James Doohan Biography

Actor

Actor James Doohan is known almost exclusively for playing chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott on the 1960s TV series Star Trek and the movies, cartoons and parodies which followed. He's the Scotty in the phrase "Beam me up, Scotty," made popular by the original series. (Ironically, the exact phrase "Beam me up, Scotty" was never spoken in the series, though many variations on it were.) Doohan was back in the news in May of 2000 when his second wife gave birth to their third child, making him a father at age 80. After his death in 2005, a small portion of Doohan's ashes were set aside to be blasted into space aboard a commercial rocket. Launched on 29 April 2007, the rocket had a brief sub-orbital flight before crashing in the San Andres Mountains in New Mexico.

Extra credit: Doohan married his second wife, Wende, in 1975, when Doohan was 55 and she was 19. The couple had three children; Doohan also had four children from a previous marriage... Doohan suffered from diabetes and Parkinson's disease in his last years. In July of 2004, his family announced that Doohan also had been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's disease; the next month a Star Trek convention was thrown in his honor, titled "Beam Me Up, Scotty...One Last Time."

Doohan stars with outlaw Jesse James in our loop on Celebs Missing Fingers, and with Sherlock Holmes in the loop Steadily Misquoted.

Other original Star Trek stars include William Shatner (Capt. Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock), and DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy).