Leonard Nimoy

Actor

• Born: March 26, 1931
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: February 27, 2015

Actor and photographer

A versatile actor, Nimoy was best known for his role as Mr. Spock in the 1960s science-fiction television series Star Trek.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; photography

Early Life

Leonard Nimoy, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants from Zaslav, Ukraine, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1931. His parents escaped from Ukraine illegally; his father, Max, by slipping over the Polish border at night, and his mother, Dora, by hiding in a hay wagon. The Nimoys settled in an Italian neighborhood in Boston’s west end, where his father owned a barbershop. Nimoy and his older brother, Melvin, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household and learned to speak fluent Hebrew and Yiddish.

Nimoy began acting in community theaters when he was eight, and he had his first major role at seventeen, playing Ralphie in Clifford Odets’s play Awake and Sing! (1935). At fourteen, he developed an avid interest in photography. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston College, and he holds a master’s degree in education from Antioch College. He moved to Hollywood in 1950, and for the next sixteen years he acted in minor roles in the theater, film, and television. His television credits include many leading series of the 1950s and 1960s, including Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Untouchables, Perry Mason, and The Outer Limits. He also taught acting classes. In 1964, he and future Star Trek costar, William Shatner, appeared together for the first time in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. titled “The Project Strigas Affair.”

Life’s Work

Nimoy’s career began to flourish in 1966 when Gene Roddenberry, the developer and producer of the science-fiction series Star Trek, cast him to play the pointed-eared alien Mr. Spock from the planet Vulcan. At first the network executives at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) were unenthusiastic about the character because of Spock’s satanic appearance. Soon, however, Nimoy was receiving abundant fan mail—especially from female viewers—which convinced the network to keep the character in the series. Nimoy’s costars were Shatner, who played Spock’s adventurous superior officer, James T. Kirk, captain of the starship USS Enterprise, and DeForest Kelley, who portrayed Dr. Leonard McCoy, the curmudgeonly ship’s doctor.

The second season’s opening episode, “Amok Time,” explored Spock’s Vulcan culture and introduced the Vulcan salute. Used as a greeting and farewell, the V-shaped gesture, formed by a splayed thumb and the separation of the first and second and the third and fourth fingers, was directly derived from Nimoy’s Jewish heritage. When Nimoy was a young boy, he attended an Orthodox service with his father. During the ritual blessing, the Kohanim (or priests) and the all-male congregation covered their eyes with their shawls or hands. Max warned his son not to look, but the eight-year-old could not resist and peeked. He was impressed by how the priests, eyes shrouded, held their arms straight out with thumbs touching and their fingers divided between the middle and ring fingers. The gesture symbolizes the Hebrew letter shin, which stands for Shaddai, or Almighty God. It became the basis for the Vulcan salute, which was usually accompanied by the phrase “Live long and prosper.” The Vulcan salute has become a celebrated piece of Star Trek lore and is widely recognized in pop culture as well.

Nimoy received three Emmy Award nominations for his portrayal of Spock, and he became so identified with the character that he wrote two memoirs, I Am Not Spock (1975) and I Am Spock (1995), which discussed the effect playing Spock had on his professional and personal life. Star Trek experienced a resurgence in popularity in syndication and spawned six feature films. Nimoy also reprised his role as Spock in the television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991) and in the film Star Trek (2009), as an older, alternate version of the character. After the film's success and the fanbases's largely positive reception of Zachary Quinto's portrayal of the iconic character, Nimoy announced in 2010 that he was officially retiring from playing Spock due to his advanced age and his desire to give Quinto the chance to own the role. However, Nimoy did return once more in his final performance as the alternate version of Spock in the 2013 film Star Trek: Into Darkness. Despite additional claims that he had retired from acting in general, Nimoy also lent his voice to the character of Sentinel Prime in the 2011 film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

When Star Trek the television series was canceled in 1969, Nimoy replaced Martin Landau in the television series Mission: Impossible, playing “The Amazing Paris.” Tiring of the role, Nimoy left the series and appeared in several made-for-television films, including Catlow(1971), The Alpha Caper (1973), and Marco Polo (1982). He also made guest appearances in popular television programs, such as Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and Colombo starring Peter Falk. In 1982, he again received an Emmy Award nomination for best supporting actor for his role as Morris Meyerson in A Woman Called Golda, a film about the life of Golda Meir. Between 2009 and 2012, he appeared in a guest role on the FOX network drama Fringe as enigmatic businessman William Bell at the request of the show's creator, J. J. Abrams (director of the 2009 Star Trek film). It would be Nimoy's last significant television role.

In 1991, Nimoy partnered with Robert Radnitz to produce a made-for-television film titled Never Forget. He also was cast in the starring role. The film is a true story about Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. After moving to the United States, Mermelstein opened a museum to document the Nazi atrocities he and millions of others had suffered. He was challenged by the Institute for Historical Review to prove that the prisoners died as a result of genocide. At great personal cost to himself and his family, Mermelstein took the organization to court and exposed it as a neo-Nazi group promoting Holocaust denial. Nimoy commented that bringing Mermelstein’s story to the screen was one of the most satisfying things he had done in his acting career.

Nimoy also enjoyed success as a stage performer and appeared in a variety of productions, including The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), Oliver! (1960), Caligula (1945), Twelfth Night (1600–1602), and Equus (1973). One of his favorite roles, however, was that of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (1964). Mounted by Stephen Slane, a New York producer who specialized in summer stock, the production played for seven weeks in Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio. Nimoy took on the role because the musical mirrored his parents’ experience of escaping from a small Russian village.

In addition to acting, Nimoy developed photographic skills. Following Mission: Impossible, he briefly considered beginning a second career as a professional photographer. However, he decided not to give up acting and continued to have a lucrative career in television, in film, and onstage. In 2003, he announced his retirement from acting so that he could devote his time to photography. He published two books: Shekhina (2002), a photographic essay focusing on the feminine aspect of God, and The Full Body Project (2007), a collection of images of nude plus-sized women.

In 2014, Nimoy revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which he believed was tied to years of smoking, despite having quit over thiry years prior. Making the announcement on Twitter, throughout the following year he also used the social media platform to urge fans to quit smoking. After a hospitalization, it was announced that Nimoy had passed away at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles on February 27, 2015, at the age of eighty-three. He was survived by his wife, brother, children, several grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.

Significance

The Star Trek television and film franchise in general and the Spock character in particular captured the imaginations of a generation of science-fiction aficionados. Nimoy’s nuanced performance of Spock as a conflicted outsider who does not fully belong to Vulcan or to human culture reflects a psychological, emotional, and social identity crisis to which many people in contemporary society can relate. His portrayal of Spock also influenced young people who were fans of the show in the 1960s to consider careers in science and space exploration. Aside from his association with Star Trek, however, Nimoy chose roles that reflected his deep love for Judaism, thereby publicly honoring his heritage through the practice of his craft.

Bibliography

Heffernan, Virginia. "Leonard Nimoy, Spock of Star Trek, Dies at 83." New York Times. New York Times, 27 Feb. 2016. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.

Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Not Spock. Millbrae: Celestial Arts, 1975. Print.

Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Spock. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Print.

Nimoy, Leonard, and Donald Kuspit. Shekhina. New York: Umbrage, 2005. Print.

Shatner, William, and David Fisher. Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man. Dunne, 2016. Print.