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 Friday at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.
His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mr. Nimoy announced last year that he had the disease, which he attributed to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.
His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music, in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the past half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing, "Live long and prosper" (from the Vulcan "Dif-tor heh smusma").
Mr. Nimoy, who was teaching method acting at his own studio when he was cast in the original Star Trek television series in the mid 1960s, relished playing outsiders, and he developed what he later admitted was a mystical identification with Spock, the lone alien on the starship's bridge.
Yet he also acknowledged ambivalence about being tethered to the character, expressing it most plainly in the titles of two autobiographies: I Am Not Spock, published in 1977, and I Am Spock, published in 1995.
In the first, he wrote, "In Spock, I finally found the best of both worlds: to be widely accepted in public approval and yet be able to continue to play the insulated alien through the Vulcan character."
Star Trek, which premiered on NBC on Sept. 8, 1966, made Mr. Nimoy a star. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, called him "the conscience of Star Trek" — an often earnest, sometimes campy show that employed the distant future (as well as some primitive special effects by today's standards) to take on social issues of the 1960s.
His stardom would endure. Although the series was canceled after three seasons because of low ratings, a cultlike following — the conference-holding, costume-wearing Trekkies, or Trekkers (the designation Mr. Nimoy preferred) — coalesced soon after Star Trek went into syndication.
The fans' devotion only deepened when Star Trek was spun off into an animated show, various new series and an uneven parade of movies starring much of the original television cast, including — besides Mr. Nimoy — William Shatner (as Capt. James T. Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), George Takei (the helmsman, Sulu), James Doohan (the chief engineer, Scott), Nichelle Nichols (the chief communications officer, Uhura), and Walter Koenig (the navigator, Chekov).
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Explore all your optionsWhen director J.J. Abrams revived the Star Trek film franchise in 2009, with an all-new cast — including Zachary Quinto as Spock — he included a cameo for Mr. Nimoy, as an older version of the same character. Mr. Nimoy also appeared in the 2013 follow-up, Star Trek Into Darkness.
His zeal to entertain and enlighten reached beyond Star Trek and crossed genres. He had a starring role in the dramatic television series Mission: Impossible and frequently performed onstage, notably as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. His poetry was voluminous, and he published books of his photography.
He also directed movies, including two from the Star Trek franchise, and television shows. And he made records, on which he sang pop songs, as well as original songs about Star Trek, and gave spoken-word performances — to the delight of his fans and the bewilderment of critics.
Born in Boston on March 26, 1931, Leonard Simon Nimoy was the second son of Max and Dora Nimoy, Ukrainian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. His father worked as a barber.
In 1949, after taking a summer course at Boston College, he traveled to Hollywood, though it wasn't until 1951 that he landed small parts in two movies, Queen for a Day and Rhubarb.
He continued to be cast in little-known movies, though he did presciently play an alien invader in a cult serial called Zombies of the Stratosphere, and in 1961 he had a minor role on an episode of The Twilight Zone. His first starring movie role was in 1952 with Kid Monk Baroni, in which he played a disfigured Italian street-gang leader who becomes a boxer.
Mr. Nimoy served in the Army for two years, rising to sergeant and spending 18 months at Fort McPherson in Georgia, where he presided over shows for the Army's Special Services branch. He received his discharge in November 1955.
He then returned to California, where he worked as a soda jerk, movie usher and cabdriver while studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He achieved wide visibility in the late 1950s and early 1960s on television shows such as Wagon Train, Rawhide and Perry Mason. Then came Star Trek.
Mr. Nimoy directed two of the Star Trek movies: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), which he helped write. In 1991, the same year that he resurrected Spock on two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mr. Nimoy was also the executive producer and a writer of the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
He then directed the hugely successful comedy Three Men and a Baby (1987), a far cry from his science-fiction work, and appeared in made-for-television movies. He received an Emmy nomination for the 1982 movie A Woman Called Golda, in which he portrayed the husband of Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, who was played by Ingrid Bergman. It was the fourth Emmy nomination of his career — the other three were for his Star Trek work — although he never won.
Mr. Nimoy's marriage to actor Sandi Zober ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, Adam and Julie Nimoy; a stepson, Aaron Bay Schuck; six grandchildren and one great-grandchild; and an older brother, Melvin.
In later years, he rediscovered his Jewish heritage, and in 1991 he produced and starred in Never Forget, a television movie based on the story of a Holocaust survivor who sued a neo-Nazi organization of Holocaust deniers.
In 2002, having illustrated his books of poetry with his photographs, Mr. Nimoy published Shekhina, a book devoted to photography with a Jewish theme, that of the feminine aspect of God. His black-and-white photographs of nude and seminude women struck some Orthodox Jewish leaders as heretical, but Mr. Nimoy asserted that his work was consistent with the teaching of the kabbalah.
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.
"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."