Actor Who Played 'Spock' Dies At 83. A Look Back At How He Created The Vulcan Salute

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.

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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”).

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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.

“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.”

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.

Nimoy 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.”

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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