D.C. Fontana, who helped craft the lore of Star Trek and developed one of its signature characters, Spock, as the first female writer for the 1960s television series, died Tuesday at a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 80 and lived in Los Angeles.
The cause was cancer, according to her husband, Dennis Skotak.
Fontana was part of the Star Trek universe from its early days, working alongside its creator, Gene Roddenberry, on the series as a story editor and writer.
The original series, which premiered in 1966, introduced audiences to Captain Kirk, the United Federation of Planets and the Starship Enterprise. But Fontana was best known among fans for her work on Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.
The character was torn between the emotionality of his human side and a Vulcan's zealous commitment to logic, a narrative tension that powered much of the television series and several of the 13 feature films that followed it.
In a 2013 interview with StarTrek.com, the franchise's official website, 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."
Dorothy Catherine Fontana was born 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 Teaneck, N.J.
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: Roddenberry, whose secretary was hospitalized for two months because of complications from an appendectomy.
When The Lieutenant went off the air, Roddenberry sold Star Trek to Desilu Productions and asked 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," Skotak said. "Then she thought, 'I should try writing these because I have some ideas.'"
Metro on 12/05/2019