James Doohan built one character out of a borrowed accent and a lifetime of radio voices, and played him for nearly thirty years. Scotty is a small part done with such conviction that it swallowed the actor who made him.
Fi1m perspective
You hear him before you see him. Montgomery Scott is usually heard first, from somewhere below decks, telling the bridge what the ship will not do, in a Scots accent that belongs to no town in Scotland. James Doohan chose it himself. The producers let him pick the accent and the name, and he took the surname from his grandfather. "If you want an engineer, he’d better be a Scotsman," he said, and Star Trek (1966) took him at his word for 66 episodes.
The accent was one of many. Doohan had come up through radio, thousands of shows from 1946, then live television and guest parts through the 1950s and 1960s, and he arrived on the Enterprise as a man who could do a voice for anything. He did. Beyond Scotty he supplied dozens of extra voices and sound effects for the original and animated series, including the first scraps of Vulcan and Klingon. The show ended in 1969, and he played the engineer again in the animated series, in all six original-cast films from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) to 1991, in an episode of The Next Generation, and finally in Star Trek: Generations (1994).
What he brought to the part was plainness. The series is built on three men disagreeing, Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley, and our review of it does not mention Doohan at all, which is fair and also the point. Scotty does not argue. He tells the captain the machine is broken, tells him how long it will take, and then does it faster, and Doohan plays every line of that as a working man's grievance rather than a joke, which is why it is funny. He made the engineering deck feel like a place someone actually worked, and engineers in the real world noticed. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) gives him the most to do down there; Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) lets him loose on twentieth-century hardware.
The cost was everything else. After 1969 he was the reliable technical man with the dialect, cast in engineering rooms and behind desks, and nothing outside the role has lasted. Generations is the last of it, and we scored it 48. Its first ten minutes are its best stretch, with Kirk, Scott and Chekov on a bridge that is no longer theirs, watching Alan Ruck's new captain flounder. We felt a pang we had not braced for, watching Doohan stand there older and quieter, still ready to fix the thing, in a film that had only booked him to warm the seats before Patrick Stewart arrived. The pang was for him rather than the character. Then the film moved on and so did we.
Start with the series, where he is the fourth man and content to be. Take Generations for its opening and leave when the old crew does. It was a small part. Doohan never once played it as one.
Biography
James Doohan (1920–2005) was a Canadian actor. He played the character Montgomery 'Scotty' Scott in the television series Star Trek (1966–1969).
Doohan trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts. He worked in radio and appeared in episodes of series including The Twilight Zone (1959) before his casting in Star Trek.
He reprised the role of Scott in the feature films Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) and Star Trek Generations (1994). He also appeared in one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987).
