William Shatner

William Shatner: Ninety Years to the Edge of Space

On 13 October 2021, at ninety years and 205 days, the man who had spent three television seasons pretending to command a starship was strapped into a New Shepard capsule in West Texas and actually left the atmosphere. He came back changed and slightly undone, telling Jeff Bezos that he had grasped how "the ecosphere of the Earth is but a thin, fragile skin enveloping its planet." It was the overview effect, delivered fifty-five years late to the person most responsible for making millions of people want it.

Notre-Dame-de-Grace

He was born on 22 March 1931 in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Montreal, into a Conservative Jewish household. His father Joseph manufactured clothing; the family name had been Schattner until his grandfather anglicised it, and all four grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Lithuania. He had an older sister, Joy, and a younger sister, Farla. He went to Willingdon Elementary and West Hill High School and passed through the Montreal Children's Theatre. He then did something no one would predict from the later career: he studied economics at McGill's Faculty of Management and took a Bachelor of Commerce in 1952. As a camp counsellor at a B'nai B'rith camp he helped teach English to the Holocaust survivor Fred Bild.

Stratford, and a Kidney Stone

He made his film debut in 1951 in the Canadian comedy *The Butler's Night Off*, then worked at Montreal's Mountain Playhouse and Canada's National Repertory Theatre before joining the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where Tyrone Guthrie directed him in *Tamburlaine* and *Oedipus Rex*. In *Henry V* he played the Duke of Gloucester while understudying Christopher Plummer as the king. Plummer was felled by kidney stones, Shatner went on, and his reading impressed both Plummer and Guthrie, who called him the most promising actor his festival had ever employed. He reached Broadway with *Tamburlaine* in 1956 and played opposite Julie Harris and Walter Matthau in *A Shot in the Dark* in 1961. He appeared in *The Brothers Karamazov*, *Judgment at Nuremberg*, and two of the most reproduced episodes of *The Twilight Zone*, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet."

Kirk

He was cast as Captain James T. Kirk for the second *Star Trek* pilot and sat in the centre chair from 1966 to 1969, through seventy-nine episodes and modest ratings, before NBC cancelled it. On 22 November 1968 the episode "Plato's Stepchildren" put Kirk's mouth on Lieutenant Uhura's, often cited as the first kiss between a white man and a black woman on scripted American television. Then the reckoning: typecast, broke, he lived for a period in a truck-bed camper between theatre jobs, made *Big Bad Mama* and *Kingdom of the Spiders*, and took game shows and margarine commercials. When *Star Wars* changed Paramount's mind, he returned for *Star Trek: The Motion Picture* in 1979 and six more films through *Generations* in 1994, where Kirk finally died. He directed *Star Trek V: The Final Frontier* himself in 1989. His relationship with the fandom was jagged; in a 1986 *Saturday Night Live* sketch set at a convention he told the assembled Trekkies to "get a life," then published a book of that title in 1999 and directed *The Captains* in 2011, interviewing all five actors who had held the chair.

Denny Crane

He outran the typecasting by leaning into it. *T.J. Hooker* gave him ninety-one episodes as a Los Angeles police sergeant from 1982 to 1986; *Rescue 911* made him a fixture of American living rooms from 1989 to 1996; *3rd Rock from the Sun* earned him an Emmy nomination as the Big Giant Head. Then *Boston Legal*, where as the attorney Denny Crane he performed what the writer Pat Jordan described as "William Shatner the man... playing William Shatner the character playing the character Denny Crane, who was playing the character William Shatner." It won him a Golden Globe and an Emmy in 2005, with nominations in each of the four following years, and made him one of very few actors to win an Emmy for the same character on two different series.

The music runs in parallel and is odder. *The Transformed Man* in 1968 consisted of dramatic recitations of lyrics rather than singing; "Rocket Man" at the 1978 Saturn Awards became a permanent artefact of camp. Then Ben Folds produced *Has Been* in 2004, a genuinely serious record containing "What Have You Done," about finding his third wife dead. *Seeking Major Tom* in 2011 drew in Brian May, Peter Frampton, Zakk Wylde and Brad Paisley, and *The Blues* in 2020 went to number one on the Billboard Blues chart.

The Difficult Part

He has married four times. Nerine Kidd, his third wife, was found at the bottom of their swimming pool on 9 August 1999; the coroner ruled accidental drowning, with alcohol and diazepam in her blood. "My wife, whom I loved dearly, and who loved me, was suffering with a disease that we don't like to talk about: alcoholism," he told Larry King. Leonard Nimoy, himself in recovery, had tried to get her to meetings. Shatner's *Star Trek* colleagues were less forgiving of him than his wives were: George Takei, Walter Koenig and James Doohan aired years of resentment, Takei calling him "a cantankerous old fossil" as recently as 2023, though he reconciled publicly with Doohan in El Paso in 2003 and with Koenig on camera in 2011. He and Nimoy, best man at his fourth wedding, did not speak for the five years before Nimoy's death in 2015. "I loved him like a brother," Shatner said. He also agreed in 2021 to host a show on RT, the Russian state channel, whose editor-in-chief crowed that "Captain Kirk has come over to the good side"; he withdrew four days after the invasion of Ukraine.

Why William Is Called a Genius

He is not called one for intellect, and he does not claim to be. The defensible claim is a specific and rare performance instinct: he understood earlier than almost anyone that a persona can be a medium in itself, and he learned to play the public idea of William Shatner with enough control that audiences could never quite locate the seam. Guthrie, one of the great directors of the century, saw the raw ability in Stratford and called him the most promising actor the festival employed. Boston Legal's Denny Crane is the fully realised version, a performance built from three nested layers of self-caricature that nonetheless carried real pathos, and it won an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Against this: his most-quoted acting mannerism, the fractured phrasing, was never a technique he theorised, and his recitation albums began as sincere work that the culture reclassified as comedy without his consent. He has never given a performance in a first-rank film. His one directing effort in the franchise is widely considered its weakest entry. And a survival instinct is not the same thing as an artistic vision; much of the long career reflects an unembarrassed willingness to take the job, whether it was margarine, Priceline or Russian state television. Call it durability elevated into an art form rather than genius in the conventional sense.

Legacy

He holds honorary doctorates from McGill, awarded in 2011, and the New England Institute of Technology, awarded in 2018, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame from 1983, a place on Canada's Walk of Fame as the first Canadian actor to headline series on three American networks, and a Saturn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025. He wrote memoirs and the TekWar novels, hosted *Better Late Than Never*, took a one-man show to Broadway in 2012, breeds American Saddlebreds, and dislikes watching himself so thoroughly that he has never seen most of his own episodes. He held the record for the oldest human in space for two and a half years, until an Air Force pilot beat him by forty-eight days.