Source: http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-leonard-nimoy-20150227-story.html#page=1.
Kirk (left) and Spock (right).
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, 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.
He was, as The 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.
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 his home in Bel-Air. He was 83.
The cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his son, Adam.
Nimoy revealed last year that he had the disease, a condition he attributed to the smoking he gave up 30 years earlier.
While he was best known for his portrayal of the green-tinted Spock, 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 evil-doers, 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,” Nimoy later wrote. “He represented a practical, reasoning voice in a period of dissension and chaos.”
He also turned Nimoy into an unlikely sex symbol.
More at: http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-leonard-nimoy-20150227-story.html#page=1
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