“
For whatever reason, I projected some kind of quality that people said, ‘OK, he’s a good alien,’ ” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1999 interview."
He served in the U.S. Army from 1953-55
For Spock, Nimoy invented the V-shaped Vulcan “Live Long and Prosper” hand gesture and the neck pinch that rendered his enemies unconscious. (He said he devised the latter move because he had grown tired of getting into staged fistfights. “Here’s a chance to cleverly avoid that,” he said in a 2000 interview with The Archive of American Television.)
Nimoy was not happy about wearing pointy ears, but Roddenberry convinced him to do it.
After being impressed with the humor in Star Trek IV, new Disney studio chiefs Jeffery Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, fresh from Paramount, asked Nimoy to step in to direct Three Men and a Baby, a remake of the 1985 Oscar-nominated French film Trois Hommes et un Couffin (Three Men and a Cradle). Coline Serreau, who directed Trois Hommes, had exited the American version because of “creative differences.”
Starring Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg as bachelors scrambling to take care of a child, Three Men and a Baby raked in $167 million in the U.S., and no film grossed more that year.
A deep-thinker, Nimoy authored nine poetry books; a comic book titled PriMortals (developed with writer Isaac Asimov); a 1977 autobiography, I Am Not Spock; and another autobiography in 1995, I Am Spock. He once said that the contradicting titles “baffled the reading audience” but that he “had some fun with that.”
