Leonard Nimoy was a poet, photographer, movie director and above all Spock, a voice of pure reason in a time of social turmoil.
LOS ANGELES — When Leonard Nimoy was approached about acting in a new TV series called “Star Trek,” he was, like any good Vulcan contemplating a risky mission in a chaotic universe, dispassionate.
“I really didn’t give it a lot of thought,” he later recalled. “The chance of this becoming anything meaningful was slim.”
By the time “Star Trek” finished its three-year run in 1969, Mr. Nimoy was a cultural touchstone, a living representative of the scientific method, a voice of pure reason in a time of social turmoil, the unflappable and impeccably logical Mr. Spock.
Free Leonard Nimoy display at EMP
What: This weekend, the EMP Museum at Seattle Center will display the tunic worn by Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock on “Star Trek.” It will be in EMP’s South Lobby, free and open to the public. After this weekend, the display will be moved inside the museum.
Where: 325 Fifth Ave. N.
Information:http://ift.tt/1zovoGH, 206-770-2700.
EMP Museum
He was, as the Los Angeles Times described him in 2009, “the most iconic alien since Superman,” a quantum leap for a character actor who had appeared in plenty of shows but never worked a single job longer than two weeks.
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Mr. Nimoy, who became so identified with his TV and film role that he titled his two memoirs, somewhat illogically, “I Am Not Spock” (1975) and “I Am Spock” (1995), died Friday at home in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 83.
The cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his son, Adam.
Mr. Nimoy revealed last year that he had the disease, a condition he attributed to the smoking he gave up 30 years earlier.
Obama: 'I loved Spock'
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said Friday that Leonard Nimoy, who made the sign for "Live long and prosper" famous around the world, achieved that goal during his 83 years on planet Earth.
The actor, who played Spock in the "Star Trek" TV series and films, died Friday at his Los Angeles home.
"I loved Spock," Obama said in a statement.
"Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy. Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time. And of course, Leonard was Spock," Obama said. "Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek's optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity's future."
Obama added that he met Nimoy in 2007.
"It was only logical to greet him with the Vulcan salute, the universal sign for 'Live long and prosper,'" the president said. "And after 83 years on this planet, and on his visits to many others, it's clear Leonard Nimoy did just that."
While he was best-known for his portrayal of the green-tinted Spock, Mr. Nimoy more recently made his mark with art photography, focusing on plus-sized nude women in a volume called “The Full Body Project” and on nude women juxtaposed with Old Testament tales and quotes from Jewish thinkers in “Shekhina.”
He also directed films, wrote poetry and acted on the stage.
As Spock, he was the pointy-eared, half-Vulcan, 23rd-century science officer whose vaulted eyebrows seemed to express perpetual surprise at the utterly illogical ways of the humans who served with him on the starship Enterprise.
Spock could barely wrap his mind around feelings. He was the son of a human mother and a father from Vulcan, a planet whose inhabitants had chosen pure reason as the only way they could survive. When he thwarted deep-space evildoers, it was with logic simple enough for a Vulcan but dizzying for everyone else, including his commanding officer, Capt. James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner.
While worlds apart from the racial strife and war protests of the 1960s, “Star Trek” explored such issues by setting up parallel situations in space, “The final frontier.”
“Spock was a character whose time had come,” Mr. Nimoy later wrote. “He represented a practical, reasoning voice in a period of dissension and chaos.”
He also turned Mr. Nimoy into an unlikely sex symbol.
When he spoke at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University in the 1970s, a woman asked: “Are you aware that you are the source of erotic dream material for thousands and thousands of ladies around the world?”
“May all your dreams come true,” he responded.
Salutes
Trekkies everywhere greeted each other with Mr. Nimoy’s “Vulcan salute,” a gesture he adapted from one he had seen at an Orthodox synagogue when he was a boy.
“I was awe-struck,” Mr. Nimoy recalled in a 2004 Los Angeles Times interview.
At the altar, five or six men chanted prayers with their arms raised. They held their hands with fingers parted between the ring and middle fingers and thumbs stuck out — a representation, Mr. Nimoy said, of the Hebrew letter “shin,” the start of “Shaddai,” a term for God.
LSD guru Timothy Leary once flashed Mr. Nimoy the Vulcan salute. So did cabdrivers who sped by on the street, and interviewers who momentarily suspended their journalistic detachment. At a 2007 fundraiser in Los Angeles, presidential candidate Barack Obama spied Nimoy across a room, smiled and held up his hand in the familiar gesture.
Four years later, President Obama told ABC’s Barbara Walters that his critics wrongly believed he was “Spock-like,” or too analytical.
For much of his career, Mr. Nimoy had to deal with the same sort of perception problem.
While his 1975 autobiography was “I Am Not Spock,” he later called the title a mistake because it was so easily misconstrued. In the book, he said he couldn’t think of a TV character he would sooner have played.
At the same time, he was disquieted by mountains of fan mail addressed not to Leonard Nimoy, but to “Mr. Spock, Hollywood, Calif.”
The melding of actor and character was sometimes uncomfortable.
On a tour of California Institute of Technology, Mr. Nimoy was asked his thoughts about complex projects by students who must have believed he had a Spock-like insight.
“I would nod very quietly, and very sagely I would say, ‘You’re on the right track,’ ” he told The New York Times in 2009.
Mr. Nimoy appeared in the original “Star Trek” TV series, which ran on NBC from 1966 to 1969. He received three successive Emmy nominations.
He also was Spock in feature films through 1991, retiring from “Star Trek” pictures until 2009, when he became Spock Prime, a Mr. Spock who inhabited an alternate universe in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek.” He did a cameo performance as the same character in “Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013).
Rumors of Spock’s impending on-screen demise in 1982’s “Star Trek II” prompted death threats to director Nicholas Meyer.
“I received a helpful letter that ran: ‘If Spock dies, you die,’ ” Meyer wrote in “The View from the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood.”
The scene was filmed anyway — so affectingly, according to Meyer, that the crew wept openly “as the dying Spock held up his splayed hand and enjoined Kirk to ‘live long and prosper.’ ”
Thanks to an ancient Vulcan ceremony and some tortuous plot twists, Spock was resurrected in “Star Trek III.” Mr. Nimoy directed that film and “Star Trek IV.” He went on to direct the 1987 comedy “Three Men and a Baby” and the 1988 drama “The Good Mother.”
In numerous public appearances, he pointed out the irony of his success.
“My folks came to the U.S. as immigrants,” he said in a 2012 speech at Boston University. “They were aliens, and then became citizens. I was born in Boston a citizen, and then I went to Hollywood and became an alien.”
Born on March 26, 1931, Leonard Simon Nimoy first acted in a community settlement house for immigrants. At 17, he was cast in a Boston production of the Clifford Odets play “Awake and Sing!”
To his parents’ chagrin, it confirmed his passion for acting. The play was about a Jewish family much like Mr. Nimoy’s and it probed his kind of teenage confusion.
“I was electrified,” he recalled. “The author gave me a voice when I was struggling to find my own.”
Mr. Nimoy’s Ukrainian-born father Max, who ran a barbershop in a Boston tenement neighborhood, tried to warn his son about the dangers ahead.
“Learn to play the accordion,” he urged. “You can always make a living with an accordion.”
Instead, Mr. Nimoy briefly studied drama at Boston College, sold vacuum cleaners, and, at 18, left for acting school in California. He dropped out after six months.
His earliest film roles include Narab, a Martian in the 1952 film “Zombies of the Stratosphere.” The same year, he scored his first title role, in the boxing movie “Kid Monk Baroni.”
After a stint in the Army, Mr. Nimoy was back in Los Angeles by the mid-1950s, studying acting and picking up work on shows such as “Dragnet,” “Bonanza,” “Dr. Kildare” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
In 1965, he drew the attention of Gene Roddenberry, the producer behind the upcoming “Star Trek” series.
In an early scene, Spock and company were huddled over a computer screen and he uttered the one-word line: “Fascinating.”
Then he tried it again.
“The director gave me a brilliant note which said: ‘Be different,’ ” Mr. Nimoy recalled in an interview for the Archive of American Television. “Be the scientist. Be detached. See it as something that’s a curiosity rather than a threat.”
“I said, ‘Fascinating.’ Well, a big chunk of the character was born right there.”
Despite its fans’ enthusiasm, the show ended its run in 1969, a victim of low ratings and tepid support from NBC.
By then, Mr. Nimoy was famous. Even his much-derided 1967 record album, “Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space” sold more than 130,000 copies.
Poems, photographs
He put in an unsatisfying two years on “Mission: Impossible” and then pursued a range of interests befitting the Renaissance man he had become.
He earned a master’s degree in education from Antioch University. He turned out seven books of poetry and created a comic-book series with science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He directed six films and, from 1978 to 1980, toured in a one-man show, “Vincent,” about Vincent Van Gogh.
From 1977 to 1982, he hosted “In Search Of … ,” a documentary TV series about paranormal phenomena. In 1978, he played a pompous self-help guru in the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
He poured himself into projects reflecting his Jewish heritage. In 1982, he appeared as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s former husband in the TV movie “A Woman Called Golda”; nine years later, he played a Holocaust survivor who waged a courtroom battle against Holocaust deniers in the TV movie “Never Forget.”
His photography book, “Shekhina,” pictured nude and sensually draped women, with a cover shot of a woman wearing “tefillin,” Jewish ritual objects traditionally worn by men. It raised some hackles in the Jewish community, but Mr. Nimoy said it was his vision of feminine Jewish spirituality.
“I’m not introducing sexuality into Judaism,” he said. “It’s been there for centuries.”
In 2009, the Santa Monica Museum of Art exhibited images Mr. Nimoy made in Northampton, Mass., of strangers willing to be photographed as their “secret selves.”
The show, called “Who Do You Think You Are?” featured a rabbi with a leather vest over his bare torso and a conservatively dressed female psychologist toting a chain saw.
Asked about his own secrets, Mr. Nimoy demurred.
“I have to laugh,” he said. “I have no secrets left. I revealed it all a long time ago.”
He was married to Sandi Zober from 1954 to 1987, when they divorced.
In addition to his children from that marriage, son Adam and daughter Julie, his survivors include Susan Bay, his wife since 1989; his stepson Aaron Bay Schuck; six grandchildren; a great-grandson; and his brother Melvin.
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