William Shatner

William Alan Shatner, OC (born March 22, 1931) is a Canadian actor. In a career spanning seven decades, he is best known for his portrayal of James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise, from his 1965 debut as the captain of the Enterprise in the second pilot of the first Star Trek television seriesto his final appearance as Captain Kirk in the seventh Star Trek feature film, Star Trek Generations (1994).

Shatner began his screen acting career in Canadian films and television productions before moving into guest-starring roles in various US television shows. He appeared as James 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 (1982–1986) and hosted the reality-based television series Rescue 911 (1989–1996), which won a People's Choice Award for Favorite New TV Dramatic Series. His appearances as a guest star in two episodes of the television detective series Columbo, almost two decades apart, were among his many such contributions to television shows from the 1970s to the 2010s.

Shatner's television career after his last appearance as James Kirk embraced comedy, drama and reality shows. In seasons 4 and 5 of the NBC series 3rd Rock from the Sun, he played the alien "Big Giant Head" to which the main characters reported. From 2004 until 2008, he starred as attorney Denny Crane in the final season of the legal show The Practice and in its spinoff Boston Legal, a role that earned him two Emmy Awards, one for his contribution 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, beginning in 1968 with his album The Transformed Man. His cover versions of songs are dramatic recitations of their lyrics rather than musical performances: the most notable of them are his versions of The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and Bob Dylan's "Mr Tambourine Man". The rendition of Elton John's "Rocket Man" that he essayed when he hosted the 5th Saturn Awards in 1978 has often been parodied by comedians. His most successful album was his third, Seeking Major Tom (2011), 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 a Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule. At the age of 90, he became the oldest person to fly in space and one of the first 600 to do so. Minutes after the flight, he described experiencing the overview effect.

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 (née Garmaise) and Joseph Shatner, a clothing manufacturer. He is the middle child of three siblings: he has an older sister, Joy Rutenberg (1928–) and a younger sister, Farla Cohen (1940–). His patrilineal family name was Schattner—it was his grandfather, Wolf Schattner, who anglicized it. All four of Shatner's grandparents were Jewish immigrants: they came from settlements that are currently in Ukraine and Lithuania, but 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. 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.

Career
Shatner's movie career began while he was still at 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 a clown, Clarabelle, whose contributions to her 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 US television profile was heightened further when he had a leading role in an episode in the third (1957–58) season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "The Glass Eye".

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. Shatner appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone, "Nick of Time" (1960) and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963); when a Twilight Zone portmanteau film was produced twenty years later, it was with a remake of the latter episode that the movie climaxed. He appeared twice as Wayne Gorham in NBC's Outlaws (1960) 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 ("The Grim Reaper" and "The Hungry Glass") and the film The Explosive Generation (1961). He took the lead role in Roger Corman's movie The Intruder (1962) and received very good reviews for his significant role in the Stanley Kramer film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). In the 1963–64 season, he appeared in an episode of the ABC series Channing. In 1963, he starred in the Family Theaterproduction 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".

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 to play Kirk for the remainder of the show, and he sat in the captain's chair of the USS Enterprise from 1966 to 1969. During its original run on NBC, the series achieved only modest ratings, and it was cancelled after three seasons and seventy-nine episodes. Plato's Stepchildren, aired on November 22, 1968, earned Shatner a footnote in the history of American race relations: a kiss that Captain Kirk planted on the lips of Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) is often cited as the first example of a white man kissing a black woman on scripted television in the United States. In 1973, Shatner returned to the role of Kirk, albeit only in voice, in the animated Star Trek series, which ran for two seasons and twenty-two episodes.

After Star Trek was cancelled, it acquired a cult following among people watching syndicated reruns of the series, and Captain Kirk became a cultural icon. Fans of the show—so-called Trekkies—began organizing conventions where they could meet like-minded enthusiasts, buy Star Trek merchandise and enjoy question and answer sessions with members of the show's regular cast. Many of the actors who had crewed the Enterprise became frequent guests at these events, Shatner included.

On May 19, 1983, the iconic status of Captain Kirk was acknowledged with a ceremony celebrating Shatner's being awarded the 1,762nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Shatner also has a star on Canada's Walk of Fame, granted to him in recognition of his being the first Canadian actor to star in major series on three US networks—NBC, CBS and ABC.

Shatner took part in Blue Origin's second sub-orbital human spaceflight, Blue Origin NS-18, on October 13, 2021. Invited to join Chris Boshuizen, Glen de Vries and Audrey Powers on the trip by Blue Origin's creator, the entrepreneur and Trekkie Jeff Bezos, he began his real-world visit to space at Blue Origin's Launch Site One in West Texas, travelling on the RSS First Step, a New Shepard suborbital rocket capsule. Aged 90 years, 6 months and 22 days, he became the oldest person to fly into space, surpassing Wally Funk, who had flown on Blue Origin's first crewed spaceflight at the age of 82 in July 2021. In a televised post-flight conversation with Bezos, Shatner articulated experiencing the overview effect, a deepened understanding of the fact that the ecosphere of the Earth is but a thin, fragile skin enveloping its planet

Shatner dislikes watching himself perform. He says that there are episodes of the original Star Trek television show that he has never seen,and he is just as averse to sitting down with Boston Legal. He has claimed that the only Star Trek movie that he has screened is the one that he directed and so necessarily viewed when it was being edited, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, although in his 1993 book Star Trek Memories, he recalls how disappointed he felt when he attended the premiere of the first Star Trek movie, Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Shatner is a longtime U.S. resident and has a green card

Animated Films

 * The True Story of Puss 'N Boots (2009) - Puss 'N Boots