Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy: The Actor Who Built a Vulcan

The most recognisable hand gesture in television history came out of a Boston synagogue. Nimoy had watched the kohanim, the Jewish priests, split their fingers into the shape of the letter shin while delivering the Priestly Blessing, and decades later he offered it to a director as the way Vulcans greet each other. He attached a line to it, too. Live long and prosper. It is now made by children who have never heard of the Book of Numbers.

Mattapan and the Barbershop

He was born on 26 March 1931 in Boston's West End, an Irish district where Jewish immigrants had settled. His parents, Max and Dora Nimoy, had escaped Iziaslav in Ukraine separately, his father crossing into Poland, his mother and grandmother smuggled out under bales of hay in a horse-drawn wagon; they reunited in America, where Max ran a barbershop in Mattapan. Leonard sold newspapers and greeting cards, shined shoes and set up chairs in theatres, and later sold vacuum cleaners to help the family. He started acting at eight in neighbourhood theatre. At seventeen he played Ralphie in an amateur production of Clifford Odets's *Awake and Sing!*, about a Jewish family in the Depression. "Playing this teenage kid in this Jewish family that was so much like mine was amazing," he said. "The same dynamics, the same tensions in the household."

He sang in his synagogue choir well enough that after his bar mitzvah he was invited to repeat the performance at another synagogue the following week. Shatner's verdict, years later: "He is still the only man I know whose voice was two bar mitzvahs good!"

The Long Apprenticeship

He took drama classes at Boston College, then spent $600 of vacuum-cleaner money on the Pasadena Playhouse, ushering, driving a cab and stocking vending machines to survive. He quit after six months, reasoning that "I have to study here three years in order to do this level of work, and I'm already doing better work." He absorbed Stanislavsky instead. He served in the Army Reserve at Fort McPherson from 1953 to 1955, writing and emceeing shows in Special Services. Then came more than a decade of B-movies and ethnic bit parts: an army sergeant in *Them!* in 1954, a professor in *The Brain Eaters*, episodes of *Perry Mason*, *Gunsmoke*, *Bonanza*, *The Twilight Zone*, *The Outer Limits*. In 1956, driving a cab, he picked up Senator John F. Kennedy, who had no cash; Nimoy followed him into the Beverly Hilton to collect $1.25 and got a $1.75 tip.

Spock

He originated Spock in the 1964 pilot "The Cage" and played him from the 1966 premiere through the series' end in early 1969, then across eight feature films and guest appearances spanning nearly fifty years. He chose *Star Trek* over *Peyton Place*. Spock was not merely cast but constructed: Nimoy contributed the Vulcan salute and invented the nerve pinch, arguing to a director that Spock had studied human anatomy at the Vulcan Institute of Technology and could project energy through his fingertips. He rehearsed it on Shatner and credited Shatner's reaction with selling it. The character took the public by storm and nearly eclipsed Captain Kirk. He received three Emmy nominations for the role and remains the only *Star Trek* actor ever nominated for one.

The cost was substantial. Playing Spock twelve to fourteen hours a day, five days a week, he spent weekends in character, more logical and less emotional than himself, and noticed Vulcan speech patterns in his private life years after the show ended. He became an alcoholic during the run and eventually entered drug rehabilitation, which he disclosed in the 2001 documentary *Mind Meld*. He also used his position: Walter Koenig revealed in 2014 that Nimoy had personally and successfully lobbied producers for equal pay for Nichelle Nichols.

Everything Else

He joined *Mission: Impossible* for its fourth and fifth seasons as the magician-agent Paris, hosted the paranormal documentary series *In Search of...* from 1976 to 1982, and played Dr. William Bell on *Fringe*, returning even after announcing his retirement. He directed *Star Trek III: The Search for Spock* in 1984, then *Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home* in 1986, the franchise's second most successful film, then *Three Men and a Baby*, the highest-grossing film of 1987, which made him a bankable director. He also directed *The Good Mother*, *Funny About Love* and *Holy Matrimony*.

On stage he played Tevye in *Fiddler on the Roof* in 1971, a role that mattered because his own parents had come from a shtetl and could see themselves in it, and Randle McMurphy in *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* in 1974, a year before Nicholson filmed it. He toured with the Royal Shakespeare Company as Sherlock Holmes in 1975. By 1977 he had played thirteen important roles in twenty-seven cities. In 1981 he created and starred in *Vincent*, a one-man show about van Gogh performed from the brother's point of view. He recorded five albums for Dot Records, published seven volumes of poetry, studied photography at UCLA and exhibited it, took an MA in education from Antioch College in 1977, narrated a documentary on Hasidism in 1997 and published *The Shekhina Project* in 2002, a photographic study of the feminine aspect of God's presence that drew stinging Orthodox condemnation. He said the objections did not surprise him but he was saddened by "the attempt to control thought."

The Two Books

*I Am Not Spock*, published in 1975, was widely misread as a repudiation; it was actually a dialogue between the actor and the character. He wrote of "a definite identity crisis. The question was whether to embrace Mr. Spock or to fight the onslaught of public interest. I realize now that I really had no choice in the matter." Twenty years later he answered himself with *I Am Spock*, conceding that the merger had happened and that he no longer wished to contest it.

Why Leonard Is Called a Genius

The honest framing is craft, not intellect, and the craft in question is character construction. Nimoy was handed roughly a page of concept, a half-human science officer with pointed ears, and built from it one of the most durable fictional personalities of the twentieth century, contributing its central physical vocabulary himself. The salute came from liturgical memory; the nerve pinch came from a refusal to accept a scripted pistol-whipping. This is the invention of a coherent inner logic for a being who does not exist, sustained over five decades and enough consistency that audiences treated Spock as a real intelligence rather than a costume. His three Emmy nominations remain unmatched within the franchise, and obituarists credited him with bringing "dignity and intelligence to one of the most revered characters in science fiction." The counter-case is that a single character, however finely made, is a thin foundation for the word. His directing successes were commercial rather than artistic and did not outlast the eighties. His poetry is sentimental. Nobody claims his photography or his albums as major work. Even he framed the achievement as something that happened to him as much as something he did, admitting he had "no choice in the matter." Genius here means one thing made permanently right, not range.

Legacy

He received an honorary doctorate from Antioch University in 2000 for Holocaust remembrance and arts activism, another from Boston University in 2012, and the Space Foundation's Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award in 2010 for creating a role model that inspired viewers to learn about the universe. Boston declared a Leonard Nimoy Day in 2009. Asteroid 4864 was named for him in 2015. He died at his Bel Air home on 27 February 2015 of complications from COPD, which he attributed to smoking he had quit thirty years earlier. Buzz Aldrin called him a fellow space traveller. Shatner said he loved him like a brother. Days before the end he posted a last message: "A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP."