Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Simon Nimoy (March 26, 1931 - February 27, 2015) was an American actor, film director, poet and photographer best known for playing the character Spock in the Star Trek franchise, namely Star Trek: The Original Series .

During and following TOS, Nimoy also released several albums of vocal recordings on Dot Records, including Trek-related songs and cover versions of popular tunes. These recordings are generally regarded as unintentionally camp, though his tongue-in-cheek performance of "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" received a fair amount of airplay when Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films were released.

In addition to his own music career he also directed a 1985 music video for The Bangles' "Going Down to Liverpool". He makes a brief cameo appearance in the video as their driver. This came about because his son Adam Nimoy (now a frequent television director) was a friend of Bangles lead singer Susanna Hoffs from college.

Leonard Nimoy is a man of many and considerable talents. As an actor he has ranged from Star Trek's indomitable, inscrutable Mr. Spock, to Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, to Vincent Van Gogh in the one-man stage show Vincent. He has also appeared in plays such as Oliver!, The King And I, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Camelot, Twelfth Night, The Man in the Glass Booth, Caligula, and Sherlock Holmes. But Nimoy is more than an entertainer: in 1997 he narrated the A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, about the various sects of Hasidic Orthodox Jews, and he received an Emmy nomination for best supporting actor for the 1982 TV film A Woman Called Golda, to go with his three Emmy nominations for Star Trek. He has also directed three of the best-selling movies of all time: two Star Trek blockbusters and Three Men and a Baby. Nimoy is also an accomplished photographer, vocalist, writer and poet.