Leonard Nimoy, 'Star Trek's' transcendent alien Mr. Spock, dies at 83

LOS ANGELES - When Leonard Nimoy was approached about acting in a new TV series called Star Trek, he was, like any good Vulcan contemplating a risky mission in a chaotic universe, dispassionate.

"I really didn't give it a lot of thought," he later recalled. "The chance of this becoming anything meaningful was slim."

By the time Star Trek finished its three-year run in 1969, Mr. Nimoy was a cultural touchstone - a living representative of the scientific method, a voice of pure reason in a time of social turmoil, the unflappable and impeccably logical Mr. Spock. Mr. Nimoy received three successive Emmy nominations.

He was, as the Los Angeles Times described him in 2009, "the most iconic alien since Superman" - a quantum leap for a character actor who had appeared in plenty of shows but never worked a single job longer than two weeks.

Mr. Nimoy, 83, who became so identified with his TV and film role that he titled his two memoirs, somewhat illogically, I Am Not Spock (1975) and I Am Spock (1995), died Friday at his home in Los Angeles.

The cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his son, Adam. Mr. Nimoy revealed last year that he had the disease, a condition he attributed to the smoking he gave up 30 years earlier.

While he was best known for his portrayal of the green-tinted Spock, Mr. Nimoy more recently made his mark with art photography, focusing on plus-size nude women in a volume called The Full Body Project and on nude women juxtaposed with Old Testament tales and quotes from Jewish thinkers in Shekhina.

He also directed films, wrote poetry, and acted on the stage.

In Star Trek, he was the pointy-eared, half-Vulcan 23d-century science officer whose vaulted eyebrows seemed to express perpetual surprise at the illogical ways of the humans who served with him on the starship Enterprise.

Spock could barely wrap his mind around feelings. He was the son of a human mother and a father from Vulcan - a planet whose inhabitants had chosen pure reason as the only way they could survive. When he thwarted deep-space evildoers, it was with logic simple enough for a Vulcan but dizzying for everyone else, including his commanding officer, Capt. James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner.

While worlds apart from the racial strife and war protests of the 1960s, Star Trek explored such issues by setting up parallel situations in space, "the final frontier."

"Spock was a character whose time had come," Mr. Nimoy later wrote. "He represented a practical, reasoning voice in a period of dissension and chaos."

For much of his career, Mr. Nimoy had to deal with the same sort of perception problem.

While his 1975 autobiography was I Am Not Spock, he later called the title a mistake because it was easily misconstrued. In the book, he said he couldn't think of a TV character he would sooner have played. At the same time, he was disquieted by mountains of fan mail addressed not to Leonard Nimoy, but to "Mr. Spock, Hollywood, Calif."

The melding of actor and character was sometimes uncomfortable. On a tour of California Institute of Technology, Nimoy was asked his thoughts about complex projects by students who must have believed he had a Spock-like insight. "I would nod very quietly, and very sagely I would say, 'You're on the right track,' " he told the New York Times in 2009.

Born on March 26, 1931, Leonard S. Nimoy first acted in a community settlement house for immigrants. At 17, he was cast in a Boston production of the Clifford Odets play Awake and Sing!

Mr. Nimoy was married to Sandi Zober from 1954 to 1987, when they divorced. In addition to his children from that marriage, son Adam and daughter Julie, his survivors include Susan Bay, his wife since 1989; stepson Aaron Bay Schuck; six grandchildren; a great-grandson; and a brother.