William Shatner was born on March 22,1931 and is a Canadian actor.
100 Facts About William Shatner
2.
William Shatner 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.
3.
William Shatner has written a series of books chronicling his experiences before, during and after his time in a Starfleet uniform.
4.
William Shatner has 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.
5.
Outside Star Trek, Shatner played the eponymous veteran police sergeant in T J Hooker and hosted the reality-based television series Rescue 911, which won a People's Choice Award for Favorite New TV Dramatic Series.
6.
In 2021, William Shatner flew into space aboard a Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule.
7.
William Shatner was born on March 22,1931, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to a Conservative Jewish household.
8.
William Shatner's parents were Ann and Joseph Shatner, a clothing manufacturer.
9.
William Shatner is the middle child of three siblings: he has an older sister, Joy Rutenberg and a younger sister, Farla Cohen.
10.
All four of William 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.
11.
William Shatner attended two schools in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Willingdon Elementary School and West Hill High School, and is an alumnus of the Montreal Children's Theatre.
12.
William Shatner studied economics at the McGill University Faculty of Management in Montreal, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1952.
13.
William Shatner was granted the same accolade by the New England Institute of Technology in May 2018.
14.
In 1951, he had a small role in a Canadian comedy drama, The Butler's Night Off: its credits list him as Bill William Shatner, and describe his role simply as "a crook".
15.
In 1954, William Shatner decided to leave Stratford and move to New York City in the hope of building a career on the Broadway stage.
16.
William Shatner was 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.
17.
In 1959, William Shatner received good reviews in the role of Lomax in The World of Suzie Wong on Broadway.
18.
William Shatner appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone, "Nick of Time" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" ; when the anthology film The Twilight Zone: The Movie was produced twenty years later, it was with a remake of the latter episode that the movie climaxed.
19.
William Shatner was featured in two episodes of the NBC television series Thriller and the film The Explosive Generation.
20.
William Shatner took the lead role in Roger Corman's movie The Intruder and received very good reviews for his significant role in the Stanley Kramer film Judgment at Nuremberg.
21.
In 1964, William Shatner guest-starred in the second episode of the second season of the ABC science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, "Cold Hands, Warm Heart".
22.
The series was not picked up, and the pilot remained unaired until 1968, when it was repackaged as a TV movie to capitalize on the fame that West and William Shatner had won in the interim.
23.
In 1965, William Shatner guest-starred in 12 O'Clock High as Major Curt Brown in the episode "I Am the Enemy".
24.
William Shatner starred in the 1966 gothic horror film Incubus the second feature-length movie ever made with all dialogue spoken in Esperanto.
25.
William Shatner starred in an episode of Gunsmoke in 1966 as the character Fred Bateman.
26.
William Shatner appeared as attorney-turned-counterfeiter Brett Skyler in a 1966 episode of The Big Valley, "Time to Kill".
27.
William Shatner 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.
28.
In 1973, William 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.
29.
William Shatner refers to this part of his life as "that period", a humbling time during which he would take any odd job, including small party appearances, in order to support his family.
30.
William Shatner had a starring role too in the western-themed secret agent series Barbary Coast during 1975 and 1976, and appeared as a guest of the week in many popular shows of that decade, including Columbo, Ironside, Kung Fu, Mission: Impossible, The Rookies and The Six Million Dollar Man.
31.
One of the special skills that William Shatner was able to offer to casting directors was an expertise in a martial art: he was taught American Kenpo karate by the black belt Tom Bleecker, who had in turn been trained by the founder of American Kenpo, Ed Parker.
32.
William Shatner's mistake meant that the contestant paired with him was automatically disqualified from receiving what would have been a prize of $20,000.
33.
William Shatner was so furious at himself over his error that he leapt out of his chair, picked it up and threw it out of the show's iconic Winner's Circle.
34.
William Shatner mocked the cavalier, almost superhuman, persona of Captain Kirk in the films Airplane II: The Sequel and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1.
35.
In 1982, Shatner was the leading character of a high-profile television show when he was cast as a veteran Los Angeles police sergeant in T J Hooker.
36.
William Shatner's growing success on television and in movie theatres in the 1980s did not lead him to stop working for advertisers.
37.
On May 19,1983, the iconic status of Captain Kirk was acknowledged with a ceremony celebrating William Shatner's being awarded the 1,762nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
38.
The novels led to four TekWar television movies, in which William Shatner played not the lead character but his boss, Walter Bascom.
39.
William Shatner reprised the role in a television series that followed, as well as directing several episodes of it himself, but its run on the USA Network, Syfy and Canada's CTV was brief.
40.
In December 1989, William Shatner took part in the British television series This Is Your Life, a show in which a celebrity is ambushed by the host and then taken to a studio for the story of his life to be told in a stream of anecdotes related by his acquaintances: William Shatner's episode began with Michael Aspel taking him by surprise on the set of the Starship Enterprise at Universal Studios in Hollywood.
41.
In 1994, William Shatner revisited Columbo to play the murderer-of-the-week in the episode Butterfly in shades of grey.
42.
William Shatner narrated a television miniseries shot in New Zealand A Twist in the Tale.
43.
William Shatner has said that while it is true that his work for priceline earned him stock options, reports that they are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars are exaggerated.
44.
William Shatner appeared in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, in which Stan Fields is kidnapped in Las Vegas together with the winner of the pageant of the previous year.
45.
In 2003, William Shatner appeared in Brad Paisley's Celebrity and Online music videos along with Little Jimmy Dickens, Jason Alexander and Trista Rehn.
46.
William Shatner had a supporting role in the comedy DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, which starred Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn.
47.
William Shatner remained with Boston Legal until, after five seasons and one hundred and one episodes, it ended in 2008.
48.
William Shatner expanded his work on YouTube in 2009, supplying the voice of Don Salmonella to the animated series The Gavones.
49.
William Shatner made several guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, including in cameos in which he made fun of the Republican politician Sarah Palin.
50.
William Shatner opened mock-hostilities on July 27,2009, with a poetry slam inspired recitation of the speech in which she had resigned the governorship of Alaska.
51.
William Shatner was not "offered or suggested" a role in the 2009 film Star Trek.
52.
At a convention held in 2010, William Shatner described the film as "wonderful".
53.
William Shatner's 2012 began with his return to his roots in theatre.
54.
William Shatner joked that Bradshaw, famous as a quarterback with the Pittsburgh Steelers, was "putty in my hands".
55.
William Shatner announced his participation in the series in a Twitter post quoting one of its catchphrases, and disclosed that he was himself a so-called brony, one of the show's devotees.
56.
Shatner became the focus of political controversy in 2021, when it was revealed that a popular science documentary show that he would host, I Don't Understand with William Shatner, was scheduled to be aired on RT, formerly known as Russia Today, from July 12.
57.
Four days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24,2022, William Shatner issued a statement via Twitter expressing unqualified support for the Ukrainians in the resistance that they were mounting against their assailants.
58.
Also in 2021, William Shatner starred in the film Senior Moment, which co-starred Jean Smart and Christopher Lloyd.
59.
In 2022, William Shatner competed in season eight of The Masked Singer as "Knight".
60.
William Shatner was eliminated in the first episode alongside Eric Idle as "Hedgehog" and Chris Kirkpatrick as "Hummingbird".
61.
William Shatner hosted and executive produced The UnXplained on History from 2019 to 2022.
62.
William Shatner made his debut on the shelves of record shops in 1968, with the release of an album titled The Transformed Man.
63.
The idiosyncratic way with songs that William Shatner chose for this LP, an approach so amusical that it scarcely even qualified as Sprechstimme, was a style to which he remained loyal throughout his recording career.
64.
Devoid of Star Trek branding because of licensing restrictions, the album's sleeve was decorated with a photograph of William Shatner brandishing an upturned camera tripod in the style of Jim Kirk going into battle with a phaser rifle.
65.
Several of the movies in which William Shatner participated featured him in a musical context.
66.
William Shatner contributed the voice of Buzz Lightyear to the Star Command anthem "To Infinity And Beyond" in the 2000 film Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins.
67.
In 2007, one of William Shatner's albums, Has Been, was taken up by the writer and choreographer Margo Sappington as the basis for a dance project, Common People, created for the Milwaukee Ballet.
68.
William Shatner attended the premiere of the work and arranged for it to be filmed.
69.
William Shatner mined this vein of self-deprecating comedy as the lynchpin of Priceline's television advertising campaign.
70.
William Shatner took part in Blue Origin's second sub-orbital human spaceflight, Blue Origin NS-18, on October 13,2021.
71.
William Shatner says that there are episodes of the original Star Trek television show that he has never seen, and he is just as averse to watching his performance in Boston Legal.
72.
William Shatner 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.
73.
William Shatner is a longtime US resident and has a green card.
74.
William Shatner's first wife was a Canadian actress, Gloria Rand, whom he married on August 12,1956.
75.
William Shatner left Rand while acting in Star Trek: The Original Series, after which he divorced her in March 1969.
76.
William Shatner urged the public to support Friendly House, a non-profit organization that helps women to rebuild their lives after trying to free themselves from alcoholism or other forms of drug addiction.
77.
William Shatner was in rehab for 30 days three different times.
78.
In 2004, she co-wrote the song "Together" on William Shatner's album Has Been.
79.
In 2016, William Shatner revealed that despite their long and affectionate relationship, he and Nimoy had not spoken to each other in the five years before his death the year before.
80.
William Shatner said that working with both Shatner and her experienced colleagues on Dynasty could be daunting, but that her nervousness motivated her to turn up on set well prepared.
81.
Hooker ended, William Shatner helped her to get other roles, and after Nerine William Shatner's death in 1999, she was solicitous in comforting him in his bereavement.
82.
The episodes' story involves William Shatner's character becoming attracted to Nolan and trying to insert himself into her defence.
83.
William Shatner acknowledged the resentment that Koenig and Doohan felt towards him in Star Trek Movie Memories, and Takei wrote about his issues with William Shatner in his 2004 memoir, To the Stars.
84.
William Shatner began suffering from tinnitus, a hearing disorder, in the early 1990s.
85.
Researchers think that tinnitus can be triggered by exposure to very loud noise, and William Shatner believes that his falling prey to it might be the result of a pyrotechnical accident that happened during the shooting of the 1967 Star Trek episode "Arena".
86.
William Shatner's condition has been ameliorated by habituation therapy that involved his wearing an earpiece delivering low-level white noise which "helped his brain put the tinnitus in the background".
87.
William Shatner is a supporter of a tinnitus charity, the American Tinnitus Association.
88.
William Shatner revealed in 2020 that he suffers from swollen joints and various age-related "aches and pains".
89.
William Shatner rode one of his own mares, Great Belles of Fire, in Star Trek Generations.
90.
William Shatner has a 360-acre farm near Versailles, Kentucky, named Belle Reve Farm, where he raises American Saddlebreds.
91.
In 2018, William Shatner was awarded the National Reining Horse Association Lifetime Achievement Award in the National Reining Horse Association Hall of Fame.
92.
William Shatner participates in the Hollywood Home Games of the World Poker Tour, in which celebrities try to win money for their favourite charities.
93.
In 2006, William Shatner sold a kidney stone that had been surgically extracted from him to the online auction company GoldenPalace.
94.
On New Year's Day 1994, William Shatner was the Grand Marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California.
95.
William Shatner took part in the coin toss before the subsequent 80th Rose Bowl college football game.
96.
In 2017, William Shatner tweeted support for Autism Speaks, a controversial charity disliked by some autism self-advocates.
97.
William Shatner spent the next few days arguing with autistic people and allies, including citing anti-vaccination website NaturalNews.
98.
Days later, William Shatner suggested his critics should have kept quiet, eventually calling the episode a misunderstanding.
99.
William Shatner has starred in movies and television shows for seven decades.
100.
William Shatner has appeared in video games, primarily as James T Kirk, as well as a number of commercials.