Ms. Fontana, who was part of the “Star Trek” universe from its early days, was best known for her work on Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.
By Liam Stack
Dec. 3, 2019
D.C. Fontana, who helped craft the lore of the 1960s television series “Star Trek” and developed one of its signature characters, Spock, as the show’s first female writer, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 80.
Her husband and only immediate survivor, Dennis Skotak, said the cause was cancer.
Ms. Fontana was part of the “Star Trek" universe from its early days, working alongside the show’s creator,
Gene Roddenberry, as a story editor and writer.
The original series, which had its premiere in 1966, introduced audiences to Captain Kirk, the United Federation of Planets and the Starship Enterprise. But Ms. Fontana was best known among fans for her work on Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.
Spock was torn between the emotionality of his human side and a Vulcan’s zealous commitment to logic. That narrative tension powered much of the series and several of the feature films that followed.
“From Day 1 she was there helping Gene, in the early days, as a confidante,” Mr. Skotak said. “Captain Kirk always found a way to solve whatever problem they were facing — using Dorothy’s words in a lot of cases,” using Ms. Fontana’s given name.
In a 2013 interview with StarTrek.com , the franchise’s official website, Ms. Fontana said she thought her greatest contribution to the franchise had been “primarily the development of Spock as a character and Vulcan as a history/background/culture from which he sprang.”
She fleshed out the character’s back story as the child of a human mother and a Vulcan father while she was a story editor and associate producer for “Star Trek: The Animated Series” in the 1970s. She later wrote, with Mr. Roddenberry, the pilot that launched “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in 1987.
Dorothy Catherine Fontana was born on March 25, 1939, in Sussex, N.J. She was raised by a single mother in Totowa, N.J., and dreamed of becoming a novelist, she said in an interview with the Writers Guild Foundation in 2014.
After high school, she studied to become a secretary at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. She told the foundation that she had thought that clerical work would be a good day job for an aspiring novelist, but that her goals had changed when she became a secretary at Columbia Pictures’ television arm, which was based in New York.
“I was seeing scripts come across our desks for the various shows we had on the air at the time and I thought, ‘I can write this,’ like so many fools before me,” she said. “I had watched television for years and years and kind of got the idea of how stories were structured.”
When her boss died of a heart attack, leaving her jobless after just two months, she decided to move to California, in December 1959, to see if she could break into television writing. She achieved early success selling scripts to western series, which were popular in the early 1960s, including “The Tall Man,” “Shotgun Slade” and “Frontier Circus.”
Ms. Fontana told StarTrek.com in 2013 that her big break came when she was hired to be the secretary to Del Reisman, the associate producer of a show called “The Lieutenant.” She was soon reassigned to work for another producer, whose secretary had been hospitalized for two months because of complications from an appendectomy: Gene Roddenberry.
When “The Lieutenant” went off the air, Mr. Roddenberry sold “Star Trek” to Desilu Productions and asked Ms. Fontana to work for him there as a production secretary. But her role soon expanded.
“She would read the scripts and retype them and things like that,” Mr. Skotak said. “Then she thought, ‘I should try writing these, because I have some ideas.’”
Mr. Roddenberry recognized her ambition, as well as her record of writing for westerns, and asked her to pick which story she wanted to write from the production outline for “Star Trek’s” first season. Her first script, about the ship’s encounter with a mysterious human teenager who possesses strange powers, became the series’ second episode.
Ms. Fontana wrote for all three seasons of the original series. She later wrote for other science fiction shows, including “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Babylon 5,” as well as influential series outside that genre like “Bonanza,” “Dallas” and “The Waltons.”
In her later years, Ms. Fontana taught at the American Film Institute. Mr. Skotak, her husband, a special effects designer, said she had continued to teach at the institute until just a few weeks before her death.
“She was a very, very tough lady,” he said. “She carried a phaser with her right up to the end.”
Speaking to StarTrek.com in 2013, Ms. Fontana reflected on what it was like to be a female writer in Hollywood in the 1960s. While working on “Star Trek,” she said, she did not realize that she had gone where no woman had gone before.
“At the time, I wasn’t especially aware there were so few female writers doing action adventure scripts,” she said. “There were plenty doing soaps, comedies, or on variety shows. By choosing to do action adventure, I was in an elite, very talented and very different group of women writers.”
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