, and his fans seemed to enjoy the camp of his covers of songs like “If I Had a Hammer.” (His first album was called “Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music From Outer Space.”)

From 1977 to 1982, Mr. Nimoy hosted the syndicated series “In Search Of ...,” which explored mysteries like the Loch Ness monster and U.F.O.s. He also narrated “Ancient Mysteries” on the History Channel and appeared in commercials, including two with Mr. Shatner for Priceline.com. He provided the voice for animated characters in “Transformers: The Movie,” in 1986, and “The Pagemaster,” in 1994.

He directed an attraction called Body Wars, a motion simulator attraction inside the Wonders of Life pavilion at the Walt Disney World Resort's Epcot.


In 2001 he voiced the king of Atlantis in the Disney animated movie “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” and in 2005 he furnished voice-overs for the computer game Civilization IV. More recently, he had a recurring role on the science-fiction series “Fringe” and was heard, as the voice of Spock, in an episode of the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”

Mr. Nimoy was an active supporter of the arts as well. The Thalia, a venerable movie theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, now a multi-use hall that is part of Symphony Space, was renamed the Leonard Nimoy Thalia in 2002.

He also found his voice as a writer. Besides his autobiographies, he published “A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life” in 2002. Typical of Mr. Nimoy’s simple free verse are these lines: “In my heart/Is the seed of the tree/Which will be me.”

In later years, he rediscovered his Jewish heritage, and in 1991 he produced and starred in “Never Forget,” a television movie based on the story of a Holocaust survivor who sued a neo-Nazi organization of Holocaust deniers.

In 2002, having illustrated his books of poetry with his photographs, Mr. Nimoy published “Shekhina,” a book devoted to photography with a Jewish theme, that of the feminine aspect of God. His black-and-white photographs of nude and seminude women struck some Orthodox Jewish leaders as heretical, but Mr. Nimoy asserted that his work was consistent with the teachings of the kabbalah.

His religious upbringing also influenced the characterization of Spock. The character’s split-fingered salute, he often explained, had been his idea: He based it on the kohanic blessing, a manual approximation of the Hebrew letter shin, which is the first letter in Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God.

“To this day, I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior,” Mr. Nimoy wrote years after the original series ended.

But that wasn’t such a bad thing, he discovered. “Given the choice,” he wrote, “if I had to be someone else, I would be Spock.”



Filmography

Film

Year Title Role Notes

1951 Queen for a Day Chief

1951 Rhubarb Young Ball Player Uncredited

1952 Kid Monk Baroni Paul 'Monk' Baroni

1952 Francis Goes to West Point Football player Uncredited

1952 Zombies of the Stratosphere Narab

1953 Old Overland Trail Chief Black Hawk

1954 Combat Psychiatry – The Division Psychiatrist Distraught marine Uncredited

Documentary

1954 Them! Army Staff Sergeant Uncredited

1958 The Brain Eaters Professor Cole As Leonard Nemoy

1963 The Balcony Roger

1965 Deathwatch Jules Lefranc Also producer

1971 Catlow Miller

1973 Baffled! Tom Kovak

1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers Dr. David Kibner

1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture Spock

1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Captain Spock

1984 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Also director

1986 The Transformers: The Movie Galvatron Voice

1986 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Captain Spock Also director and story by

1987 Three Men and a Baby Director

1988 The Good Mother Director

1989 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Captain Spock

1990 Funny About Love Director

1991 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Captain Spock Also writer

1993 Lights: The Miracle Of Chanukah Voice

Short animated film

1994 Holy Matrimony Director

1994 The Pagemaster Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde Voice

1995 Titanica Narrator Voice

Documentary

1997 A Life Apart: Hasidism in America Narrator Voice

Documentary

1997 The First Men in the Moon William Carver Direct-to-video

1998 The Harryhausen Chronicles Narrator Voice

Documentary

1998 Armageddon: Target Earth Narrator Voice

1999 Rashi: A Light After the Dark Ages Rashi Voice

Short film

2000 Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists Akron / Baraka / King Chandra Voices

2001 Atlantis: The Lost Empire King Kashekim Nedakh Voice

2005 Rambam: The Story of Maimonides Rambam (Rabbi Mosche Ben Maimon) Voice

Illustrated-animated film

2009 Star Trek Spock Prime

2009 Land of the Lost The Zarn Voice

2011 Transformers: Dark of the Moon Sentinel Prime Voice

2012 Zambezia Sekhuru Voice

2012 New England Time Capsule Narrator Voice   Documentary

2012 Hava Nagila: The Movie Himself    Documentary

2013 Miracle of Israel Narrator Voice   Documentary

2013 Star Trek Into Darkness Spock Prime Cameo; final film role

2016 For the Love of Spock Himself Documentary; Posthumous release





Television

Year Title Role Notes

1954 Dragnet Julius Carver Episode "The Big Boys"

1956 The West Point Story Tom Kennedy 2 episodes

1957–1958 Highway Patrol Harry Wells / Ray 2 episodes

1957–1958 Broken Arrow Apache / Nahilzay / Winnoa 3 episodes

1958 Harbor Command Fred Garrison Episode: "Contraband Diamonds"

1958 Mackenzie's Raiders Kansas Episode: "The Imposter"

1958–1960 Sea Hunt Indio 6 episodes

1959 Dragnet Karlo Rozwadowski Episode: "The Big Name"

1959 Tombstone Territory Little Hawk Episode: "The Horse Thief"

1959–1962 Wagon Train Bernabe Zamora, et al. 4 episodes

1960 Bonanza Freddy Episode "The Ape"

1960 M Squad Bob Nash Episode "Badge for a Coward"

1960 Tate Comanche Leader Episode "Comanche Scalps"

1960 The Rebel Jim Colburn Episode "The Hunted"

1961 Gunsmoke John Walking Fox / Holt / Arnie / Elias Grice 4 episodes

1960, 1961 The Tall Man Deputy Sheriff Johnny Swift 2 episodes

1961 The Twilight Zone Hansen Episode: "A Quality of Mercy"

1961 87th Precinct Barrow Episode: "Very Hard Sell"

1961 Rawhide Anko Episode: "Incident Before Black Pass"

1962 The Untouchables Packy Episode: "Takeover"

1963 Perry Mason Pete Chennery Episode: "The Case of the Shoplifter's Shoe"

1963 Combat! Neumann Episode: "The Wounded Don't Cry"

1963 The Virginian Lt. Beldon M.D. Episode: "Man of Violence"

1964 The Outer Limits Konig / Judson Ellis 2 episodes

1964 The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Vladeck Episode: "The Project Strigas Affair"

1965 Death Valley Days Yellow Bear Episode: "The Journey"

1965 Combat! Pvt. Baum Episode: "The Raiders"

1965 The Virginian Benjamin Frome Episode: "The Showdown"

1966 Gunsmoke John Walking Fox Episode: "The Treasure of John Walking Fox"

1966 A Man Called Shenandoah Del Hillman Episode: "Run, Killer, Run"

1966 Get Smart Stryker Episode: "The Dead Spy Scrawls"

1966 Daniel Boone Oontah Episode: "Seminole Territory"

1966–1969 Star Trek Spock 79 episodes

1967 Valley of Mystery Spencer Atherton Television film

1969–1971 Mission: Impossible The Great Paris 49 episodes

1971 Assault on the Wayne Commander Phil Kettenring Television film

1972 Night Gallery Henry Auden Episode: "She'll Be Company For You"

1973 Columbo Dr. Barry Mayfield Episode: "A Stitch in Crime"

1973 Baffled! Tom Kovack Television film

1973 The Alpha Caper Mitch Television film

1973 Night Gallery Directed episode: "Death on a Barge"

1973–1974 Star Trek: The Animated Series Spock (voice) 22 episodes

1974 Rex Harrison Presents Stories of Love Mick Television film

1975 The Missing Are Deadly Dr. Durov Television film

1976–1982 In Search of ... Narrator/Host 145 episodes

1980 Seizure: The Story of Kathy Morris Dr. Richard Connought Television film

1981 Vincent Theo van Gogh Television film; also director and co-writer

1982–1987 Standby...Lights! Camera! Action! Himself (host) 20 episodes

1982 A Woman Called Golda Morris Meyerson Television film

1982 The Powers of Matthew Star Directed episode: "The Triangle"

1983 Marco Polo Ahmad Fanakati 3 episodes

1983 T. J. Hooker Lt. Paul McGuire Episode: "Vengeance is Mine"

1983 T. J. Hooker Directed episode: "The Decoy"

1984 The Sun Also Rises Count Mippipopolous 2 episodes

1991 Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories Narrator (voice) Episode: "Ghosts R Us/Legend of Kate Morgan/School Spirit"

1986 Faerie Tale Theatre The Evil Moroccan Magician Episode: "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp"

1991 Never Forget Mel Mermelstein Television film

1991 Star Trek: The Next Generation Ambassador Spock Episodes: "Unification"

1993 The Halloween Tree Mr. Moundshroud (voice) Television film

1993, 1997 The Simpsons Himself (voice) 2 episodes

1994–1998 Ancient Mysteries Narrator (voice) 91 episodes

1995 Bonanza: Under Attack Frank James Television film

1995–1997 Deadly Games Executive producer and directed episode: "Killshot"

1995 The Outer Limits Thomas Cutler Episode: "I, Robot"

1996 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Spock Archive footage used in one episode (Trials and Tribble-ations)

1997 David Samuel Television film

1997 Duckman Himself Episode: "Where No Duckman Has Gone Before"

1998 Brave New World Mustapha Mond Television film

1998 The Lost World Angus McArdle (voice) Television film

1998 Invasion America General Konrad (voice) 4 episodes

1999, 2002 Futurama Himself (voice) 2 episodes

2001 Becker Professor Emmett Fowler Episode: "The TorMentor"

2009–2012 Fringe Dr. William Bell 11 episodes

2012 The Big Bang Theory Action figure Spock (voice) Uncredited

Episode: "The Transporter Malfunction"

Music videos

Year Title Artist

1967 "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" Leonard Nimoy

1985 "Going Down to Liverpool" The Bangles

2011 "The Lazy Song" Bruno Mars

Video games

Year Title Voice role

1992 Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Spock

1993 Star Trek: Judgment Rites Spock

1999 Seaman Narrator

2005 Civilization IV Narrator

2010 Star Trek Online Spock

2010 Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Master Xehanort

2012 Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance Master Xehanort