James Doohan: James Doohan, the actor who played Star Trek's indefatigable chief engineer Scotty, lost his battle against pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease last Wednesday. He was 85.
The Canadian-born performer began his career in radio and was a jobbing character actor when he auditioned for a role in a new space adventure for NBC in 1966.
He tried out seven different accents before stumbling on the one that would give rise to legions of horrific impressions over the next four decades.
"The producers asked me which one I preferred," he 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, starring William Shatner as Captain James Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr Spock was on air for three years and attracted a cult following. But NBC cancelled it in 1969 when it failed to achieve the required ratings.
After the series ended, Doohan admitted feeling typecast in the role of the canny and dependable Scots engineer. When he complained about his lot to his dentist in 1973, he was told: "Jimmy, you're going to be Scotty long after you're dead. If I were you, I'd go with the flow." Doohan said: "I took his advice and since then everything's been just lovely."
He went on to star in five feature-length Star Trek films and, in later years, attended Trekkie gatherings around the world and lectured at colleges about the phenomenon.
However, his recollections of his time tending the Enterprise's dilithium crystals were not always fond. In interviews he accused Shatner, another Canadian, of hogging the camera. "I like Captain Kirk," he said, "but I sure don't like Bill. He's so insecure that all he can think about is himself."
Doohan was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to William Doohan, a pharmacist, veterinarian and dentist, and his wife, Sarah. He later wrote in his biography, Beam Me Up Scotty, that his father was a drunk who made family life difficult.
At 19 he joined the Canadian army, becoming a lieutenant in artillery. He was among the Canadian forces to land on Juno Beach on D-Day, where he was hit six times by machine-gun fire and in the battle lost one of the fingers of his right hand.
Fiendishly perceptive Star Trek fans later noted that the absence of Scotty's digit was noticeable in only two episodes of the series.
His wartime experiences made a deep impression on him and he was among many veterans to publicly thank Steven Spielberg for his gorily realistic depiction of the Normandy landings in the director's 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.
Doohan retired from public life last year after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He married his third wife, Wende Braunberger, in 1974 and they had three children, Eric, Thomas and lastly Sarah, who was born five years ago when Doohan was 80. He had six children from the two previous marriages.
Asked in 1998 whether he ever got tired of hearing the show's line "Beam me up, Scotty" - a line, which any true Star Trek fan will tell you, did not actually appear in the original series - he remained phlegmatic to the last.
"I'm not tired of it at all," he said. "It's been said to me for just about 31 years. It's been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It's been fun."
James Doohan, born March 3rd, 1920; died July 20th, 2005