William Shatner

WILLIAM SHATNER - EARLY PUBLICITY SHOT

Although James Brown was often referred to as the hardest working man in show business ... it’s not true.  There is another.  A man of prolific roles, melodramatic flair, engorged libido, self-effacing humor, swaggering bravado, and staccato speech.  That man.  Is.  Of course.  The great.  William Shatner.  Actor, writer, director, producer, host, narrator,  interviewer, celebrity pitchman, singer (ahem) and starship commander.

When I was a kid, nobody was cooler than Captain Kirk ... and we’re about to find out if a biographer can be objective when writing about his boyhood hero.

William Alan Shatner was born on March 22nd, 1931 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada to Joseph Shatner (a clothing manufacturer) and Anna Shatner (née Garmaise).  William (nicknamed Bill) was brought up in a family that embraced Conservative Judaism -- his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Hungary; his paternal grandfather, Wolf Schattner, anglicized the family name to Shatner.

Bill, ever the ham, got his start in performing on radio programs for the Canadian Broadcasting Company.  He continued dabbling in drama while attending Willingdon Elementary School in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Baron Byng High School in Montreal.  Returning to NDG, he graduated from Westhill High School.  Later, after enrolling at Montreal’s McGill University, and spending his summers performing with the Royal Mount Theater, he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in commerce in 1952.  But acting was his true love, and Bill soon joined the National Repertory Theater of Ottowa, appearing in productions such as Henry V at the Strattford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.

In 1956, Bill debuted on Broadway in a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great.  Proving he was nothing if not diverse, during this same period, he was cast as Ranger Bill on the Canadian version of The Howdy Doody Show.  More television work ensued on programs like Studio One, Playhouse 90, and The Goodyear Television Playhouse.  Bill’s first major role in a feature film came with 1958’s The Brothers Karamazov, starring Yul Brynner -- Bill played Alexei, the youngest of the titular siblings.  After this coup, Bill returned to Broadway where he won raves (and a 1959 Theater World Award) playing Robert Lomax during a two-year run of The Secret Life of Suzie Wong.

WILLIAM SHATNER AS CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK

After much more television work (notably playing Marc Antony in Julius Caesar and appearing in two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents), Bill played an Army Captain, assistant to Spencer Tracy’s character, in Stanley Kramer’s Holocaust courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg (his trademark charm and swagger were present even then).  Returning to TV, where his appearances were already prolific, Bill appeared on Naked City, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, two Twilight Zone episodes (Nick of Time, and Richard Matheson’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet), 77 Sunset Strip, Route 66, The Outer Limits, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (where he worked for the first time with a young actor named Leonard Nimoy), The Fugitive, The Big Valley, and recurring roles on The Defenders and Dr. Kildare.

In 1965, Bill starred in a legal drama called For the People -- it only lasted one season.  Perhaps the strangest of Bill’s projects during this early period, was a 1965 Gothic horror film entitled Incubus, which was filmed with all dialogue spoken in the constructed language Esperanto.  But all past was prologue for what was to come next.

In 1966, after writer/producer Gene Roddenberry was seeking a lead for his second pilot of Star Trek (the network suits liked his “Wagon Train to the stars” concept, but felt his initial pilot was “too cerebral”), he hired Bill to play Captain James T. Kirk.  Kirk, a heroic lothario not unlike a space-age Horatio Hornblower, fit Bill like a glove.  His repartee with the stoic Vulcan Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the gruff-yet-kind Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) was the stuff of TV legend.  For three seasons and 79 episodes, Kirk and his gallant crew “boldly went where no man had gone before.”  Ratings were never as stellar as the series itself, and NBC canceled the show in 1969.

WILLIAM SHATNER

The 1970s were a rough time for Bill.  Typecast as Captain Kirk, he had trouble finding work.  His first wife divorced him, taking most of his Star Trek money with her, and with acting jobs sparse, Bill lived for awhile in a truck bed camper in the San Fernando Valley.

Humbled by this period, Bill redoubled his efforts at seeking work.  He went on to guest-star on The F.B.I., Hawaii Five-0, Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, Mission: Impossible, Marcus Welby M.D., Barnaby Jones, Mannix, The Six Million Dollar Man, Ironside, and Kung Fu.

In 1973, Bill reunited briefly with his Star Trek castmates for Filmation’s Star Trek: The Animated Series.  The half-hour Saturday morning cartoon ran for two seasons, and despite its cheaply produced animation, actually had some very intelligent scripts penned by some of Trek’s original writers.

Things were (seemingly) lookng up in 1975, when Bill was cast in the TV series Barbary Coast about secret agents in the late 1800s.  The show, kind of a rip-off of The Wild, Wild West, lasted only 14 episodes before the network yanked it.  Bill was also cast in the horror film The Devil’s Rain with Ernest Borgnine and John Travolta.  The movie bombed.  Other films of this mid-70s period include Big Bad Mama with Angie Dickenson, Kingdom of the Spiders, and the miniseries How The West Was Won.

SHATNER AS ADMIRAL KIRK IN STAR TREK II

While Bill’s career was struggling to find its pulse, a resurrection was brewing.  Star Trek, which in the decade since it was canceled, had found a new and devoted following in syndication.  Fan conventions, letter campaigns, and even NASA’s christening of the first space shuttle as "Enterprise," let Paramount Studios know they were sitting on a gold mine.

While a new television series was proposed, Star Trek Phase II, in the wake of the success of Star Wars, it was instead turned into a feature film.  Nobody was more excited by this prospect than Bill Shatner.

1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, directed by Oscar-winner Robert Wise, was a worldwide smash (even if most critics agreed it could have used a little more emphasis on character).  But ravenous Star Trek fans, starved for ten years, ate it up.  In just a few years, Bill had gone from being homeless and broke to a pop culture icon.

Three years later in 1982, Bill had another banner year.  He was cast in the television police drama T.J. Hooker, which ran on ABC for three seasons (and on CBS for a fourth).  The Star Trek cast also reassembled for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  Directed (and ghost written) by Nicholas Meyer, the film was everything that critics and fans wanted the first one to be -- character-driven, action-packed and emotionally impacting.

1984’s Star Trek III: The Search For Spock and 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home were also very successful.

In 1989, Bill was hired to host a dramatic reenactment series called Rescue 911 -- it would run in syndication for seven years.  Also in ‘89, Bill directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.  However, budget cuts, script doctoring, and a rushed production seriously compromised the final cut of the film, causing most fans and critics to cringe at the result.  1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (directed and cowritten by Khan-helmer Meyer) fared much better.

Though Undiscovered Country was meant to be the swan song of the cast of the original Star Trek, Bill was asked back for 1994’s Star Trek: Generations.  Intended to pass the franchise torch to the cast of the spin-off series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the film ended with Kirk’s (badly executed) death.  Bill agreed to do it, but in later years seriously regretted the decision (especially after director J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of Star Trek).

Despite the demise of his (our) beloved Captain Kirk, Bill stayed busy.  He had a recurring role on the sci-fi sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, he costarred with Sandra Bullock in two Miss Congeniality movies, and made a 2003 guest appearance on David Kelley’s legal drama The Practice.  Bill’s character, Denny Crane, and his rapport with James Spader’s Alan Shore, was so popular that Kelley dropped The Practice and reinvented the show as Boston Legal (2004 - 2008).  Bill would go on to win two Emmys and a Golden Globe for the role.

SHATNER AS DENNY CRANE ON BOSTON LEGAL

In 2008, The Biography Channel hired Bill to host his own talk show, Shatner’s Raw Nerve.  Bill was so good in the program -- indeed asking questions waaaay outside standard interview fare -- that it was quickly renewed for a second season.

Bill is also a rather prolific author, having penned a series of science fiction detective novels called Tek War.  He has also written (with help of scribes Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens) a series of Star Trek novels which resurrected Captain Kirk.  The nonfiction books Star Trek Memories, Star Trek Movie Memories, and Get a Life! (all cowritten with Chris Kreski) are Bill’s very entertaining memoirs regarding his life with Star Trek.  His most recent book is an autobiography called Up Till Now (2008 - cowritten with David Fisher).

When not working, Bill enjoys breeding and showing American Saddlebreds and Quarter Horses on his 360-acre horse farm in Kentucky.

Bill has been married four times.  First to Canadian actress Gloria Rand in 1959 -- they had three daughters together (Leslie - 1958, Lisabeth - 1960, and Melanie - 1964) before divorcing in 1969.  Bill married actress Marcy Lafferty in 1973 -- the marriage lasted until 1994.  Soon after, Bill married former Ford model, Nerine Kidd.  Kidd, a troubled alcoholic, died tragically in 1999, when she accidentally drowned in a pool at the Shatners' Studio City home.  Finally, in 2001, Bill found someone who seemed to be an ideal match: horse breeder, Elizabeth J. Martin.  The couple, both of whom had recently been widowed, married in 2001.

Bill continues to work incessantly, and his presence is still felt all over popular culture.  From his Priceline ads, YouTube Channel and Official Website to his talk show, odd association with John Carpenter’s Halloween, and standing as one of the world’s most popular impressions ... you just can’t get away from the Shat.  Also, those newly remastered Star Trek episodes are a wonder to behold.

As a recent Discovery Channel special posited ... William Shatner has truly changed the world.

For an intimate (and fascinating) interview between Shatner and Nimoy, click here.