All Star Trek cast members enjoyed fan adulation, but James Doohan may have been the most beloved. Fans savored his role as Scotty, the Scottish-burred, miracle-working engineer of the starship USS Enterprise in the original 1960s television series and seven films. More than that, at countless fan conventions and events he was very accessible and plain-spoken, openly sharing his true feelings, such as a dislike for Star Trek's Captain Kirk, William Shatner. Fans ate it up.
"I see the love in their eyes," Doohan said on a Houston visit for 1986's Star Trek IV.
Doohan, 85, died Wednesday of pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease. Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home. With him was his wife of 31 years, Wende, 48. His ashes are to be sent into space — at his request — by Houston company Space Services Inc. Space Services spokesperson Susan Schonfeld said Doohan's ashes would probably go up on a Titan 1 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in late September or early October.
Doohan said a farewell to Trek fans and public life in August 2004, after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At that time all the surviving original Trek cast, plus many fans, showed up for a party and a ceremony putting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At the event the wheelchair-bound Doohan was smiling but too weak to make a speech.
Fans often spoke of the Star Trek cast as a family. Doohan was preceded in death by DeForest Kelley, the show's Dr. Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy, who died in 1999, and the show's creator and guide, Gene Roddenberry, who died in 1991.
Once a little-known but steadily working character actor good at accents — he was Canadian — he found both lifelong adoration and some career frustration when cast as Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in Star Trek in 1966. While later Trek films and conventions kept him active for decades, he found it hard to get non-Trek roles once Star Trek became a cultural phenomenon in the early 1970s, several years after the series ended.
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"I see the love in their eyes," Doohan said on a Houston visit for 1986's Star Trek IV.
Doohan, 85, died Wednesday of pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease. Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home. With him was his wife of 31 years, Wende, 48. His ashes are to be sent into space — at his request — by Houston company Space Services Inc. Space Services spokesperson Susan Schonfeld said Doohan's ashes would probably go up on a Titan 1 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in late September or early October.
Doohan said a farewell to Trek fans and public life in August 2004, after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At that time all the surviving original Trek cast, plus many fans, showed up for a party and a ceremony putting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At the event the wheelchair-bound Doohan was smiling but too weak to make a speech.
Fans often spoke of the Star Trek cast as a family. Doohan was preceded in death by DeForest Kelley, the show's Dr. Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy, who died in 1999, and the show's creator and guide, Gene Roddenberry, who died in 1991.
Once a little-known but steadily working character actor good at accents — he was Canadian — he found both lifelong adoration and some career frustration when cast as Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in Star Trek in 1966. While later Trek films and conventions kept him active for decades, he found it hard to get non-Trek roles once Star Trek became a cultural phenomenon in the early 1970s, several years after the series ended.
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