William Shatner
William Shatner is a Canadian actor. In a career spanning seven decades, he is best known for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise, from his 1966 debut as the captain of the starship Enterprise in the second pilot of the first Star Trek television series to his final appearance as Captain Kirk in the seventh Star Trek feature film, Star Trek Generations.
Shatner began his screen acting career in Canadian films and television productions before moving into guest-starring roles in various American television shows. He appeared as Captain Kirk in all the episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, 21 of the 22 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and the first seven Star Trek movies. He has written a series of books chronicling his experiences before, during and after his time in a Starfleet uniform. He has also co-written several novels set in the Star Trek universe and a series of science fiction novels, the TekWar sequence, that were adapted for television. Outside Star Trek, Shatner played the eponymous veteran police sergeant in T. J. Hooker, hosted the reality-based television series Rescue 911, guest starred on the detective series Columbo, and acted in the comedy film Miss Congeniality.
Shatner's television career after his last appearance as Captain Kirk embraces comedy, drama and reality shows. In seasons 4 and 5 of the NBC series 3rd Rock from the Sun, he plays the alien "Big Giant Head" to whom the main characters report. From 2004 until 2008, he starred as attorney Denny Crane in the final season of the legal show The Practice and the entire run of its spinoff, Boston Legal. The role of Denny Crane won Shatner two Emmy Awards, one for his contributions to each series.
In 2016, 2017 and 2018, he starred in both seasons of NBC's Better Late Than Never, a comical travel series in which a band of elderly celebrities toured east Asia and Europe.
Aside from acting, Shatner has had a career as a recording artist, starting with his 1968 album, The Transformed Man. Shatner's cover versions of songs are dramatic recitations of their lyrics rather than musical performances: the most notable are his versions of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", and Elton John's "Rocket Man". His most successful album was his third, Seeking Major Tom, which includes covers of Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly", David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody".
In 2021, Shatner flew into space aboard Blue Origin NS-18, a Blue Origin sub-orbital mission. At age 90 he became the oldest person to fly in space and one of the first 600 to do so. In 2024 Ed Dwight, also age 90, but 48 days older than Shatner, flew on the suborbital Blue Origin NS-25 spaceflight.
Early life
Shatner was born on March 22, 1931, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to a Conservative Jewish household. His parents were Ann and Joseph Shatner, a clothing manufacturer. He is the middle of three children; his older sister was Joy Rutenberg and his younger sister is Farla Cohen. His patrilineal family name was Schattner; his grandfather, Wolf Schattner, anglicized the spelling. All four of Shatner's grandparents were Jewish immigrants from settlements in Ukraine and Lithuania, which were then under the rule of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire.Shatner attended two schools in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Willingdon Elementary School and West Hill High School, and is an alumnus of the Montreal Children's Theatre. He studied economics at the McGill University Faculty of Management in Montreal, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1952. Shatner was a camp counselor at a B'nai B'rith camp in the Laurentians. Over 6 weeks, Shatner helped teenage Holocaust survivor Fred Bild learn English.
In 2011, McGill University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Letters. He was granted the same accolade by the New England Institute of Technology in May 2018.
Acting and literary career
1951–1966: Early stage, film, and television work
Shatner's movie career began while he was still attending college. In 1951, he had a small role in a Canadian comedy drama, The Butler's Night Off: its credits list him as Bill Shatner, and describe his role simply as "a crook". After graduating, he worked as an assistant manager and actor at both the Mountain Playhouse in Montreal and the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa before joining the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.His roles at the festival included a part in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, in which he made his Broadway debut in 1956. His brief appearance in the opening scene of a high-profile production of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex by Tyrone Guthrie introduced him to television viewers across the whole of Canada. In Henry V, he combined playing the minor role of the Duke of Gloucester with understudying Christopher Plummer as the king: when a kidney stone obliged Plummer to withdraw from a performance, Shatner's decision to present a distinctive interpretation of his role rather than imitating his senior's impressed Plummer as a striking manifestation of initiative and potential. Plummer later appeared as a Klingon adversary of Captain Kirk's in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Guthrie too rated the young Shatner very highly, later recalling him as the most promising actor that his Festival employed, and for a time, he was seen as a potential peer of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In the view of Pat Jordan, author of an in-depth profile of Shatner for The New York Times, his subsequent failure to achieve the acclaim accorded to his starrier contemporaries was attributable to his professional philosophy of "work equals work", and his consequent participation in many "forgettable" projects that probably did his career more harm than good. On the eve of his momentous casting as James Kirk, he was in Jordan's opinion seen merely as an actor who "showed up on time, knew his lines, worked cheap and always answered his phone".
In 1954, Shatner decided to leave Stratford and move to New York City in the hope of building a career on the Broadway stage. He was soon offered the chance to make his first appearance on American television: in a children's program called The Howdy Doody Show, he created the role of Ranger Bob, co-starring with a cast of puppets and Clarabell the Clown, whose dialogue with Shatner consisted entirely of honks on a bicycle horn.
It was four years before he won his first role in a major Hollywood movie, appearing in the MGM film The Brothers Karamazov as Alexei, the youngest of the brothers, in a cast that included Yul Brynner. In December 1958, directed by Kirk Browning, he appeared opposite Ralph Bellamy as a Roman tax collector in Bethlehem on the day of Jesus's birth in a Hallmark Hall of Fame live television production entitled The Christmas Tree, the cast list of which included Jessica Tandy, Margaret Hamilton, Bernadette Peters, Richard Thomas, Cyril Ritchard, and Carol Channing. His American television profile was heightened further when he had a leading role in an episode in the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "The Glass Eye".
File:Nero-Wolfe-CBS-1959.jpg|thumb|upright=1.15|alt=Characters Archie Goodwin and Kurt Kasznar are discussing around a business room table. Goodwin is looking to Kasznar while fixing his tie.|Shatner as Archie Goodwin and Kurt Kasznar as Nero Wolfe in the aborted 1959 CBS television series Nero Wolfe
In 1959, Shatner received good reviews in the role of Lomax in The World of Suzie Wong on Broadway. In the March of that year, while still performing in that production, he also played detective Archie Goodwin in what would have been television's first Nero Wolfe series, had it not been aborted by CBS after shooting a pilot and a few episodes.
File:William Shatner-Jeanne Cooper in The Intruder.jpg|thumb|alt=Shatner and Jeanne Cooper are looking beyond the camera in a stern manner.|Shatner and Jeanne Cooper in The Intruder
Shatner appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone, "Nick of Time" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" ; when the anthology film The Twilight Zone: The Movie was produced twenty years later, the movie climaxed with a remake of the latter episode. He appeared twice as Wayne Gorham in NBC's Outlaws, a Western series with Barton MacLane, and then returned to Alfred Hitchcock Presents for a 5th-season episode, "Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?".
In 1961, co-starring with Julie Harris, he appeared on Broadway in A Shot in the Dark, directed by Harold Clurman; Gene Saks and Walter Matthau took part in the play too, Matthau winning a Tony Award for his performance. Shatner was featured in two episodes of the NBC television series Thriller and the film The Explosive Generation. He took the lead role in Roger Corman's movie The Intruder. which Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic described as Shatner's first interesting performance, and had a supporting role in the Stanley Kramer film Judgment at Nuremberg. In the 1963–64 season, he appeared in an episode of the ABC series Channing. In 1963, he starred in the Family Theater production called "The Soldier" and received credits in other programs of The Psalms series. That same year, he guest-starred in Route 66, in the episode "Build Your Houses with Their Backs to the Sea".
In 1964, Shatner guest-starred in the second episode of the second season of the ABC science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, "Cold Hands, Warm Heart". Also that year, he appeared in an episode of the CBS drama The Reporter, "He Stuck in His Thumb", and played a supporting role in the Western feature film The Outrage, a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon starring Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom and Edward G. Robinson. The same year, Shatner was cast in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that featured Leonard Nimoy, later to be his co-star in Star Trek. Also in 1964, he played the titular Alexander in the pilot for a proposed series called Alexander the Great alongside Adam West as Cleander.
The Alexander series was not picked up, and the pilot remained unaired until 1968, when it was repackaged as a TV movie to capitalize on the fame that West and Shatner had won in the interim. Shatner had hoped that the series would be a major success, but West was apparently unsurprised by its failure to proceed, later castigating the pilot for "one of the worst scripts I have ever read" and recalling it as "one of the worst things I've ever done."
In 1965, Shatner guest-starred in 12 O'Clock High as Major Curt Brown in the episode "I Am the Enemy". In the same year, he had the lead role in a legal drama, For the People, starring as an assistant district attorney married to a woman played by Jessica Walter; the show's cancellation after its 13-episode first season allowed him to walk onto the bridge of the Enterprise the following year.
Shatner starred in the 1966 gothic horror film Incubus the second feature-length movie ever made with all dialogue spoken in Esperanto. He also starred in an episode of Gunsmoke in 1966 as the character Fred Bateman. He appeared as attorney-turned-counterfeiter Brett Skyler in a 1966 episode of The Big Valley, "Time to Kill". In 1968, he starred in the little known Spaghetti Western White Comanche, playing both a white-hat character and his black-hat evil twin: Johnny Moon, a virtuous half-Comanche gunslinger, and Notah, a bloodthirsty warlord.