James Doohan

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James Doohan, 1997

James Montgomery Doohan (born March 3, 1920 in Vancouver , British Columbia , † July 20, 2005 in Redmond , Washington , USA ) was a Canadian actor . He was best known for his role as Scotty in the original television series and films in the Star Trek franchise.

Life

Doohan attended high school at the Sarnia Collegiate Institute and Technical School in Ontario , where he excelled in math and science. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Canadian Artillery with the rank of captain . He was wounded on D-Day by six machine gun bullets from one of his own guards and lost the middle finger of his right hand. In his film and series appearances, however, the producers managed to almost always keep the damaged hand out of the camera area.

In the 1950s he began his acting career in the science fiction genre; in 1953 he played a major role in the television series Space Command . Supporting roles followed in series such as Smoking Colts , Twilight Zone , Bonanza and Auf der Flucht .

Doohan (left) at NASA in 1967

Doohan had a knack for foreign accents. When auditioning for Gene Roddenberry , creator of Star Trek , he demonstrated a few different accents. Roddenberry wanted to know from Doohan which one he would like best. Doohan stated that, in his opinion, "the best engineers in the world were all Scots ". And so in 1966 he got the role of pragmatic chief engineer Montgomery Scott of the spaceship Enterprise. Scotty, as he was called by the crew, was able to repair damage to the Enterprise even in tricky situations and to beam crew members in distress back to the spaceship at the last minute .

After the series was discontinued in 1969, Doohan found that he was locked into this one role and that it was difficult to get other engagements. It wasn't until Star Trek was revived ten years later that he was able to return to acting on a larger scale. In addition to the first seven Star Trek films, he appeared in the series Magnum , Hotel and MacGyver in guest roles. In the 1990s, Doohan took on the role of Damon Warwick in the soap opera Rich and Beautiful . He was also in his star role "Scotty" in an episode of the television series Starship Enterprise: The Next Century to see. He is one of six actors from the original team who appeared in subsequent Star Trek series and films. Together with SM Stirling , he published some novels that can be assigned to the Military SF .

James Doohan suffered from diabetes , pulmonary fibrosis and Parkinson's disease . His wife Wende Doohan announced in July 2004 that her husband had also been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease . In October of the same year he made his last public appearance when he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his life's work. His former colleagues George Takei , Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig accompanied him .

James Doohan died in the presence of his family on July 20, 2005 at 5:30 am in his home in Redmond of complications from pneumonia. His last wish was that his ashes, like Gene Roddenberry's, be taken into space. On April 28, 2007, his remains were brought into space for a short period with a SpaceLoft XL rocket. The return on a parachute was confirmed by the White Sands Missile Range radar . However, the container landed in a rugged mountain range and was only recovered on May 18, 2007. On August 3, 2008, the remains were to be launched a second time and spend a few years in orbit. The launch took place with a Falcon 1 rocket from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. After a flight time of 2 minutes and 20 seconds, the separation between the first and second stage did not succeed, which made it impossible to reach the orbit and the rocket crashed into the Pacific. On May 22, 2012 at 9:44 a.m. CEST, the urn from Doohan and 500 kilograms of provisions for the ISS crew on board the spacecraft Dragon C2 + finally started from Cape Canaveral .

Filmography (selection)

Trivia

  • James Doohan was married three times and had nine children. His youngest daughter, Sarah, was born on April 11, 2000.
  • The SF novel trilogy Flight Engineer, which he published together with SM Stirling, consists of the volumes The Rising ( ISBN 0-671-87758-5 , 1996), The Privateer ( ISBN 0-671-57832-4 , 1999) and The Independent Command ( ISBN 0-671-31951-5 , 2000),
  • Doohan's portrayal of the heroic chief engineer on the USS Enterprise served as a model for many young students to choose engineering courses . He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Milwaukee School of Engineering .
  • In Germany, James Doohan was dubbed in the role of "Scotty" by Kurt E. Ludwig (1924-1995). Other speakers were only used in the ZDF version of the cartoon series and in the dubbing that took place after Ludwig's death.
  • Doohan was also known for his vocal versatility. While he took on five additional vocal roles in the original series Raumschiff Enterprise , including the central guest role Sargon in Geist sucht Körper (Return to Tomorrow) and two speaking roles (Computer M5 and Commodore Enwright) in Computer M5 (The Ultimate Computer) , he had in the animated series Die Enterprise 51 speaking roles, not counting the main role "Scotty". Often he spoke several characters in one and the same episode. His record is the episode The Deception / The Time Portal (Yesteryear) with a total of seven different speaking roles.
  • The German rock band Ohrfeindt dedicated the song Energie from the album Rock'n'Roll Sexgott to Doohan.
  • According to his own statements, James Doohan is the inventor or co-inventor of the Klingon language . It is not clear whether and to what extent this is true. He spoke it relatively fluently even in old age, as was seen or heard on a German TV appearance in the 90s.

literature

  • Doohan, James; David, Peter (1996). Beam Me Up, Scotty: Star Trek's “Scotty” in his own words. ISBN 0-671-52056-3 . (Autobiography)

Web links

Commons : James Doohan  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The cremated remains of James Doohan ... will be integrated into an UP Aerospace Spaceloft XL launch vehicle ( English , PDF; 141 kB) Space Services Inc. / Celestis Inc .. March 28, 2007. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved September 17, 2012.
  2. ^ Heise online: "Scotty" symbolically buried in space , April 29, 2007.
  3. ↑ http://hem.bredband.net/b108107/stirling/biblio.html
  4. ↑ http://www.ohrenfeindt.de/texte/text-energie.html
personal data
SURNAME Doohan, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Doohan, James Montgomery (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian actor
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Vancouver , British Columbia
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 2005
Place of death Redmond , United States