William Shatner

• 1. Introduction

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  William Shatner, the Canadian actor who captained the starship Enterprise as James T. Kirk, once threw a chair out of the Winner's Circle on a television game show. It happened in 1977 on The $10,000 Pyramid. Shatner was trying to steer his partner toward the phrase "things that are blessed". Instead of hinting at the Virgin Mary, he blurted out the word "blessed" itself. That slip disqualified the contestant beside him from a $20,000 prize. Furious with himself, Shatner leapt up, seized his seat and hurled it. The clip still circulates on YouTube.

  It is a strange image for a man whose career has run across seven decades. That career has touched stage, film, television, books, music and advertising. Nobody could have scripted the road from that chair to everything that followed. So how did a young Shakespearean from Canada become the face of a franchise he later teased? Why did he recite pop songs rather than sing them, and keep releasing albums anyway? And what carried him, decades after his first starship, to a real launch site?

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• 2. Montreal to Broadway

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  On the 22nd of March 1931, William Shatner was born in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec, into a Conservative Jewish household. His father, Joseph, manufactured clothing, and his mother was Ann, born Garmaise. He was the middle of three children, between his older sister Joy and his younger sister Farla. The family name had once been Schattner, until his grandfather Wolf Schattner anglicized the spelling. All four of his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from settlements in Ukraine and Lithuania.

  At McGill University, Shatner studied economics rather than drama and graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor of Commerce degree. He had attended Willingdon Elementary School and West Hill High School, and he belonged to the Montreal Children's Theatre. He also worked as a counselor at a B'nai B'rith camp in the Laurentians. There, over six weeks, he helped a teenage Holocaust survivor named Fred Bild learn English.

  His screen debut came in 1951, while he was still a student. In a Canadian comedy drama called The Butler's Night Off, the credits listed him as Bill Shatner, playing simply "a crook". After graduating he worked as an assistant manager and actor at the Mountain Playhouse in Montreal and at the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa. Then he joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. A part in Marlowe's Tamburlaine there took him to Broadway in 1956.

  At Stratford, Henry V gave him the minor role of the Duke of Gloucester, plus the job of understudying Christopher Plummer as the king. When a kidney stone forced Plummer out of one performance, Shatner chose to take his own approach rather than imitate his senior. Plummer saw real initiative in that choice. Director Tyrone Guthrie later remembered Shatner as the most promising actor the Festival employed. A brief appearance in the opening scene of Guthrie's Oedipus Rex had already shown him to television viewers across Canada. For a time, people spoke of him as a possible peer of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

  Why did that promise never grow into stardom on their scale? Pat Jordan, who profiled Shatner for The New York Times, pointed to a philosophy of "work equals work". Shatner accepted many "forgettable" projects, and Jordan thought they probably did more harm than good. By the time he was cast as Kirk, Jordan judged, he was seen as an actor who "showed up on time, knew his lines, worked cheap and always answered his phone".

  In 1954 he left Stratford for New York City, hoping to build a Broadway career. American television came first. On The Howdy Doody Show he created the role of Ranger Bob, sharing scenes with puppets and with Clarabell the Clown, whose only replies were honks on a bicycle horn. Four years passed before his first major Hollywood film, MGM's The Brothers Karamazov. He played the youngest brother, Alexei, in a cast that included Yul Brynner.

  Guest roles piled up through the early 1960s. He appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in 1963. Twenty years later, The Twilight Zone: The Movie climaxed with a remake of that episode. He took a supporting part in Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961 and the lead in Roger Corman's The Intruder in 1962. Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic called that performance Shatner's first interesting one.

  Not every project landed. In 1964 he played the title role in a pilot called Alexander the Great, with Adam West as Cleander. The series was never picked up, and the pilot stayed unaired until 1968. West later called the script "one of the worst scripts I have ever read". In 1966 Shatner also starred in the gothic horror film Incubus, only the second feature-length movie made with all its dialogue in Esperanto.

  In 1965 he starred as an assistant district attorney in the legal drama For the People. Its cancellation after a single season of 13 episodes left him free to walk onto the bridge of the Enterprise the following year.

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• 3. The Captain's Chair

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  Shatner was cast as Captain James T. Kirk for the second pilot of Star Trek, titled "Where No Man Has Gone Before". He was then contracted for the rest of the show and sat in the captain's chair of the USS Enterprise from 1966 to 1969. On NBC the series drew only modest ratings. It was cancelled after three seasons and seventy-nine episodes.

  One scene from the 22nd of November 1968 earned him a footnote in the history of American television. In the episode "Plato's Stepchildren", Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. The moment is often cited as the first kiss between a white man and a black woman on scripted American television. In 1973 Shatner returned to Kirk in voice only, for an animated series that ran two seasons and twenty-two episodes.

  Cancellation did not end the story. Syndicated reruns built a cult following, and Kirk became a cultural icon. Fans began organizing conventions with merchandise, meetings with fellow enthusiasts and question-and-answer sessions with cast members. Shatner became a frequent guest at these events, alongside many of his former crewmates.

  In the mid-1970s, Paramount began pre-producing a sequel series called Star Trek: Phase II, to pair younger actors with the original stars. Then George Lucas's Star Wars became an enormous hit in 1977. The studio concluded that the Enterprise would earn more in theatres than on television. Star Trek: The Motion Picture reached screens in 1979 with the original cast back in place.

  Shatner played Kirk in six further films, from The Wrath of Khan in 1982 to The Undiscovered Country in 1991. The seventh, Star Trek Generations in 1994, ended with the captain's self-sacrificial death. His last turns as Kirk were scattered. They included movie sequences in the 1997 video game Starfleet Academy, a 2006 DirecTV advertisement reusing footage from Star Trek VI, and a comic interlude with host Seth MacFarlane at the 2013 Academy Awards.

  One of those films he directed himself. A clause in his contract gave him parity with Leonard Nimoy, so after Nimoy directed Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Shatner was entitled to direct a Star Trek movie too. He used the right on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in 1989. Many Trekkies were disappointed, and Shatner mainly blamed the film's weak visual effects.

  When the franchise was rebooted with the 2009 film Star Trek, Shatner was not offered or suggested for a role. In July 2007, director J. J. Abrams said the production was desperately searching for a way to include him. Forcing him in, Abrams added, would be a disaster. Shatner echoed that view in several interviews, and at a convention in 2010 he called the finished film wonderful.

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• 4. Lean Years, Loyal Fans

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  In the early 1970s, with Star Trek cancelled, Shatner was so short of money that for a time he lived in a truck-bed camper between theatre jobs. Typecasting as Kirk made work hard to find. His films were B-movies: Roger Corman's Big Bad Mama in 1974, the horror film The Devil's Rain in 1975 and Kingdom of the Spiders in 1977.

  There were bright spots. His turn as a prosecutor in a 1971 PBS adaptation of Saul Levitt's play The Andersonville Trial drew critical praise. From 1975 to 1976 he starred in Barbary Coast, a western-themed secret agent series. He also guest starred on Columbo, Ironside, Kung Fu, Mission: Impossible, The Rookies and The Six Million Dollar Man. Casting directors could count on a special skill as well. Shatner had learned American Kenpo karate from the black belt Tom Bleecker, who had trained under the style's founder, Ed Parker.

  To bring in extra income, he became a celebrity guest on a long list of game shows, among them Beat the Clock, Celebrity Bowling, The Hollywood Squares, Match Game and Tattletales. He visited The $10,000 Pyramid and its more generous sequels several times. One week-long contest against Leonard Nimoy was billed as "Kirk versus Spock". Richard Dawson later told an Archive of American Television interviewer that Mark Goodson would have chosen Shatner to host the Family Feud pilot in 1976. Goodson, Dawson said, was pressured by a threat from Dawson's agent into choosing Dawson instead.

  Advertising agencies helped too. Shatner appeared in spots for General Motors' Oldsmobile brand, Promise margarine and the supermarket chains SuperValu and Loblaws. Canadian viewers heard the former hero of Starfleet promise them: "At Loblaws, more than the price is right. But, by gosh, the price is right."

  The fans who revived Star Trek came with complications. As early as April 1968, a group of admirers tried to tear the clothes off him as he left 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In a much-discussed 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch set at a Star Trek convention, he told a room full of Trekkies to "get a life". He had voiced similar views in several interviews.

  He was also willing to laugh at Kirk. The cavalier, almost superhuman captain was lampooned in Airplane II: The Sequel in 1982 and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 in 1993. In the 1998 romantic comedy Free Enterprise, Shatner played a caricature of himself in a film that satirized Kirk idolatry.

  In May 1999, Simon & Schuster published his book Get a Life!, built around his experiences with Trekkies. It features interviews with some of the franchise's most devoted fans, including several who regard the show as philosophically significant.

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• 5. Talk-Singing

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  In 1968, Shatner made his recording debut with an album titled The Transformed Man. It paired readings from classic plays with dramatic recitations of the words to thematically related popular songs, all set against instrumental backing. Among them were Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the Lennon-McCartney song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". Shatner would stay loyal to that talk-singing style for his entire recording career.

  In 1977, Lemli Records released a double album called William Shatner Live, taken from a performance on a 1971 tour. It included him reminiscing about Star Trek and reading from Cyrano de Bergerac, The War of the Worlds and Galileo. A year later it was reissued as William Shatner Live: Captain of the Starship. Licensing restrictions kept Star Trek branding off the sleeve. Instead it showed Shatner brandishing an upturned camera tripod, in the manner of Kirk charging into battle with a phaser rifle.

  Television audiences got a taste soon after. In 1978, while hosting the fifth Saturn Awards, he performed Elton John's "Rocket Man" in a version that became a staple of comic parody. On Dinah Shore's talk show, Dinah!, he sang Harry Chapin's "Taxi".

  His second studio album took over thirty years to arrive. Has Been appeared in October 2004, produced by Ben Folds, who also co-wrote and arranged a number of its songs. It included a cover of the Pulp hit "Common People", performed with Joe Jackson. In March 2006, TV Land aired "William Shatner in Concert", which showed him working with Folds and ended with a defiant "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", punctuated by an obscene gesture.

  On the 9th of June 2005, he performed "My Way" at George Lucas's AFI Life Achievement Award. Dancers in Imperial Stormtrooper costumes finished his segment by lifting him up and carrying him offstage.

  Has Been even reached the dance stage. In 2007 the writer and choreographer Margo Sappington used it as the basis for Common People, a piece for the Milwaukee Ballet. Shatner attended the premiere and arranged for it to be filmed. The resulting documentary, William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet, was well received at the Nashville Film Festival on the 17th of April 2009.

  His most successful album was the third, Seeking Major Tom, released in October 2011. Shatner announced it under that name on the 4th of February, briefly promoted it as Searching for Major Tom, then went back to the original title. It had an astronautical theme and a heavy metal flavour, with covers of Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly", David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". Guests included Brad Paisley, Zakk Wylde, Peter Frampton, Brian May and Steve Howe.

  The flow continued. Ponder the Mystery, a fifteen-track album produced by Billy Sherwood, appeared in October 2013, with all the music credited to Sherwood and all the lyrics to Shatner. In 2018 came his first country venture, Why Not Me, made with Jeff Cook, a founding member of the band Alabama. Two months later he released the holiday collection Shatner Claus, with Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, Todd Rundgren and Billy Gibbons. His ninth album, The Blues, came out on the 2nd of October 2020 and reached number one on the Billboard Blues Chart fifteen days later.

  A tenth album, Bill, was announced on the 26th of August 2021 and released on the 24th of September. That was less than three weeks before a very different kind of launch.

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• 6. Second Act on Screen

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  On the 19th of May 1983, Shatner received the 1,762nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in a ceremony that acknowledged the iconic status of Captain Kirk. He also holds a star on Canada's Walk of Fame, granted because he was the first Canadian actor to star in major series on NBC, CBS and ABC.

  The series behind that run was T. J. Hooker, in which he played a veteran Los Angeles police sergeant from 1982. It ran five seasons and ninety-one episodes until 1986 and paired him with Heather Locklear and James Darren. Shatner also began directing, taking charge of many episodes. Its success led to his hosting the dramatic re-enactment series Rescue 911 from 1989 to 1996.

  Working on Hooker gave Shatner an idea: a show starring a hybrid of Hooker and Kirk, a hard-boiled former police officer working as a private investigator in a dystopian future. When a Writers Guild strike delayed Star Trek V, he began turning the concept into a novel with Ron Goulart, an established author of pulp science fiction. Goulart called himself merely an adviser, though Shatner credits him with rewriting. The result, TekWar, was published in 1989 and launched a book series that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It led to four television movies, in which Shatner played the hero's boss, Walter Bascom, and then a brief television series. It also inspired a first-person shooter game in 1995.

  In December 1989, the British show This Is Your Life ambushed him with host Michael Aspel on the set of the Enterprise at Universal Studios. In 1999 and 2000 he played the "Big Giant Head" on 3rd Rock from the Sun, a high-ranking officer from the alien planet of the Solomon family who becomes a womanizing party animal on Earth. The role earned him an Emmy nomination.

  In the late 1990s he also became closely linked with the travel website priceline.com, appearing in many commercials as a pompous caricature of himself. He says the stock options he earned are real, but reports that they are worth hundreds of millions of dollars are exaggerated. From 1994 to 2010 he was also chief executive officer of C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, a Toronto special effects studio.

  Those commercials caught the eye of David E. Kelley, who brought Shatner into the final season of the legal drama The Practice. His character, Denny Crane, was an eccentric but highly capable attorney. Pat Jordan described the performance as "William Shatner the man... playing William Shatner the character playing the character Denny Crane, who was playing the character William Shatner."

  Crane moved to the spinoff Boston Legal, and in 2005 Shatner won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy. He earned Emmy nominations again in 2006, 2007-2008 and 2009. With the 2005 win he joined his co-star James Spader as one of the few actors to win an Emmy for the same character on two different shows. Boston Legal ended in 2008 after five seasons and one hundred and one episodes.

  He kept finding new platforms. In 2007 he began daily autobiographical vlogs on LiveVideo under the name ShatnerVision, and the project moved to YouTube the following year as The Shatner Project. In February 2012 he brought a one-man show, Shatner's World: We Just Live in It, to the Music Box on Broadway for three weeks before touring the United States. On the 23rd of August 2016, NBC premiered Better Late Than Never. It followed Shatner and four other aging celebrities, Terry Bradshaw, Jeff Dye, George Foreman and Henry Winkler, on a tour of Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia. Shatner joked that Bradshaw was "putty in my hands".

  Not every venture was uncontroversial. In 2021 it emerged that Shatner would host a popular science show, I Don't Understand with William Shatner, on RT, formerly Russia Today, starting on the 12th of July. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022, he expressed unqualified support for Ukrainians on Twitter. On the 2nd of March he withdrew from the show, and RT America ceased transmitting the next day.

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• 7. Friends, Rivals, and Loss

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  In 1964, Shatner and Leonard Nimoy first shared the screen, as guest stars in the Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode "The Project Strigas Affair". Like their characters on Star Trek, the two men had a professional rivalry that grew into close friendship. Nimoy recalled being "very competitive, with a sibling rivalry up to here". The tension sharpened once fan mail about Spock arrived and NBC asked for more of him. They worked together again on the animated series, on The $20,000 Pyramid and on T. J. Hooker.

  In 2016, Shatner revealed that he and Nimoy had not spoken in the five years before Nimoy's death the year before. When Nimoy died in 2015, Shatner said, "I loved him like a brother." Other commitments kept Shatner from the funeral, so his daughters attended in his place, and he celebrated his friend in an online memorial.

  Nimoy also played a part in the hardest chapter of Shatner's life. Shatner married his third wife, Nerine Kidd, in 1997. At around 10 p.m. on the 9th of August 1999, he came home and found her lifeless at the bottom of their backyard swimming pool. She was forty years old. An autopsy found both alcohol and diazepam in her blood. The coroner ruled the cause accidental drowning, and the Los Angeles Police Department closed the case, finding no evidence of foul play.

  Shatner later told Larry King that she had been suffering from a disease "that we don't like to talk about", alcoholism. In his 2008 book Up Till Now, he wrote that Nimoy, sober for many years, had warned him of her struggle. According to Shatner, Nerine went to rehab for 30 days three separate times, and Nimoy took her to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She did not want to quit. Shatner's 2004 album Has Been contains a spoken piece, "What Have You Done", about his anguish on finding her body.

  His other marriages ran differently. He married the Canadian actress Gloria Rand on the 12th of August 1956, and they had three daughters: Leslie, Lisabeth and Melanie. He left her during the original Star Trek series and divorced her in March 1969. His second wife, Marcy Lafferty, was the daughter of the producer Perry Lafferty. Their marriage lasted from 1973 to 1996, his longest, and produced no children. In 2001 he married Elizabeth Anderson Martin, who co-wrote the song "Together" on Has Been. He filed for divorce in 2019 and it was finalized in January 2020. As of 2025 they have reconciled, and he again calls her his wife.

  For years, several Star Trek co-stars called him difficult to work with, notably George Takei, Walter Koenig and James Doohan. Koenig eventually accepted an invitation onto Shatner's interview series Shatner's Raw Nerve in 2011, and made it clear that his old animosity had dissolved. Doohan took far longer. Shatner made numerous attempts at reconciliation in the 1990s without success. Doohan was the only former co-star who refused to be interviewed for Shatner's first memoir, Star Trek Memories, in 1993.

  The breakthrough came at a convention in El Paso, Texas, in November 2003. Organizer Sky Conway recalled that before going on stage, the two men hugged, apologized and told each other of their love and admiration. Shatner had specifically asked Conway to arrange the meeting so he could make amends before it was too late.

  Takei was harder. In London in 2023, he said that time had done nothing to soften his hostility, and he called Shatner a cantankerous old fossil. In 2025, though, Takei posted birthday wishes for Shatner's 94th birthday, closing with "Live long and prosper, my friends."

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• 8. Saddlebreds and Orbit

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  Belle Reve Farm is a 360 acre property near Versailles, Kentucky, where Shatner breeds and shows American Saddlebreds. The name comes from the French beau rêve, "Beautiful Dream". It is also the name of the family home of Blanche Dubois and her sister Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. His notable horses include Call Me Ringo, Revival and Sultan's Great Day. One of his mares, Great Belles of Fire, appeared under him in Star Trek Generations.

  The horses have earned him honours. In 2018, the National Reining Horse Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 his Standardbred road horse Track Star won a world championship at the Kentucky State Fair World's Championship Horse Show in Louisville. Most of his philanthropy revolves around horses too. Since 1990 he has been a major supporter of the Hollywood Charity Horse Show, and his farm works with the Central Kentucky Riding for Hope "Horses for Heroes" program. On New Year's Day 1994, he served as Grand Marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena and presided from horseback instead of a classic car.

  He has also raised money in stranger ways. In 2006 he sold a surgically removed kidney stone to the auction company GoldenPalace.com for $25,000, after rejecting an earlier bid of $15,000. He noted that collectors had paid more than $100,000 for one of his Star Trek tunics. The proceeds, plus $20,000 raised by the cast and crew of Boston Legal, went to Habitat for Humanity.

  Space had been calling for years. Since Apollo 15, NASA has woken its astronauts with tailored recordings. On the 7th of March 2011, the crew of STS-133 on the Space Shuttle Discovery began their last day docked to the International Space Station with Alexander Courage's Star Trek theme. Shatner followed it by reciting an adapted version of the show's famous introduction, which began "Space, the final frontier."

  The real flight came on the 13th of October 2021, aboard Blue Origin NS-18, the company's second sub-orbital human spaceflight. Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin's creator and a Trekkie, invited him. His fellow passengers were Chris Boshuizen, Glen de Vries and Audrey Powers. They lifted off from Blue Origin's Launch Site One in West Texas in a New Shepard capsule called RSS First Step.

  In a televised conversation with Bezos afterward, Shatner described the overview effect, a deepened sense that Earth's ecosphere is only a thin, fragile skin around its planet. At 90, he became the oldest person to fly in space. He surpassed Wally Funk, who had flown on Blue Origin's first crewed flight in July 2021 at the age of 82.

  His record did not last long. On the 19th of May 2024, the retired U.S. Air Force pilot Ed Dwight flew on Blue Origin NS-25. Dwight was also 90, but he was 48 days older than Shatner.

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