Star Trek’s James Doohan dies, immortalized for ‘Beam me up, Scotty’
BOB THOMAS - Yahoo news.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek TV series and motion pictures who responded to the command “Beam me up, Scotty,” died early Wednesday. He was 85.
Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s, he said.
The Canadian-born Doohan was enjoying a busy career as a character actor when he auditioned for a role as an engineer in a new space adventure on NBC in 1966. A master of dialects from his early years in radio, he tried seven different accents.
“The producers asked me which one I preferred,” Doohan recalled 30 years later. “I believed the Scot voice was the most commanding. So I told them, ‘If this character is going to be an engineer, you’d better make him a Scotsman.”‘
The series, which starred another Canadian, William Shatner, as Capt. James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as the enigmatic Mr. Spock, attracted an enthusiastic following of science fiction fans, especially among teenagers and children, but not enough ratings power. NBC cancelled it after three seasons.
When the series ended in 1969, Doohan found himself typecast as Montgomery Scott, the canny engineer with a burr in his voice. In 1973, he complained to his dentist, who advised him: “Jimmy, you’re going to be Scotty long after you’re dead. If I were you, I’d go with the flow.”
“I took his advice,” said Doohan, “and since then everything’s been just lovely.”
Star Trek continued in syndicated TV both in the United States and abroad, and its following grew larger and more dedicated. In his later years, Doohan attended 40 “Trekkie” gatherings around the country and lectured at colleges.
The huge success of George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977 prompted Paramount Pictures, which had produced Star Trek for TV, to plan a movie based on the series. The studio brought back the TV cast and hired a topflight director, Robert Wise. Star Trek - The Motion Picture was successful enough to spawn five sequels.
The powerfully built Doohan, a veteran of D-Day in Normandy, spoke frankly in 1998 about his employer, Paramount, and his TV commander: