Crossword Dictionary

WILLIAM SHATNER 

William Shatner, (born March 22, 1931, Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Canadian actor whose prolific output and self-deprecating sense of humour secured him a place in the North American pop culture pantheon. He was best known for playing Capt. James T. Kirk in the science fiction television series Star Trek (1966–69) and in several Star Trek films.

Shatner was raised in Montreal. His father was a menswear manufacturer, and his mother taught elocution. He exhibited an early interest in performance, enrolling at age eight in an acting school for children and later performing in radio productions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the Montreal Children’s Theatre. Despite his early success as a performer, he enrolled at McGill University and graduated in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in commerce.

Shatner’s first major film role came in 1958, when he played Alexi (also spelled Alexey) Karamazov opposite Yul Brynner in an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He then returned to Broadway for a two-year run in The World of Suzie Wong (1958–60), earning critical acclaim for his performance. He later played a U.S. Army captain in the film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), about the post-World War II Nürnberg trials.

Shatner’s other notable credits included the one-man show Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It, which ran on Broadway in 2012 and later toured the country. On October 13, 2021, Shatner became the oldest person in space, when at age 90 he took a suborbital spaceflight on the second flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft.