Age, Biography, and Wiki
William Shatner was born on March 22, 1931, making him 94 years old as of May 2025. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, he is celebrated for his contributions to the entertainment industry, which include acting, directing, and writing. Shatner's detailed biography is available on his Wikipedia page.
| Occupation | Game Show Host |
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| Date of Birth | 22 March 1931 |
| Age | 94 Years |
| Birth Place | Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Horoscope | Aries |
| Country | Canada |
Height, Weight & Measurements
William Shatner stands at a height of 5 feet 9 inches (175.26 cm). However, his current weight is not widely reported.
| Height | 5 feet 9 inches |
| Weight | |
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Dating & Relationship Status
William Shatner has been married four times: to Gloria Rand (1956-1969), Marcy Lafferty (1973-1996), Nerine Kidd (1997-1999), and Elizabeth Martin (2001-2020). He is currently divorced from Elizabeth Martin, with whom he settled a divorce in 2020 that included a significant real estate division.
His parents were Ann (née Garmaise; 1905–1992) and Joseph Shatner (1898–1967), a clothing manufacturer. He is the middle 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; his grandfather, Wolf Schattner, 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 appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone, "Nick of Time" (1960) and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963); when the anthology film The Twilight Zone: The Movie was produced twenty years later, the movie climaxed with a remake of the latter episode. He appeared twice as Wayne Gorham in NBC's Outlaws (1960), a Western series with Barton MacLane, and then returned to Alfred Hitchcock Presents for a 5th-season episode, "Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?".
| Parents | |
| Husband | Gloria Rand (m. August 12, 1956-March 1969) Marcy Lafferty (m. 1973-1996) Nerine Kidd (m. 1997-1999) Elizabeth Anderson Martin (m. 2001-January 2020) |
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Net Worth and Salary
As of May 2025, William Shatner's net worth is estimated to be around $100 million. His income comes from a variety of sources including his acting career, book sales, public appearances, and endorsement deals. He reportedly earned $150,000 per episode for some television shows.
To supplement his income from acting, Shatner performed as a celebrity guest in a multitude of television game shows, among them Beat the Clock, Celebrity Bowling, The Hollywood Squares, Match Game, Tattletales and Mike Stokey's Stump the Stars. His curriculum vitae in this genre included several visits to The $10,000 Pyramid and its more generous sequels, shows in which contestants attempted to guess a word or phrase with the help of hints from a famous partner. Shatner's contributions to the Pyramid series included a week-long match-up that pitted him against Leonard Nimoy in an event billed as "Kirk versus Spock". In a 1977 episode, he perpetrated a blunder that has been preserved on YouTube: at the climax of the show, attempting to guide his partner to the phrase "things that are blessed", he blurted out the word "blessed" instead of, as he had intended, citing the Virgin Mary. His mistake meant that the contestant paired with him was automatically disqualified from receiving what would have been a prize of $20,000. 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. During an Archive of American Television interview, Richard Dawson disclosed that when Mark Goodson was considering whom to employ as the host of the pilot of Family Feud (1976), he would have chosen Shatner if he had not been intimidated into awarding the position to Dawson by a threat from Dawson's agent.
Career, Business, and Investments
William Shatner is best known for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise. He has also starred in other notable roles such as T.J. Hooker, Rescue 911, and Boston Legal, for which he won an Emmy Award. Shatner has been involved in music and has released several albums. He has also written several books, including memoirs and novels. In 2025, Shatner continued to engage in public speaking events and tours, including a live event series titled "William Shatner vs. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Unscripted. Unfiltered. Unmissable".
William Shatner (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 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 American 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), 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. 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 are his versions of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", and Elton John's "Rocket Man". 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".
Shatner's movie career began while he was still attending 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.
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.
In 1965, Shatner guest-starred in 12 O'Clock High as Major Curt Brown in the episode "I Am the Enemy". In the same year, he had the lead role in a legal drama, For the People, starring as an assistant district attorney married to a woman played by Jessica Walter; the show's cancellation after its 13-episode first season allowed him to walk onto the bridge of the Enterprise the following year.
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.
In the early 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969, Shatner experienced difficulty in finding employment, having become somewhat typecast as James Tiberius Kirk. With very little money and few acting prospects, he lost his home and was for a time so poor that he was reduced to living in a truck-bed camper in the San Fernando Valley. He 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, to support his family.
Shatner's film work in this phase of his career was limited to such B-movies as Roger Corman's Big Bad Mama (1974), the horror film The Devil's Rain (1975) and Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). On television, he made a critically praised appearance as a prosecutor in a 1971 PBS adaptation of Saul Levitt's play The Andersonville Trial, and was also seen in major parts in the movies The People (1972) and The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973). He 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. One of the special skills that 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.
Social Network
William Shatner is active on social media platforms like Twitter, where he engages with fans and shares updates about his projects.
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".
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 American 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".
Advertising agencies also played a part in helping Shatner through his post-Kirk doldrums. Among the television commercials for which he was hired were spots promoting General Motors' Oldsmobile brand, Promise margarine, the British Columbia-based supermarket chain SuperValu and its Ontarian equivalent, Loblaws; Canadian viewers became familiar with the former hero of Starfleet reassuring them that "At Loblaws, more than the price is right. But, by gosh, the price is right."
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.
In the mid-1970s, noting the growing appetite for Star Trek, Paramount began pre-producing a sequel show, Star Trek: Phase II, in which they planned to present new, younger actors alongside the stars of the original series. However, astounded by the enormous success that George Lucas's film Star Wars achieved in 1977, the studio decided that Star Trek would earn them more money if the next adventure of the Enterprise took place not on television but in theatres. Shatner and all the other original Star Trek cast members returned to their roles when Paramount produced Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979. He went on to play Kirk in six further Star Trek films: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) and—in a story that culminated in the captain's self-sacrificial death—Star Trek Generations (1994). His final appearances as James Tiberius Kirk were in the movie sequences of the video game Starfleet Academy (1997), in a 2006 DirecTV advertisement that used footage from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and at the 2013 Academy Awards, in which he reprised the role for a comedic interlude with the show's host, Seth MacFarlane.
Although the resurrection of Star Trek from oblivion only came about because of the enthusiasm of Trekkies, Shatner's attitude towards them is not uncritical. In a much-discussed 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch about a Star Trek convention, he advised a room full of Trekkies to "get a life". The comment was an apt summary of the view of his fans that he had expressed in several interviews. Their adoration of him took unwelcome forms almost from the beginning of his time as Captain Kirk; as early as April 1968, a group of them attempted to tear his clothes from him as he left 30 Rockefeller Plaza. His amusement at the behaviour of the lunatic fringe of his admirers was reflected in the romantic comedy movie Free Enterprise (1998), in which he contributed a caricature of himself to a film that satirized some Trekkies' Kirk idolatry. He also mocked the cavalier, almost superhuman, persona of Captain Kirk in the films Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993).
In 1982, Shatner was once again the leading character of a high-profile television show when he was cast as a veteran Los Angeles police sergeant in T. J. Hooker. Running for five seasons and ninety-one episodes until 1986, the series partnered Shatner with Heather Locklear and James Darren, later to be a recurring cast member of the third live-action Star Trek show, Deep Space Nine. The success of T. J. Hooker led to Shatner's hosting the popular dramatic re-enactment series Rescue 911 from 1989 to 1996. His career diversified further in the 1980s when he began working as a director, taking charge of many episodes of T. J. Hooker. A clause in his Star Trek contract giving him parity with Leonard Nimoy meant that after Nimoy's directing of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Shatner was entitled to direct a Star Trek movie too: he exercised his right in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, although many Trekkies were disappointed by the film that he delivered, something that he attributed principally to the weakness of the movie's visual effects. His growing success on television and in movie theatres in the 1980s did not lead him to stop working for advertisers. The VIC-20 home computer, for example, was endorsed by him both on television and in print.
Education
William Shatner attended McGill University in Montreal, where he studied economics. He later moved to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, to pursue a career in acting.
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. Shatner was a camp counselor at a B'nai B'rith camp in the Laurentians. Over 6 weeks, Shatner helped teenage Holocaust survivor Fred Bild learn English.
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.
