Up Till Now. The Autobiography

to talk both men into posing with me for a photograph. After everything that had been written about our relationship, I figured a picture of us holding hands would really shock the entire Trekkie nation. But truthfully, I was glad that they agreed to pose for the photo. I thought, maybe they’re mellowing a bit. And I continued to think that until Walter said to me as we posed, “Any picture of the three of us holding hands has got to be worth at least five hundred dollars at a convention. If we all sign it, fifteen hundred.”
    And so Kirk died, although since then he has continued to live long and has prospered in the series of Star Trek novels and, more recently, video games.
    I’d been playing James T. Kirk for almost thirty years. But Kirk was done. And naturally with that reality I began to wonder if the greatest days of my career were done too. There would always besmall roles for me, I knew that, and that I could always earn a reasonable living, but there does come a time when the phone rings less often. I did wonder if this was the beginning of the end of my career.
    And after Nerine’s death I began wondering if I was condemned to spend the rest of my life alone too. Obviously I had my daughters and their families, which happily included a growing number of grandchildren, but they all had their own busy lives. My greatest fear was being back—emotionally—in that ribbed-bed, rat-infested room in Toronto. All alone.
    As it turned out, rather than this being an ending, it was simply another beginning.
    I went back to work about two months after Nerine’s death. There is no such thing as “enough time,” or “being ready” to work. I just couldn’t sit around the house anymore. I’m an actor. I needed to act. Fortunately, the perfect role was offered to me, a role truly befitting the status I had earned in the entertainment industry. John Lithgow offered me the role of the Big Giant Head in his sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun.
    When I started watching the show I realized what a master farceur John Lithgow is. 3rd Rock is about the adventures of four aliens who have come to Earth on a mission to investigate life here and have taken human bodies. I love farce—very broad, wide-open, full-throttle madcap comedy played absolutely straight—but I hadn’t had the opportunity to do much of it since working in the theater in Canada. Great farce has all the meaning and depth of a soap bubble, it shimmers for an instant and then disappears. It really was precisely what I needed at that moment. Great farce means giving wit a swift kick in the pants—and it was the best possible work for me.
    In this half hour the unit’s superior officer, the Big Giant Head, was making his first inspection of the mission. He had never been to Earth before. Well, what fun to play that. My part was written extremely broadly. In an early scene I discovered I had these things called legs and kicked Lithgow in the pants! And it was so much fun I kicked him again. And then I got slapped in the face by a womanwhen I commented how much I liked “the round part at the end of her legs!” Kicks in the pants, slaps in the face, plot misunderstandings, and slapstick—I had to dump a large bowl of red punch over a prom queen wearing a white gown. What actor wouldn’t want to dump a bowl of red punch over the head of a girl in a white prom gown? It was everything farce is supposed to be, even the lines were properly broadly absurd. For example, when the beautiful Kristen Johnston discovered the Big Giant Head had promoted her because of her sexy appearance, she complained, “When a woman with a body like this gets a promotion everybody questions it. But if it were a man with a body like this no one would ask a question!”
    As Lithgow told me, no one in the cast knew what to expect from me. None of them had ever seen me playing broad comedy— although John claimed he had seen me singing “Rocket Man.” He told me that a series of performers ranging from Dennis Rodman to Naomi Judd had guest-starred on the show. “Some people wanted to come in and join in the fun, some knew it was their job to be a foil, and there were some people who just didn’t have a clue.”
    I know that when I showed up for rehearsals some members of the cast were a little dubious, wondering how serious I was going to be about protecting my image. At first we did have a bit of a problem— I was playing more broadly than they were. I was really into it,