‘Something universal in his appeal’
B.C. fans of Star Trek and sci-fi mourn loss of legendary Leonard Nimoy
In B.C.’s tiny corner of the universe, the death of actor Leonard Nimoy Friday left many fans feeling stunned and emotional.
Nimoy, best known as the logical half-human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek television series, also made his presence felt in B.C. with a recurring role as Dr. William Bell in the Vancouver-filmed Fringe until his last episode in 2012.
He also made headline appearances at Vancouver Star Trek conventions in 1997 and 2010. But his first visit to the city — and Canada — was for the Variety Club Telethon in 1969.
“In other cities the caring is there, but it’s electric here,” Nimoy said after a third trip to Vancouver for the 1971 telethon.
“I have never had quite such an amazing sense of community relationship between the people putting on the show and the people watching.”
Friday, his wife Susan Bay Nimoy confirmed he died of end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.
His final tweet was a poetic reflection on life with Spock’s signature ‘Live long and prosper’ sign-off: “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP.”
R. Graeme Wilson, president of the B.C. Science Fiction Association, said Nimoy will be “missed, no question” by his fans and the sci-fi community.
“Even minus the Star Trek, he was a first-class person,” Wilson said. “He was very articulate in spreading a very civilized viewpoint of what people should be like. And it’s not just Trek fans who loved him but, just speaking for the genre, science fiction fans had tremendous respect for him as well. There was something universal in his appeal.”
Michael Unger, program co-ordinator at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre and a proud Trekkie, warmly recalled a science teacher showing his class episodes of Star Trek when he was at Seaquam Secondary School in Delta.
“Spock’s one of those incredible characters in sci-fi,” Unger said.
“He’s probably one of the best scifi characters of all time and for people of my generation — Star Trek and Star Wars — this is our connection to space and it’s really why I got interested in space.”
Unger praised Nimoy’s off-screen space exploration advocacy and said the actor and director “really embodied the character” of Spock.
Cam Smith, who co-hosts the Vancouver-based Star Trek podcast Subspace Transmissions, was stung by the news of Nimoy’s death. “Nimoy is loved and adored just by everyone who loves Star Trek,” Smith said. “Even though these guys are getting older, Nimoy had really carried himself strongly … his public face was so enduring that I think it really hit with a shock.”
The Storm Crow Tavern, a self-proclaimed ‘sports bar for nerds’ on Commercial Drive, held a Nimoy memorial Friday night with Star Trek screenings and specials on Romulan Ale and Vulcan Mind Meld shooters.
On March 11, the Rio Theatre in Vancouver will host a special screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan in celebration of Nimoy’s life.
“He lived long. He prospered. And we are better for it,” the Rio posted on its Facebook account.
Spock’s legacy will also live on in Zachary Quinto, who returns to play the character for the third instalment of the rebooted Star Trek franchise when it begins shooting in Vancouver this summer.
Two years ago I drove up the winding roads of the Bel Air neighbourhood in Los Angeles to meet a god in retirement.
That was Leonard Nimoy: the closest thing to a legend that I’ve ever encountered.
We sat outside in his garden, sipped orange juice and talked politics. I was writing a book about Hollywood activism and Nimoy had been a lifelong liberal. He told me that when working as a cab driver in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, one of his fares from the airport was Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
And after he achieved global fame as Mr. Spock in Star Trek, he was happy to lend his name to the 1972 presidential candidacy of George McGovern — the inheritor of Kennedy’s liberal mantle.
Nimoy said the campaign was never quite sure how to use him, given the eccentricity of his onscreen character.
Because he was associated with a logical alien, they mostly wheeled him out to talk about science.
Nimoy came from a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking home in Boston — the kind of background that inculcates politics and artistry. His talents extended well beyond acting. My grandmother (who probably harboured a crush on him) collected his poetry, and McGovern liked it enough to enter it into the congressional record. His home was covered in art and sculpture that he’d created himself, and there were mementoes, too, of a fine career in directing (Three Men and a Baby was probably his biggest success).
Even this polymath, however, had his limits. His controversial covers of songs like I Walk the Line are best described as “camp classics,” while his performance in Mission: Impossible as The Great Paris, a “man of a thousand voices,” was limited by the fact he really only had one voice: Leonard Nimoy’s.
No matter if he was disguised as a Cuban revolutionary or a Mongolian despot, he always sounded like ... Leonard Nimoy.
But, oh, what a voice it was. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) he stole the show as a psychiatrist losing his humanity, those marvellously sexy vocal chords willing his victims to fall asleep and succumb to the alien menace.
And in Columbo: a Stitch in Crime his villainous doctor character had the distinction of being the only murderer to make the eponymous detective lose his temper — such was his infuriating coolness. Those qualities were, of course, present in spades in Spock.
I asked Nimoy if he ever found that there was some difficulty adjusting from Spock to a public role as a liberal activist, and he laughed.
Spock, I sensed, had become him and, for a long time, haunted him.
But he felt tremendous affection for the character because he had created him. He regretted any impression to the contrary.
Nimoy, who died on Friday at age 83, was a star who deserves due respect. A star is someone whose talents are such that they transcend the moment and become something eternal: a face, a name that will never be forgotten.