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Leonard Nimoy, the character actor who became an icon due to his role as the always logical first officer on the starship Enterprise on “Star Trek,” has died at age 83. Nimoy was one of those handful of actors who created a role in a film or television show that became embedded in the popular culture for years after the film or TV show ended. And “Star Trek,” a show produced by Desilu Productions when Lucille Ball was firmly in charge, only ran from 1966-1969 on NBC, hugely popular with science fiction fans, scientists and others but never top-rated. Due to popular demand, the characters came back in series of motion pictures.
—The New York Times:
The title of Leonard Nimoy’s autobiography was “I Am Not Spock,” and that so offended some fans that he followed it with a second, “I Am Spock.”
The actor who won a permanent place on the altar of pop culture for his portrayal of Mr. Spock on “Star Trek,” was almost as famous for wanting to be remembered for other things.
And that is, of course, highly illogical.
It’s hard to think of another star who was so closely and affectionately identified with a single role. Even George Reeves, the first television Superman, was also one of the Tarleton twins in “Gone With the Wind.”
It’s even harder to think of a television character that so fully embodied and defined a personality type. Just as Scrooge became synonymous with miser, and Peter Pan became a syndrome, Spock was dispassion personified.
Crime fiction and the movies offered Sherlock Holmes as the ultimate aloof, brainy hero. But until “Star Trek,” television didn’t really have anyone that distinctively — and irresistibly — coldblooded, cerebral and punctilious. (Mr. Peabody of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show came close, but he was a beagle and quite affectionate in his fusty way.)
Bloopers on the set:
Spock dies 1982 in Spock Dies – Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan:
Perhaps no actor was tied to Star Trek more than Leonard Nimoy, whose character Spock helped turn the franchise into a cultural touchstone. Though many alums of the show have had second and third public careers since — William Shatner on Boston Legal, George Takei as a gay-rights activist, Wil Wheaton and Patrick Stewart as lovable Internet celebrities — Nimoy is so synonymous with his half-Vulcan alter ego that fans revolted upon seeing the title of his first memoir, “I Am Not Spock,” despite Nimoy’s insistence that behind the name was merely a nuanced explanation of the distinctions between himself and his character.
Nimoy passed away today from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States, and a sobering reminder that despite the species’ incredible longevity, Nimoy was no Vulcan. That still hasn’t stopped fans from trying to determine where the Boston native ends and the green-blooded extraterrestrial begins. For many, there is no difference.
The irony is that Nimoy’s face might never have become one of the most familiar on television if he’d shown just a little more skepticism of the pointy ears; according to producer Gene Roddenberry’s early vision for Star Trek, Spock’s character was to be completely covered in devilish red makeup.
As Nimoy said a friend told him at the time, the actor could either portray Spock with so much makeup on that if the show failed, his career would be protected — or he could do it with the ears alone and “pray that it worked.” Luckily for the rest of us, Nimoy kept the ears. It was a scary choice, he recalled in an interview with Pharrell Williams.
For better or for worse, Nimoy’s success with Spock tends to overshadow many of his other achievements as a photographer, a director and a musician.
But some of these activities actually tell us a lot about how Nimoy put his own stamp on the Enterprise’s science officer.
Born in 1931 to Orthodox Jewish Ukrainian immigrants, Nimoy began acting at age eight and wound up studying it at Boston College. His parents disliked the profession — in interviews later in life, Nimoy said they believed thespians had a reputation for descending on a town and leeching off its residents before taking off again in search of the next act.
Nimoy never did finish his acting degree at Boston College, but sought out minor roles in various episodes of “Dragnet,” “The Twilight Zone,” and other, less memorable TV shows.
Nimoy got his start on Star Trek at the show’s very beginning, with an appearance on the first pilot, “The Cage.” Only he and one other actor from that episode — Majel Barrett, who would go on to marry Roddenberry and voice the U.S.S. Enterprise’s computer in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” — would be included in the rest of the series.
On The Simpsons:
If you cared a fig for space travel, it was easy to not to care when the first episode of Star Trek aired on Sept. 8, 1966. Just four days later, after all, Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon would be blasting off on their Gemini XI mission, which would orbit the earth 44 times in just under three days and set a then-unheard of manned-altitude record of 739 nautical miles (1,369 km). There was still one more Gemini flight to go before the NASA could even think of test-flying its Apollo lunar ships—and only a little more than three years left if the U.S. was going to meet President Kennedy’s goal of reaching the moon before 1970.
Against that, a group of actors on a paste-board set pretending to fly in space was pretty small beer. And as for one with the blunt-cut bangs and pointy rubber ears? Please.
But the space geeks and critics and TV execs—so many of whom sniffed at Star Trek during the brief three years it ran—were too smart and too cute by half. And the loss of Leonard Nimoy—who more than any other character captured the romance, the rocket science and the extraordinary wit of the series—is cause again to consider why the show was what it was.
Star Trek’s production values—with its wobbly doors and painted rocks and its lizard-like antagonist with, as a friend of mine once put it, bicycle reflectors for eyes—were entirely beside the point. It was the largeness of the stories Star Trek sought to tell that mattered, and never mind the idea that fever dreams about dilithium crystals and warp drive seemed all wrong for an era in which metal rockets and flesh-and-blood men were flying, the timing of the series was perfect.
On CNN’s Piers Morgan Feb 2014:
An extensive number of reactions to his death can be seen HERE on the Toronto Star’s blog. And on The Huffington Post.
On Mission Impossible in 1970:
Nimoy sings:
Buzzfeed gives 21 Reasons We Are Forever Thankful For Leonard Nimoy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.