Wednesday - July 20, 2005

Star Fleet Bulletin: Cmdr. Montgomery Scott

LOS ANGELES, California (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. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, 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 disease, 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 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 canceled 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.”

From Doohan’s Biography: You may have never noticed, watching the Original Series and the movies, that Mr. Scott has a physical handicap — he’s missing the middle finger of his right hand. That’s because the actor kept it very well hidden.  (Watch the shows again carefully — Scotty is almost always clenching his right hand, or hiding it behind a console — but if you know to look, the missing digit is occasionally apparent.) That injury occurred on D-Day.  Lt. Doohan successfully led his Canadian troop onto the beach and pushed inland to establish the best possible gun position (along the way Doohan shot two German snipers, never knowing whether he killed them). A field was secured and command posts were established, but not all Germans between the beach and their position had been captured. That night about 11:30, Doohan and another officer were walking between command posts when machine gun fire broke out. Doohan was hit; he fell into a shell hole, looked at his hand and saw blood. Three bullets struck the one finger. Never losing consciousness, he actually walked to the regimental aid post, unaware he also took four bullets in the leg.

There was an eighth bullet, and it was nothing less than a miracle that he’s still with us today. It hit his chest, four inches from his heart. But it ricocheted off the sterling silver cigarette case in his pocket, the one his brother had given him for being best man at his wedding. It’s like a trite plot twist, he acknowledges — his brother saved his life from thousands of miles away. Jimmy pushed the dent out of the cigarette case and continued using it until he quit smoking years later. He stayed in the military, learned to fly and came to be known as the “craziest pilot in the Canadian Air Forces.”

Well, back in Canada after the war, Jimmy never gave thought to a career in acting until one night around Christmas of 1945, he took a break from his VA school studies and turned on the radio. “And I heard the worst radio drama I had ever heard. Couldn’t believe how terrible it was,” he said. With no training whatsoever, he was sure he could do better. So he found some Shakespeare and other reading material and marched into the local radio station to say, “I want to make a recording.”

That “tryout” eventually led to a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, where he trained under famed acting coach Sanford Meisner. “He turned out to be one of the greatest drama teachers in the world,” Jimmy would say years later. He then knew he had a career, and he was soon working in the fledgling medium of television.

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/20/2005 at 11:05 AM   
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