Leonard Nimoy Dead at 83

Actor and director Leonard Nimoy has died at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83 years old. Wife Susan Bay Nimoy confirmed his death to the New York Times, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Nimoy had announced his COPD via Twitter last year, and had spent recent days in the hospital.

Best known for his work as the half-Vulcan Spock on Star Trek, Nimoy successfully parlayed his popularity to launch a career as a director with Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

While his career may have been defined and shaped by Star Trek, his work spanned numerous memorable projects — Mission: Impossible, A Woman Called Golda, In Search Of… — and he received four Emmy award nominations over the course of his career.

Born in Boston, Leonard Simon Nimoy was a child of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, and it was that heritage that would inform a great deal of the Spock character. The character’s split-fingered salute, he often explained, had been his idea, based on the kohanic blessing, a manual approximation of the Hebrew letter shin, which is the first letter in Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God.

His first appearance on stage was at age 8, in a production of Hansel and Gretel. After serving in the Army from 1953-55, he had small roles in a few films, but mostly found work in TV series, appearing in episodes of Dragnet, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Untouchables, and Gunsmoke, among others. In 1952, he landed his first lead role in the film Kid Monk Baroni.

It was a guest shot on Gene Roddenberry’s police series The Lieutenant where Nimoy first attracted the attention of the producer. He would go on to star as the Vulcan science officer of the USS Enterprise in the original 1964 pilot, and would be the only surviving member of the cast to return for the second pilot two years later.

His directing work began with Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and it quickly took on a life of its own, with successful turns at the helm of Three Men and a Baby, The Good Mother, and Funny About Love.

Nimoy also found success in animation, not only with Star Trek: The Animated Series, but also the Transformers franchise, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Pagemaster, Invasion America, and several video game projects.

In most recent years, Nimoy essentially retired from Hollywood, although he did return to acting with a role on Fringe and in the rebooted Star Trek as Spock Prime, who comes back in time to fend off a deadly Romulan plot. Outside of his film and television career, his priority was his career as a photographer.

In his 1977 autobiography I Am Not Spock, he wrote, “In Spock, I finally found the best of both worlds: to be widely accepted in public approval and yet be able to continue to play the insulated alien through the Vulcan character.”

Years after the end of the original Star Trek, Nimoy wrote, “To this day, I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior.” And he realized that he was fine with that. “Given the choice,” he wrote, “if I had to be someone else, I would be Spock.”