William Shatner

He is the middle (and only son) of three children; his older sister was Joy Rutenberg (1928–2023) and his younger sister is Farla Cohen (1940–).

His patrilineal family name was Schattner; it was his grandfather, Wolf Schattner, who anglicized the spelling.

All four of Shatner's grandparents were Jewish immigrants: they came 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.

William Shatner (born March 22, 1931) is a Canadian actor.

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.

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.

He studied economics at the McGill University Faculty of Management in Montreal, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1952.

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.

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".

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 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.

In a career spanning seven decades, he is best known for his portrayal of 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 (1994).

Shatner began his screen acting career in Canadian films and television productions before moving into guest-starring roles in various U.S. 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.

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 are his versions of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", and Elton John's "Rocket Man".

Outside Star Trek, Shatner played the eponymous veteran police sergeant in T. J. Hooker (1982–1986), hosted the reality-based television series Rescue 911 (1989–1996), guest starred on the detective series Columbo, and acted in the comedy film Miss Congeniality (2000).

Shatner's television career after his last appearance as Captain Kirk has 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.

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 age 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.

In 2011, McGill University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.

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.

He was granted the same accolade by the New England Institute of Technology in May 2018.

Shatner's movie career began while he was still at college.