“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,” Virginia Heffernan reports for The New York Times. “He was 83.”
“His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” Heffernan reports. “Mr. Nimoy announced that he had the disease last year, attributing it to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.”
“His religious upbringing also influenced the characterization of Spock. The character’s split-fingered salute, he often explained, had been his idea: He based it 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,” Heffernan reports. “‘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.'”
"I loved him like a brother. We will all miss his humor, his talent, and his capacity to love."
-William Shatner http://t.co/U8ZN98tVYp
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) February 27, 2015
Read more in the full obituary here.
MacDailyNews Take: Rest in peace, Mr. Nimoy.
Someone, somewhere, is revving up The Genesis Device.
“A serious embuggerment”.
I remember seeing Nimoy interviewed several years ago, at about the time that cell phones were becoming popular. He said that he’d received a call on his flip phone as he was walking through a store. Took it out of his pocket and flipped it open, then realized that other people were gawking at him and chuckling. He said that it took him a minute to realize why they were laughing.
Legend in his own right !
He will be missed by millions !
Wow… Very sad !
The Bangles “Going Down to Liverpool” with Leonard Nimoy.
I just ordered the complete series on BluRay from Amazon. Guess I should have done it long ago since I always watch them if I run across an old episode on television. We didn’t have a color tv and it was awesome to see the original shows on someone else’s color tube.
Well Mac Plus
I would NEVER have bought my FIRST TRS-80 Radio Shack computer, if it wasn’t for things like 2001, and Star Trek.
THOSE THINGS, got me interested, when the internet didn’t EXIST, and people thought I was nut’s to buy a computer.
Steve Jobs said HE loved to program in BASIC (see Last Interview) , and said he did it mostly for FUN.
That is just way cool about the Vulcan gesture as a blessing to each other.