[msb-alumni] Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek Legendary Spock, Dead at 83
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:28:40 -0500
BlankLeonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNANFEB. 27, 2015
Inside
Continue reading the main story Video
Play Video|2:29
The Man Who Was Spock
The Man Who Was Spock
Leonard Nimoy, best known for playing the character Spock in the Star Trek
television shows and films, died at 83.
Video by Robin Lindsay on Publish Date February 27, 2015. Photo by Jerry
Mosey/Associated Press.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
a..
For Leonard Nimoy, Spock’s Hold Made Reaching Escape Velocity FutileFEB.
27, 2015
Continue reading the main story Share This Page
a.. Email
b.. Share
c.. Tweet
d.. Save
e.. more
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
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, which he attributed
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”).
Continue reading the main story Slide Show
Slide Show|12 Photos
Leonard Nimoy Dies at 83
Leonard Nimoy Dies at 83
CreditNBC, via Photofest
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 1977, 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 primitive special effects 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 Capt. James T. 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.”
Continue reading the main story
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. And he made records, on which he sang 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: both a colleague and a creature apart, who sometimes
struggled with his warring racial halves.
In one of his most memorable “Star Trek” episodes, 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 and
compassion, but also a rarefied concept of alienation.
“I am what I am, Leila,” Mr. Spock declared. “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.”
Continue reading the main story Video
Play Video|3:23
Nimoy Explains Origin of Vulcan Greeting
Nimoy Explains Origin of Vulcan Greeting
As part of the Yiddish Book Center Wexler Oral History Project, Leonard
Nimoy explains the origin of the Vulcan hand signal used by Dr. 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.
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.”
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story 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 College later awarded
Mr. Nimoy an honorary doctorate.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Nimoy directed two of the Star Trek 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; and six grandchildren; 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 1995 to 2003, Mr. Nimoy narrated the “Ancient Mysteries” series on the
History Channel. He also 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.
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 teaching of the
kabbalah.
Continue reading the main story Write A Comment
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.”
Daniel E. Slotnik and Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.
Other related posts:
- » [msb-alumni] Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek Legendary Spock, Dead at 83 - Steve
