Actor Who Played 'Spock' Dies At 83. A Look Back At How He Created The Vulcan Salute
RIP and may you live long and prosper, Mr. Spock!
By Sadho Ram — 28 Feb 2015, 10:56 AM
Actor Leonard Nimoy, globally famous for playing Spock on Star Trek, died on Friday morning, 27 February, at the age of 83
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.
nytimes.com
In other words:
The person who taught a generation of kids the meaning of logic is no more. Farewell Mr. Spock. #LeonardNimoy
— V Vinay (@ainvvy) February 27, 2015
Nimoy was also a writer, a photographer, and a musician, but none could touch the impact he made defining Spock, the Enterprise's logical and emotionless science officer. So much so that in his final tweet, he signed off with one of his character's most memorable phrases: "live long and prosper."
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP
— Leonard Nimoy (@TheRealNimoy) February 23, 2015
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”).
nytimes.com
Born in 1931 in Boston, he acted in several amateur productions as a child and then began his movie and TV acting career in 1951. But it wasn't until 1965, when Nimoy passed on a role in Peyton Place to take a part in Gene Roddenberry's TV show Star Trek – and the rest would become history.
Unique among most TV shows, Star Trek actually had two pilots. NBC liked aspects of the first pilot, “The Cage” but had some issues and asked Roddenberry to shoot a second pilot. Mr. Nimoy’s Spock, half-human, half-Vulcan, was the only character to appear in both pilots. (Something that became a plot point for the two-parter “The Menagerie” which followed up on the original pilot.)
Nimoy’s Spock became a cultural phenomenon. Characterized by an emotionless devotion to the Vulcan ethos of logic, Spock was an inspiration to a generation of fans and became well known to the public at large. Nimoy had a large part in shaping the character into someone who was non-violent (Nimoy developed the Vulcan nerve pinch as an alternative to punching), ethical, intellectual, and compassionate.
Spock's funeral scene from 'Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan' (1982) resurfaced with news of his demise. In the scene, Admiral James T. Kirk pays a tearful goodbye to Spock, saying: "Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human."
Nimoy, a classically trained actor, had a complicated relationship with his most famous creation - Spock, at least in the early days, notes the NYT blog Arts Beat
Leonard Nimoy at his 2010 one-person photography exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass
Image via nytimes.com“It’s all in the ears. Five words. That’s what they want to hear anyway,” he groused to a New York Times reporter in 1968. “Here’s your whole story: It’s all in the ears.”
While the title of his 1975 autobiography, “I Am Not Spock,” was widely misconstrued as hostile toward the character, Mr. Nimoy said, his comfort with his spot in the pop culture firmament was more explicit in his 1995 follow-up: “I Am Spock.”
But the truth is, Nimoy wasn't just Spock
A poet, musician, director and photographer, Mr. Nimoy pursued a wide range of creative interests even as he periodically reprised everyone’s favorite Vulcan, including in J.J. Abrams’s recent “Star Trek” films.
nytimes.comNimoy had a longtime interest in photography that he channeled later in life into several books and exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and elsewhere. His specialty was portraiture, often involving the kind of subjects that don’t frequently adorn gallery walls.
A 2010 show at Mass MoCA featured photos of people acting out their “secret selves,” something Mr. Nimoy suggested he knew something about in an interview with The Times.
“So many people have said that the project has made them wonder about whether they have a secret self, and inevitably some of them ask about my secret self,” Mr. Nimoy said. “Are you kidding? I’ve had 60 years of acting out my other selves. Been there, done that.”
About Spock's split-fingered salute, which came to be known as the famous 'Vulcan salute', had been Nimoy's idea
He says in his autobiography that it is a priestly blessing that forms the Hebrew letter Shin. He spoke to the Hebrew Book Center about encountering this blessing as a child: He was watching a ceremony with four or five men, and then his father told him not to look.
"I hear this strange sound coming from them, they’re not singers, they were shouters, and dissonant, it was all discordant," he said.
"It was chilling, like whoa! Something major is happening here. So I peeked, and I saw them with their hands stuck out. I had no idea what was going on but the sound of it and the look of it was magical."
“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.”
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