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Before Star Trek, producers were hiring a respected character actor when they called him; after Star Trek they wanted his name, although most of the time his full name was usually “Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy.” But now people knew it, and it attracted a growing audience. It was an odd time for Leonard—the first time in his career he had the luxury of making choices rather than accepting roles for the income. The actor’s inclination always is to say yes and then feel relieved he or she has a job. Leonard was carefully feeling his way into his post-Spock career. He made several mostly forgettable films. What he was really trying to do was shed his ears. Instead, what he was discovering, as I did, was that there was no such thing as post–Star Trek. In almost every story or review about whatever it was he was doing, almost inevitably there would be a reference or a comparison to Spock. “Tevye is not recognizable as Spock” or his character in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers “is the evil side of Spock.” I’ve wondered if reporters or critics ever realized when they wrote that he had successfully made the audience forget Spock for a few hours that they actually were pointing out that no one had really forgotten about Spock.

Forgotten? In fact, the opposite was true. While each member of the original cast was finding his or her own projects, in the background, Star Trek was growing more popular in syndication than it had ever been during its original run. Rather than successfully escaping it, it was overtaking and enveloping all of us. It was as if it had become the theme music of our lives.

Soon after Leonard quit M:I, he accepted his very first starring role in a television movie, an ABC Movie of the Week thriller called Assault on the Wayne. He played the commander of a nuclear submarine carrying a secret antimissile weapon. As he discovers his crew has been infiltrated by enemy agents who intend to sail the sub into a mid-ocean trap and steal the device, Commander Kettenring has to somehow figure out which members of his crew are traitors to foil their plot. Unfortunately, the movie sank, although it still shows up on occasion on late-night television.

Following that, he made several films, including his first theatrical feature, the cowboy movie Catlow in which—just like the days before Star Trek—he played the villain. He costarred with Yul Brynner and Richard Crenna while his friend and mentor Jeff Corey also had a small role.

It was a bumpy road, filled with plays, TV movies, and one-shots in popular series. I was following the same path. The phone rang a lot, but as much as we pretended it wasn’t true, we were both carrying our characters on our backs.

Leonard made some interesting choices, among them starring in his first major Hollywood film, director Philip Kaufman’s remake of the suspense classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum costarred with him, and Robert Duvall made an unbilled cameo as a priest on a swing. In this story, aliens have come from outer space to colonize Earth. They arrived as giant seedpods that are hidden under beds, and when a human goes to sleep, an exact replica emerges from the pod and takes control of his or her body. Physically, they are exact duplicates, but they have no emotional center; they are completely dispassionate.

Dispassionate aliens? Now that sounds familiar. I wonder why they thought of Leonard.

In the film, he plays a psychiatrist and the author of several bestselling self-help books who refuses to believe claims made by friends that people they love have changed somehow, that they have lost access to their emotions. Leonard’s Dr. Kibner listens sympathetically but implores these people to be rational. In soft and measured tones, he manages to calm their fear—then the audience discovers that he is one of the pod people. In fact, he may well be the leader of the invasion. One critic pointed out the greatest irony—none of Dr. Kibner’s close friends, the people who come to him for help, even notice that he himself is devoid of emotion.

In some ways, this is Leonard showing Spock’s dark side, an alien unable to experience any of the human emotions that Spock always found so fascinating yet also was unable to feel.

I’m not sure when each member of the original cast accepted the inevitable, that we were bound to Star Trek forever. I know I probably resisted longer than anyone else. I still kind of thought my most memorable role was around the next corner. It took me quite a while to understand and finally appreciate and be very grateful for the important place that Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise filled in the entertainment universe.

It was while Leonard was working on Body Snatchers that Paramount decided to go ahead with the first Star Trek movie. Only after they settled his lawsuit for a percentage of merchandising revenue did he agree to appear in it. With the success of that film, the studio was finally beginning to understand the potential value of this property. This TV show that had struggled through three seasons had become a franchise. Paramount immediately began planning a second Star Trek feature. Leonard agreed to do it—we all did—but this time he demanded a guarantee from the studio that they would find other, very different roles for him. The studio agreed to two “pay or play” commitments. They would have to pay him for two more films, whether or not they used him. I know studios; if they were paying him, they would find a way to use him.

While the script for Star Trek II was being written, he accepted the role of the Israeli pioneer and Prime Minister Golda Meir’s husband, Morris Meyerson, in the TV movie A Woman Called Golda. Initially, he turned it down, not sure he could do it, but the producer finally talked him into it. In the movie, which was filmed in Israel, the great actresses Judy Davis and Ingrid Bergman played Golda at different times of her life. This was only a few years after the miniseries Roots had caused people to start searching for their own heritage, and with roles like Tevye and Meyerson, it was as if Leonard was exploring his Jewish roots. Working with Ingrid Bergman was especially poignant for him. While making this film, she was dying of cancer, and everyone in the cast and crew knew it. Leonard remembers how wardrobe created costumes to keep her arm, badly swollen arm from the treatments she was receiving, covered. He spoke to her for the last time several months after the film was done. She had stopped taking her medication, she said. It made her feel awful, and she accepted that whatever was going to happen would happen. “I want to enjoy myself as much as possible.”

She was honored with an Emmy for the best performance by an actress in a TV movie, although she had died before it was announced. Leonard also was nominated as best supporting actor, his fourth nomination, but the competition included John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, and the winner, Laurence Olivier, for his work in Brideshead Revisited.

Following the success of both the first and then second Star Trek feature films, Leonard was ambivalent about making a third film. I think we both were. We had done this, then done it again and then again, and for an actor, it was no longer challenging. Spock had died in the Wrath of Khan, but enough seeds had been planted in his death scene to make his cinematic resurrection viable. Trying to find that challenge that makes familiar material exciting. Leonard came up with an interesting idea: he told the studio he wanted to direct the film. That was a huge leap; he had never directed a movie, much less a movie with a substantial budget.

He was taking a gamble. When you make a demand like that, you’re taking a big risk, especially in a situation where they had already killed off his character. But they also knew the value Mr. Spock brought to the story and were convinced that Leonard was serious about it. Well, he was. The studio agreed to it.

I was thrilled. Years earlier, Leonard and I had added a “most favored nations” clause to our contracts that said, essentially, that whatever one of us got, the other one had to be treated to equally. I have no memory of negotiating that. I just woke up one day, and we had a favored nations clause. That meant if Leonard got to direct a film, I would get to direct the next one. Until then, this clause had worked mostly in Leonard’s favor. Each time my agents had gotten me a raise, he would automatically get the same raise. We used to laugh about it; I’d tell him that he didn’t even need an agent, that he could save the 10 percent by firing his agent and just relying on mine to get us the best possible deal. But this really paid off for me; the money that my agent had gotten for us over the years was nothing compared to being given the opportunity to direct a feature.

Directing a major movie is a universal dream. There is a wonderful, and clearly invented story, that after Mother Teresa had won the Nobel Prize a delegation from the United Nations visited her in her humble surroundings. A representative told her how greatly she was admired throughout the world and said, “All that you have been given you have given to others. Surely there must be something you’d like for yourself.” When she asked for food for orphans, the representative told her that while that was a beautiful request, this one time they wanted to give her something for herself. So Mother Teresa thought about it and finally said in her soft voice, “Well, I have always wanted to direct.”

That was every actor, ever. And now Leonard was being given that opportunity. It actually was something he’d been preparing to do for almost his entire career. Early in his career, he once said, people had been telling him he should be directing. Instead of being flattered, “I took it as an insult. I thought, what’s wrong with my acting?”

Obviously, that wasn’t the rationale behind that suggestion. Leonard just always came across as being smart, as being analytical. Maybe it was the cadence of his voice or the way he used the language, but he projected his natural intelligence. That’s what made him a good teacher, and it probably was what people saw in him when they made that suggestion. He started learning how to direct early in his career. While in the army, he directed training films in addition to starring in and directing plays like A Streetcar Named Desire for the local theater company he had helped establish. Through the years, he paid attention to the way different directors worked and learned from almost every job; from the early days of TV he learned how to be economical, how to shoot fast and get what you need right away. A lot of directors protect themselves by doing several takes of the same scene, figuring at least one of them would be useable. Before videotape was available, that sometimes got to be expensive as well as time consuming. On a set, time really has a cost. Among those directors he worked for in those days was Jack Webb on Dragnet, who was a master at shooting quickly and cheaply. Webb used lots of close-ups. He would bring actors in, stand them up against the background, and have them say their lines directly to the camera. Often the person they supposedly were talking to wasn’t even on the set. An actor might come in, read his lines, and leave without making the slightest contact with another actor. Norman Felton, the producer of The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Dr. Kildare, and several other shows, was known for helping young directors learn the process. Leonard spent several days on the U.N.C.L.E. set trailing Joe Sargent, who would later direct great feature films like MacArthur and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

Leonard’s first opportunity came in 1972, when he was hired to direct an episode of the anthology series Night Gallery. It was called “Death on a Barge,” and as Leonard said, “The script was poetry.” He probably meant poetry written by Edgar Allan Poe. It was the story of a beautiful young vampire kept on a barge in the middle of a canal by her father. The water prevented her from leaving and, equally important, prevented other people from getting there. And then the canal was drained!

Leonard, dear Leonard, as only he could, described it as the story of “Romeo and Juliet in vampire terms.”

He subsequently directed another Night Gallery and an episode of Mission: Impossible, but when he signed to do Star Trek III, he hadn’t been behind a camera in almost a decade. I was doing the police show T.J. Hooker when the studio signed Leonard to direct. He had guest-starred on an earlier episode, playing my old partner who seeks revenge when his daughter is raped and there isn’t enough evidence to convict the rapist. But we decided it made sense for him to direct an episode of the show. A TV cop show, a multimillion-dollar feature … on some level it made sense. The episode he directed was called “The Decoy,” in which beautiful young Heather Locklear volunteered to be a decoy to draw out a man who is killing beautiful young blondes. The real challenge for Leonard in that script was figuring out how many different ways he could shoot Heather Locklear with as few clothes as possible. So probably it wasn’t the best preparation for the movie.

Many people wondered how I would respond to being directed by Leonard. And truthfully, I was among them. The director has to be in complete charge on the set, and in our friendship, neither one of us felt we had that power. I thought it might be a little awkward at first, but I had no doubts we’d find a way of getting through it. We’d certainly had disagreements in the past and talked our way through them. Actors often disagree and have to find the comfortable middle. Leonard told a story about the first real meeting we had with producer Harve Bennett to go over the script. Just the three of us, and Harve probably thought he was the referee. Leonard remembered that I came in and said flatly, “I want nothing to do with this script.”

That sounds a lot more confrontational than I remember. But without a doubt, there was some tension in the room. Perhaps even a lot of tension. The balance that we had reached in our friendship, which had worked so well, was being upset and then having to find some kind of new footing. I had some questions about the script, as most actors do, and a few suggestions. No one knew Captain Kirk better than I did, and, as Leonard always believed, I had an obligation to be kind to him. He certainly had been good to me. Leonard began the meeting by agreeing, “What’s good for you, Bill, is good for Star Trek. My intention is to make a damn good Star Trek movie, and to do that, I need you to come off well.” I probably didn’t realize at that moment, but he already was at work as the director, providing a comforting environment for his actor. We spent the next several hours going through the script page by page; Leonard and Harve listened respectfully and agreed to most of the changes I requested. This wasn’t that unusual for us; while making the first movie, we’d spent a lot of time together trying to improve that script. It was a good, long, productive discussion, and by the time we were done, I thought the script was much tighter and stronger.

The other members of the crew probably had the same trepidation I did. It wasn’t easy for Leonard to step out of the group and assume command, but he successfully found a way to deal with each of them. I also think they were watching warily to see how I reacted to taking orders from him. Early in the production, Leonard and I dealt with that. We were filming a very dramatic scene in which Kirk learned of his son’s death. Leonard and I started discussing it, and we had a somewhat different approach. Finally, as we were getting to shoot it, Leonard asked everyone else to leave the set. After they were gone, we looked at each other, and, without discussing it, we knew exactly what we were going to do. I slammed my fist down on the metal console, a sharp sound that everybody heard. “Damn it, Leonard!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “I don’t care what you think! That’s not the way Kirk would do it! I’m not going to do it your way!”

Director Nimoy stood his ground loudly. “The hell you’re not!” he yelled right back. “You’re just the actor, and you’re goddamn well going to do it the way I tell you! So go stand over there and shut up!”

“Oh yeah?” Bam! I smacked my hands together, the sound of flesh hitting flesh reverberated through the soundstage.

“Oh yeah!” Leonard raised his voice ever louder.

I was half expecting people to come running in to rip us apart, but neither one of us could hold it together any longer. One of us—I don’t remember if it was me or him—broke up, and the other one followed. Who knows if anyone even believed we actually were fighting—that line about “just the actor” probably gave it away—but they all got the point: we were the crew of the starship Enterprise, and we were going to have another good voyage.

Leonard handled what might have been a difficult situation very well. It helped, of course, that this was a group of talented, very professional actors. On the set, he was extremely diplomatic. After all our years together, he knew the temperament, the needs, and the size of the ego of each actor and was smart enough to understand what he could get from each of them and how far he could go to guide them. He was, as George Takei recalls, “extremely diplomatic. He worked in shorthand; his way of directing was ‘a little more of that’ or ‘a little less.’ If he thought we were going in the wrong direction, he would suggest, ‘Think of such and such.’”

He actually made a point of trying to find something special for each actor. His goal, I remember he said one day, “was to find a way of putting an actor in a position to use all of his tools.” One of the first days, we were shooting a scene in which Walter Koenig, our Russian navigator Ensign Chekov, found life signs in Spock’s living quarters, which had been sealed off. While I dismissed it brusquely, muttering something about the whole crew being obsessed with Spock, Chekov showed his readings to Scotty. His line was something like, “You see. I’m not crazy.” Just as they were about to shoot, Leonard told Walter, “I’d like you to deliver that line in Russian.” It was incredibly meaningful for Walter. His parents were Russian Jews who had emigrated from Lithuania. In the twenty years he had been playing a Russian, he’d never had a single line in that language. This was a tribute to his parents as well as his own heritage.

Steve Guttenberg remembers Leonard working very much the same way several years later when Leonard was directing him in Three Men and a Baby. “As a director, Leonard was always authentic, always sincere. He didn’t play games with the actors. He never lied; he never said anything that wasn’t true. He dealt with everybody as they needed to be dealt with, because everybody is different. And he was quite malleable, he listened, he discussed, and he let actors do their work.

“Once, I remember, we were getting ready to do a scene in which Tom Selleck and I were arguing with Ted Danson about his responsibility to keep the baby. Just before we started, Leonard passed me a folded piece of paper on which he’d written a note. ‘I want you to look at this every time you start the scene,’ he said. I opened it up, and it read, ‘I love you.’ I looked up at him and started to say something, but he put up his hand. ‘Don’t talk to me,’ he said. ‘Do the scene.’

“After we’d completed several takes, I asked him, ‘Leonard, what was that?’

“He said, ‘That is your subject.’ It was a hugely intelligent way to direct an actor. Reading that note just before I went into the scene filled me with great warmth. It made me feel special, and I took that feeling with me into the scene. Some directors are Machiavellian manipulators; he was a Mother Teresa manipulator.”

When we were working together, Leonard never gave me a lot of direction; but what he did do was put me in a position to do my best work. In a key scene in which Kirk was told his son had been killed by the Klingons, rather than suggesting a response, he told me to go with my instincts. That certainly was consistent with his belief that no one understood a character better than the actor who created it. “You have to decide how emotionally vulnerable Kirk is going to be that moment,” he said. “How much of the heroic veneer you want to strip away.” I didn’t know for certain how Kirk would react to that news. He positioned me near the captain’s chair, and as I stepped back, I simply collapsed. Leonard told me later that he thought I’d tripped. But he let me go. Then I struggled to my feet and said my line. After he cut, he came over to me and asked with concern, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I told him. “Think we can use that?”

The next day, he told me that Jeff Katzenberg had called him after looking at the rushes and said, “Leonard, I just saw that scene with Bill. Why have you been wasting your time acting all these years? You’re a director!” I’m not sure how much he appreciated his acting career being described as “wasting your time,” but I do know how much he liked that call.

There was one scene that I thought we never got quite right. It was a light, simple scene in which Kirk was sitting with a woman and trying to keep a secret, while she was trying to tease it out of him. It was a setup that had the potential to be very funny. But I just couldn’t get it. I’ve never seen it—I don’t watch my own performances—but I remember knowing I didn’t quite get what Leonard wanted. I didn’t have enough spontaneity. That was a time I could have used some additional guidance, but that wasn’t the way he worked. Or, perhaps, he was more satisfied with it than I was.

As a director, Leonard believed strongly that the most important element in the entire process was story, story, story. “It’s always the good story,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how many ships you blow up, how many missiles you fire, how many fights or disasters or stunts you show. Is it a good story? Is it something you can take home with you and think about? Something that affects you or makes you feel you’re part of the human race.”

For art to resonate with an audience, he believed, it has to be accessible. And the best way to accomplish that is to begin by finding a personal connection to the material. So when starting a project, he would pore over the script, searching for those elements that would allow the audience to become emotionally involved. If they weren’t there, he would try to find a way to make changes and include them.

When Leonard’s son, Adam, decided to give up his career as an attorney and set out to become a director, his father worked with him. “When I first started getting assignments, we would work together breaking down the script. He always emphasized the importance of the story over the technical aspects of filmmaking, which basically means moving the camera. ‘We’re just storytellers,’ he said. ‘We just happen to be telling these stories on film.’ While in his experience he’d found that most young directors are obsessed with the camera, ‘it’s always about the story. The object is to do it well, and the performances, the technical problems, will take care of themselves.’ We would go through it scene by scene, and I learned very quickly about figuring out the theme, the character arc, and most important, the meaning of the story, how to find my personal connection to that story.”

The commercial and critical success of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock marked the beginning of the next phase of Leonard’s career. Contractually, I was entitled to direct the next film, but my contractual obligation to T.J. Hooker made that impossible, so the studio hired Leonard to direct Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. In this script, we went back in time to San Francisco in the 1980s. While there had always been an undertone of humor in our scripts, we never really had gone for comedy. This was essentially a whale-out-of-time story—our mission was to capture two whales and bring them back to the future—and putting the ever-logical Spock in what was then the current time offered the irresistible potential for fun. At one point, for example, Kirk’s love interest asked Spock, “Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”

After considering that, he asked, “Is there something wrong with the one I have?”

Leonard’s handling of the clever dialogue and humorous scenes led to producers Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, who had moved from Paramount to Disney, asking him to direct the American remake of a French comedy that was being called Three Men and a Baby. The woman who had directed the French film initially had been hired to do the American version. She wanted to do a line-for-line translation, which wouldn’t work for American audiences. The film was already in preproduction, and they needed a new director. Leonard stepped in and reworked the script. Just as with Star Trek, there were some actors who wondered if he was the right choice. Tom Selleck remembers thinking, “Well, there’s a good choice. You got a guy with no emotion who’s going to direct a comedy.” But Leonard’s professionalism and talent quickly won the respect of the cast. Years later, Selleck said, “Leonard was irreplaceable.”

That’s exactly right: Leonard was irreplaceable.

As far as I know, this film was the first time Leonard had directed a five-month-old. Actually, twin five-month-olds. There were some “creative differences.” There are some actors who can cry on cue; Leonard needed the baby to pee on cue. Obviously, that was going to be a problem, so they attached a tube to the baby that would produce the … the illusion. But when they filmed the scene, the device failed—but the baby worked. It was amazing; the baby peed on cue.

Thrilled by that, Leonard looked at the baby’s mother standing nearby and told her, “That’s what good actresses do!”

Three Men and a Baby was a huge hit, outperforming films like Fatal Attraction, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Good Morning, Vietnam to become the top-grossing film of the year with a total of $168 million. Star Trek IV had been the most successful film in the series, earning $109 million domestically and making Leonard one of the very few directors in the business at that time to have made two films that grossed more than $100 million.

Leonard never changed. While I’m certain the starving actor part of his personality was thrilled at the commercial success of those films, this is a business that judges talent by those numbers, and I’m certain that he was happy that other people finally were recognizing his artistic talents. Content isn’t the word; I’m not sure that Leonard ever was content with his career. He never stopped reaching, but I know he took great satisfaction in that recognition.

Obviously, a lot of people were surprised that Leonard Nimoy had directed this sweet comedy that had earned a small fortune for the studio. But some things really never change. When people learned about it, there was an almost universal response: I didn’t know Spock had become a director!