Leonard Nimoy: The Others – Times Online

Leonard Nimoy became famous as Mr. Spock in “Star Trek”. He embodied therein not only the infallible rationality, but also the stranger in us all.

28th February 2015 11:05 clock

Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in” Star Trek “1967 | The appeal is © CBS / Landov / dpa

just too irresistible to recognize tragedy, where perhaps none is , But what could be more tragic for an actor to be identified more than half a lifetime with only one character he has not really played so often. The television series Star Trek yes only lasted three seasons before it was discontinued due to failure by the US broadcaster NBC in 1969, there were 79 episodes in the end, all turned hastily and cheaply.

A really large audience reached the series in the US in the later second window on smaller channels, then they went around the world; ZDF about only began in 1972 with the airing of the first, orderly vice-cut English version of Star Trek . And it took a while again until 1979, the Star Trek went off -Kinofilmen with which it no longer seems to stop now because of too much success. Leonard Nimoy was seen in eight of the previous twelve films in his lifetime role. Spock, half-Vulcan, first, first and scientific officer of the Enterprise, later promoted to captain, including Ambassador

The title of Nimoy’s first autobiographical book I Am Not Spock (1975) seemed to suggest that he rejected the commitment to this role; and that he was his second autobiographical book I Am Spock named 20 years later, then looked as though he had eventually resigned to his fate actresses.

In fact, Nimoy wrote in the preface of his first book, he was very proud to be associated with the series: “I have the feeling that they deal with moral and philosophical questions in a way dealt hope of many of us that they would be part of our life reality. The series has given me definitely a hint of self-worth, and in particular the relationship with the character Mr. Spock was my always guide when trying dignified a person to be. “

Tragic? No, Spock’s favorite word fits better fascinating. A case of over-identification of an actor with a roll, if any. But Leonard Nimoy was indeed a trained in the method acting Actors. He had been leaning against the Stanislavsky method even self-taught, long before Spock anverwandelte to the beginning of the sixties, as a representative of his own mentor, Jeff Corey, whose most prominent disciple was there still have been James Dean (Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda about then also studied at Corey).

Nimoy, who was in 1931 came as the son of Orthodox Jewish, Ukrainian immigrants in Boston to the world, had at the time been a good decade lived in Los Angeles and made his way with supporting roles , Hollywood had not just been waiting for a guy who seemed to suck neither a hero nor villain really. Nimoy was like their birth to an outsider, and the outsider Illustrative seemed to him apparently to interest at Spock.

I Am Not Spock he described his formative childhood memories in the movies, Charles Laughton’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein – and how these monstrous figures for a moment only salvation experienced by a gesture of affection, “the love relationship between a man and a stranger.”