a rational biography
by Joe Kane
Hansel & Spock?
Leonard Nimoy was born, unsurprisingly enough, at a very early age and decided soon after that event that he wanted a career in acting. In his first role, at the age of 8, he played Hansel in Boston’s Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse production of Hansel & Gretel and continued working with the Playhouse off and on over the next twelve years. He later attended Boston College and studied drama before splitting, inevitably, to Hollywood in 1949, where he immediately enrolled in the Pasadena Playhouse.
In 1954, Nimoy married a young actress, Sandra Zober, just prior to being drafted and was sent to Fort McPherson, Georgia where he and his wife spent the next 8 months. While the service interrupted his professional career, he managed to use this lull to good advantage, writing, narrating, and emceeing G.I. shows for the Special Services Department, while working during his off hours with the Atlanta Theater Guild. After his release from the Army, Nimoy and his family hustled back to L.A.
no Hollywood slick, but a wee Dead End
Since Nimoy in no way resembled the kind of Hollywood slick who still dominated American films, his screen career was extremely uneven. In 1952 he landed a title role in Kid Monk Baroni, an obscure B film featuring a group of overaged adolescents called the Billy Goat Gang, an obvious and unsuccessful imitation of the old Dead End Kids. Jack Larson (of Jimmy Olsen fame) appeared as a member of the gang and the film itself emerged as an eccentric attempt to revive the old Dead End schtick at a time when this type of film could no longer go over and when the B film production was already in a severe state of decline. In it, Nimoy played an egocentric boxer who tries to battle his way out of an exaggerated inferiority complex arising from his physical ugliness. And while Nimoy wore extensive make-up for this part, he seemed to have been chosen because he very well might have looked ugly or at least ‘unusual’ to the eye of a hack studio producer. At any rate, Kid Monk Baroni was his only film break during that period and he was forced to earn a living in the traditional starving-actor style-doing counter work, delivering newspapers, selling vacuum cleaners, servicing vending machines, working in a pet shop, and driving a cab. But he continued to study and eventually teach acting before finding a more profitable outlet in television where he appeared on shows like Rawhide, The Virginian, Dr. Kildare, Outer Limits, and Profiles In Courage.
et tu, STAR TREK?
Even after STAR TREK came, conquered, and left, Nimoy’s film career remained spotty. Before Star Trek he appeared chiefly in offbeat films like The Balcony, the screen version of Jean Genet’s play, released in 1963. Created by Joseph Strick and Ben Maddow, The Balcony starred Shelley Winters and Peter Falk as a brothel madam and a police chief, respectively, with Nimoy cast in the small but crucial role of Roger, the revolutionary. Three years later, Nimoy and actor Vic Morrow produced another Genet-based film called Deathwatch, which Morrow also directed.
In it Nimoy and actors Michael Forest and Paul Mazursky (later half of the team of Mazursky-Tucker who created Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Alex In Wonderland) as three convicts awaiting execution. A small role in Seven Days In May preceded Deathwatch.
underneath the Vulcanizing
Nimoy admitted to genuinely enjoying his role as Mr. Spock. “Spock is fun to portray,” he told an interviewer, “because, underneath, he really does have emotions. If Spock didn’t have any emotions, he wouldn’t be interesting … When I first started as an actor, my work was overemotional. I considered acting an opportunity to express emotions and I took advantage of every opportunity I got. It took me a long time to discover that restraint could be admirable.”
Not that Leonard can’t cast off that restraint when he wants to. Recently, he toured with the roadshow production of Fiddler on the Roof where in which he played, of all people, Tevye, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-life-lusting. Jewish peddler. You can’t get much further away from Spock than that.