Leonard Nimoy Retires From Star Trek 224
DesScorp writes "Leonard Nimoy is hanging up his Vulcan ears for good and retiring from the role of Spock in the Star Trek franchise, reports the Daily Mail. Nimoy apparently wants to pass the torch: 'Nimoy, one of the most recognizable and best loved characters from the sci-fi series that began in 1966, announced that he wanted to "get off the stage" and give young actor Zachary Quinto a clear run at the role he took over for last year's Star Trek movie.' Nimoy, at age 79, appears to be retiring from acting, period. He has, in recent years, undertaken another career in photography, as well as other pursuits, but seems to be preparing to retire from the public eye altogether."
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
79? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway who can blame him? Spock was the ultimate typecasting.
Let me just say ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Live Long and Prosper.
Hope for one last appearance: Civ5 (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only hope he has already done the voice acting/narration of technologies for Civ5, as in Civ4. His reading of the little quotes with each technological advance were spot-on almost every time. The deadpan delivery of Space Flight/Sputnik's "Beep. Beep. Beep." is probably the best, but Bureaucracy isn't far behind.
Class (Score:5, Insightful)
That man has quite a bit of class, and as one actress (Kim Cattrall?) noted, he is indeed a renaissance man. I wish him well. He has earned both deep respect and a well-deserved retirement.
That needs to be remixed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or mashed up with a Shatner piece..
OH, I KNOW, Shatner needs to do a spoken word version of Lenard Nimoy's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins".
Re:Class (Score:5, Insightful)
He's earned his place as a cultural icon, and spent a lot of years in the public eye. He's almost 80, and it seems like a good time to bid adieu. Better, I think, than the way Jimmy Doohan spent his finally years, his battle with Alzheimer's at least semi-public, and certainly a lot better than the never-ending George Takei-William Shatner hatefest (we get it, you guys are both preening egomaniacs). Do what Katherine Hepburn did, retire to your own little corner and enjoy your last years without having to put up with us pathetic Trekkies.
What about Fringe? (Score:3, Insightful)
He still got some 'splainin to do on that show!
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't need a background in something to know what I *like*.
Subjective things are subjective.
Re:79? (Score:3, Insightful)
I laughed out loud when he was Mustafa Mond in the Brave New World movie.
Actually, I thought he did it fairly well. Klaus Kinski might have been better, if he had not been dead already. Nimoy was a good choice.
Re:That sucks! (Score:2, Insightful)
Spock must live on!
That seems to be the point of Nimoy retiring, and this is partly his way of saying Spock > Nimoy. He has certainly earned the right to a private retirement. I will miss him on future Futurama episodes, however.
Of course he did. (Score:3, Insightful)
This last movie broke so many things, they can avoid the 'original' Spock (depending on which timeline you subscribe to) and plow new ground:
- Vulcan is destroyed. They have to fix it, obviously. Time travel to the rescue.
- Kirk knows Spock from the future. He'll be looking for a way to restore Vulcan now.
- Spock (new) obviously will figure out he's in two places at the same time.
They need at least two more movies to fix everything. One to get Kirk and Young Spock in a position where they know both how and why they must restore Vulcan. I don't yet know why, but I'm not the screenwriter either. And one to actually do it. After that, then movies keep coming to let villains and victims try to take revenge, Cmdr. Pike's story, and some excuse to see more slave girls.
Pretty much as pathetique as Star Wars. Why can't we have a Blade Runner sequel, eh? Nobody has any Vaseline for the lenses? Do it in digital, ok? A set of Red cams isn't that damned expensive.
awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Of course he did. (Score:5, Insightful)
What a slacker! (Score:5, Insightful)
79 is nothing for a Vulcan! He's still a kid!
Re:That sucks! (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought Urban's McCoy was pretty darned good too.
Re:Of course he did. (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of the new movie was to completely break away from the old "Trek universe" - This isn't the universe of TOS, TNG, DS9 etc, it's an alternate reality created by the time travel. The old universe is still there.
Re:a class act who shall be missed (Score:3, Insightful)
Kirk is just about the weakest major character in all Star Trek (with the *possible* exception of Uhura, and even that is a near thing). He's flat, static, *and* shallow, which is a pretty rare combination in a protagonist. Several TOS villians are better characters than Kirk.
But the real problem is Shatner's acting, which would be right at home in a lame B-grade horror flick directed by Ed Wood. The only other bridge-officer Star Trek character to even begin to approach his level of incompetence is Nana Visitor, and at least she was cast well enough that you really only notice her bad acting in episodes that require her to act a different part from usual (e.g., mirror universe, that ceremony where she takes on the personality of one of Dax's former hosts, Bashir's holodeck programs, and that one where Sisko is a twentieth-century sci-fi writer). When she's playing Major Kira, you don't notice that the acting is bad, because you just attribute the actor's personality to the character, and it works. With Shatner's Kirk, on the other hand, the acting is so bad it's impossible to ignore. You can actually *see* him struggling to come up with his lines, like it's some kind of junior high play production. The words the writers put in Kirk's mouth would, if you read them on a printed page, convey emotions that the actor doesn't seem to be able to manage to get across when he says them out loud -- an impressive level of badness. He may be the worst actor ever to appear in a major motion picture, although the competition for that dubious honor is pretty steep.
The closest thing to Shatner's acting in the rest of Star Trek is in Time's Arrow (the TNG episode where they find Data's head in a cave on Earth then travel back in time and meet Mark Twain and Guinan) when Mrs. Carmichael (the boarding house lady) is reading off the line from A Midsummer Night's Dream: "What. Jealous. Oberon. Fairies. Skip. Hence. I have... forsworn... his bed... and company." It's like that because they were deliberately portraying Mrs. Carmichael as completely incapable of acting, but she's really not very much worse than Shatner.
Re:Again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering his age - and the cause that he will in all our minds be "The Spock" he will have a hard time to drop it completely.
He is also the most important figure that have appeared in Star Trek, which says a lot. Many other persons could have been replaced easily.
But he also need to have quality time and not be Spock all the time. And we will have to accept that even our favorite actors seems to grow old and pass away sooner or later even though some seems to hang around in the fringe for a long time after their heavy acting career has ended - like Kirk Douglas (who have more than 60 years of activities listed at IMDB). [imdb.com]
Anyway - Nimoy will probably make guest appearances if it suits him, but maybe not as Spock.
Re:The thing is: Quinto as Spock looks like Nimoy (Score:1, Insightful)
You can only say that because Doohan was an almost OK actor with crappy lines, while Urban is a crappy actor with almost OK lines.
Re:The thing is: Quinto as Spock looks like Nimoy (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, they may have done so, but, overall, the movie was a step back in science fiction.
Re:Of course he did. (Score:3, Insightful)
What might be even more interesting is that old Spock should know about all of those things already, which means that they could be dealt with in the new Universe in an entirely different manner. I'd really like to know more about who built the Doomsday machine, where the whale probe came from, and what Voyager (V'ger) ran into myself.