Leonard Nimoy

Before anyone handed him a character, Nimoy put in more than a decade as a working bit player: an army sergeant in the 1954 giant-ant picture Them!, then cops, outlaws and heavies in Highway Patrol, Sea Hunt, Wagon Train, The Tall Man and 26 Men. He was in his mid-thirties when Star Trek cast him as Spock in 1966, and he went on playing the part, on and off, for more than forty years.

What made Spock endure was a decision most actors would refuse: play the least expressive person on the show and trust the audience to lean in. Nimoy underplayed everything. The character's whole appeal is the gap between what he says and what is obviously happening underneath, and that gap only exists because the performance declines to close it. He carried it through the animated series, the first six films, a Next Generation appearance and the two rebooted films of 2009 and 2013, and by the end he could get more out of an eyebrow than the scripts deserved. Between the original series and the films he also spent two seasons on Mission: Impossible as an agent named Paris.

He directed, and directed well. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home are his two inside the franchise, and The Voyage Home is the funniest and most humane thing the series has produced. Then, oddly, he made a broad comedy about three bachelors and an infant that turned into an enormous hit, followed by two smaller films. Later work leaned into the icon: his own head in a jar on Futurama, William Bell on Fringe, Sentinel Prime in a Transformers film, Galvatron in the animated one, and a Saturn Award for a television guest role. He was also a photographer and an author. He died in 2015.