American actor and director who played Spock for nearly fifty years and directed The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home.
Leonard Nimoy (1931–2015) was an American actor, director, author and photographer. He originated Spock in the first pilot, The Cage, in 1964 and was the only actor carried over to the regular cast. His performance earned three Emmy nominations, and he devised the Vulcan nerve pinch and the Vulcan salute, which he based on a gesture from Jewish ritual.
Nimoy played Spock in all three seasons of the original series, in The Animated Series, in all six original-cast films and in the Next Generation two-parter Unification. He directed Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), co-writing the latter's story, and he was executive producer of Star Trek VI and shared its story credit.
He returned as the elder Spock in Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). Outside Star Trek he starred in Mission: Impossible, directed Three Men and a Baby and wrote two memoirs, I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock. He died in 2015.