LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original “Star Trek” TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command “Beam me up, Scotty,” died early Wednesday. He was 85.
Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said.
The Canadian-born Doohan fought in World War II and was wounded during the D-Day invasion, according to the StarTrek.com Web site. He was enjoying a busy career as a character actor when he auditioned for a role as an engineer in a new space adventure on NBC in 1966. A master of dialects from his early years in radio, he tried seven different accents.
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James Doohan, the actor who played the engineer Scotty on the original 1960s “Star Trek” TV series, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, his agent says. Doohan, 84, is in the beginning stages of the progressive neurological disorder, said the agent, Steven Stevens. Doohan, who lives in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, also has suffered for some time with Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and fibrosis, the latter due to chemical exposure during World War II, when he was a soldier in the Canadian military, Stevens said. One of Doohan’s sons, Chris Doohan, 45, said, “His longterm memory seems to be intact. If you ask him how he got his role on ‘Star Trek’ or about D-Day, he can talk for an hour about that. But if you ask him what he had for breakfast ? .” Doohan’s career spans more than 50 years, but he’s best known for his role as the USS Enterprise’s affable chief engineer.