James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty passed yesterday.
Sky News has an obituary:
TV LEGEND 'SCOTTY' DIESHe will be missed...
James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty in the original Star Trek TV series has died aged 85.
Doohan, who played the Starship Enterprise's chief engineer, helped make the catchphrase "Beam me up Scotty" one of the most famous in TV history.
He died at his home in Redmond, Washington, with his wife Wende at his side, his agent Steve Stevens said.
The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease.
Canadian-born Doohan 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.
"The producers asked me which one I preferred," Doohan 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, which starred William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as the enigmatic Mr. Spock, became legendary among science fiction fans.
When the series ended in 1969, Doohan found himself typecast as the Enterprise's Montgomery Scott, and went on to star in five feature length Star Trek movies.
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