Following the death of Leonard Nimoy in February 2015, we’ve had to live long and prosper without the man that brought us Spock (as well as the funniest music video ever created in The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins). While Nimoy wrote two autobiographies during his life, William Shatner has taken on the challenge of bringing it all together with his own biography for his former Star Trek co-star and buddy in Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship With A Remarkable Man.
The book is scheduled for release in hardback, audio book and digital download on Thursday the 25th February 2016, just a little under a year since Leonard Nimoy’s death. Shatner has written the book with the help of British writer, David Fisher, who has his own long history with the brilliance of sci-fi, having written the scripts for four serials of Doctor Who.
When you’ve known someone for as long as these two there’s bound to be a lot to cover, and the biography will take us from their very first introduction, working together on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in 1964, right the way through their Star Trek odyssey, which for Nimoy continued on until his final appearance as Spock Prime in Star Trek: Into Darkness. They’ve starred together in seventy-nine episodes of the TV series and featured in six big screen movies, so they’ve had a lot of time to cement their friendship.
The book promises to be as emotionally charged as it is cloaked in the majestic mantle of the sci-fi legacy that the two actors have left behind. Shatner will recount the highs as much as the lows, both from their personal and professional lives, with their friendship at the heart of his ode to a remarkable man.
As it’s been written by Shatner, we’re expecting it to focus on their shared experiences in TV, film and the Star Trek fan circuit, which they were both fairly active parts of. This will provide a lot of insight into their time spent together, however, it could limit it to the things they did with one another, so there’s probably plenty outside of this that may not make it into the book.
Leonard Nimoy did a whole lot more than you might think, which led him to write his own autobiography, I’m Not Spock in 1975 to talk about all of the other work that he’s been involved in over the years. While he also went on to write the follow-up, I Am Spock, in 1995 to realign himself back to his Star Trek heritage, he’s still had a pretty impressive career even if you take Boldly going out of the equation.
He’s provided the voice for both The Transformers: The Movie and Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, he starred in and directed Three Men And A Baby, had computer gaming roles in the Kingdom Hearts series and appeared in everything from The Twilight Zone to The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. Much of this may not be included in Leonard: My Fifty Year Friendship With A Remarkable Man, but Shatner and his co-writer David Fisher have talked to a lot of people that were close to Leonard Nimoy to get more of a rounded picture of him when he wasn’t hanging out with James T. Kirk on the Starship Enterprise set.
Some of the anecdotes that will make their way into the book will be the first time they’ve been set down in writing and maybe even the first time they’ve been recounted at all, so there’s bound to be a fair few gems. The fact that Nimoy directed Shatner in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock should make for an interesting section, for example. It looks like it’s going to be a touching tribute to the memory of such a great actor, director, poet and writer and with his final words to fans on Twitter – “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP” – you get a sense of why biographies and autobiographies are such important part of literature.
