William Shatner was born March 22, 1931 in Montreal, Canada, to clothing manufacturer Joseph Shatner and his wife Ann Garmaise, who were both children of European Jewish immigrants. The family name was Anglicized from Schattner by his paternal grandfather. The Conservative Jewish family sent Shatner to public schools and to learn acting at the Montreal Children’s Theatre. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in commerce from McGill University, which in 2011 conferred upon him an honorary doctorate of letters. Seven years later the New England Institute of Technology conferred the same degree.
While in college, Shatner did some work as an actor, and after graduation in 1951, he acted and managed at the Mountain Playhouse in Montreal, and the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa. He joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. Moving to New York, he appeared as Ranger Bob on The Howdy Doody Show. In 1958, he had a role in the MGM film The Brothers Karamazov, followed by a role as a Roman tax collector in Bethlehem in a Hallmark Hall of Fame live production of The Christmas Tree. He continued with his work on Broadway in 1959 in The World of Suzie Wong, and in two Twilight Zone episodes, the better remembered of which was Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. In 1961, he appeared in the film Judgment at Nuremberg. He and Leonard Nimoy, who later would star as Spock with him in Star Trek, were cast together in an episode of The Man from Uncle.
Shatner’s big break came in 1966 when he was cast as James T. Kirk in a Star Trek pilot episode titled Where No Man Has Gone Before, and he continued to portray the captain of the spaceship USS Enterprise to 1969, the same year he and the first of his four wives, Gloria Rand, divorced. During their 12+ years of marriage, they had three daughters: Leslie, Lisabeth, and Melanie.
In one episode of the original Star Trek series, Shatner kissed Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, and TV historians cite that as the first instance of a White man kissing a Black woman in a scripted television show in the U.S.
His career went into a downslide following the cancellation of the series, forcing Shatner to live in a camper and take odd jobs to support himself and his second wife, Marcy Lafferty, to whom he stayed married until 1996.
In the 1970s he made guest appearances on weekly television dramas, acted in some B-movies, and also made commercials, and appeared as a celebrity guest on television game shows.
Star Trek gained fame after it went into reruns, with fans of the show known as Trekkies organizing conventions at which they could meet like-minded enthusiasts, buy Star Trek merchandise, and meet members of the original cast. This development, along with the box office success of George Lukas’ Star Wars in 1977, prompted Paramount Pictures to reunite the cast in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979. Five sequels followed, including one he directed: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
In 1982, Shatner became the lead character in T. J. Hooker, which ran for 91 episodes until 1986. During that period, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his Star Trek role as Captain Kirk. The T. J. Hooker title character was a veteran Los Angeles police sergeant. From 1989 to 1996, Shatner hosted the live reenactment series Rescue 911. In 1989, he published TekWar with the help of Ron Goulart, and that story about a former police officer working as an investigator in a dystopian future led to book sequels and four television movies in which Shatner starred.
In the 1990s, Shatner became a spokesman for the travel website priceline.com. In 1999, Shatner published Get A Life! – a memoir of his interactions with trekkies. Shatner married Nerine Kidd in 1997. An alcoholic, Kidd was found dead by Shatner at the bottom of their backyard pool, having alcohol and diazepam in her blood. Shocked, Shatner urged the public to support Friendly House, a nonprofit organization that helps women kick alcoholism and/ or drug addiction to rebuild their lives.
In 2001, he married Elizabeth Anderson Martin, later writing the song “Together” on Shatner’s album Has Been. They were divorced in 2020.
More movie roles in came in 2000, leading to Shatner being asked to play the eccentric, but highly capable attorney Denny Crane during the last season of The Practice. Shatner then took the role to the television series Boston Legal, which lasted for 101 episodes. He won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for that role in 2005, and was nominated for the Emmy four more times.
In 2011, he wrote and presented a feature length documentary, The Captains, in which he interviewed Patrick Stewart of Star Trek: The Next Generation; Avery Brooks of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Kate Mulgrew of Star Trek: Voyager; Scott Bakula of Star Trek: Enterprise; and Chris Pine of Star Trek, the 2009 reboot of the franchise by director J.J. Abrams.
In 2016, along with Terry Bradshaw, Jeff Dye, George Foreman, and Henry Winkler, Shatner starred in an NBC miniseries called Better Late Than Never in which the aging celebrities hooted and hollered it up on tours of foreign countries. He later agreed to a science documentary show on RT, formerly known as Russia Today, but withdrew after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Shatner also enjoyed singing and has done so on television shows and on recordings. One beloved shtick was a parody of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.”
He recorded a wake-up message for the Space Shuttle Discovery in which he recited an adapted version of Star Trek’s famous introduction: “Space, the final frontier. These have been the voyages of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Her 30-year mission: To seek out new science. To build new outposts. To bring nations together on the final frontier. To boldly go, and do, what no spacecraft has done before.”
In 2021, he became an “astronaut” himself, participating in Blue Origin’s second sub-orbital space flight, financed and developed by entrepreneur and Trekkie Jeff Bezos. At age 90 years, 6 months and 22 days, Shatner became the oldest person to fly into space.
Shatner breeds and shows Quarter Horses and American Saddlebreds at a 360-acre farm near Versailles, Kentucky. The National Reining Horse Association conferred upon him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Tomorrow, March 23: Erich Fromm
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article.