A Voyage to Star(dom)

When Laurence Luckinbill learned that he had landed the role of Sybok in Paramount’s new “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” he went out to his back-yard hammock, sank into it, and just cried.

“I cried about many years of rejection and many years of denying that the rejection was there,” says the 54-year-old performer. “All actors go through the same thing. You deny the rejection because you can’t live with it if you admit it all the time.”

Luckinbill, whose “Star Trek V” portrayal of Mr. Spock’s passionate half-brother, is hoping that Sybok takes him where no character has before: into feature-film stardom.

“Whether that happens or not, (my film career’s) been given the most enormous rocket thruster boost by the movie,” he says happily. “And by me. I did good.”

With a 25-year career encompassing stage work from Shakespeare to Neil Simon, a Tony nomination (“The Shadow Box”), and dozens of TV and film roles, Luckinbill hardly has the appearance of a man plagued by rejection. Indeed, his most recent outing on the boards--his one-man show as Lyndon Johnson--won him the kind of acclaim many actors would think of as an end in itself.

As for who will get him next, Luckinbill is waiting for offers. He is also writing several scripts at once--and shepherding progress on the proposed TV biography of his father-in-law, the late Desi Arnaz.

“That’s on the front burner again,” he says.

Lucie Arnaz is currently on the road with her nightclub act, leaving Luckinbill--a self-proclaimed “obsessive father”--to play “Mr. Mom” with their three children, ages 4 to 8, and his two teen-age sons by a previous marriage.

Although he finds it not so easy to have his wife 3,000 miles away, “she needed this,” he says, after coping with the death of her mother, Lucille Ball, in April.

“We were just on the ropes after that. I can’t even tell you,” says the actor. “Lucie handled the whole thing like a champ.”