04/23/2025
Expectation vs reality 🙂
Happy STAR TREK Birthday to the one and only William Shatner born 22 March 1931.
William Shatner, OC (born 22 March 1931; age 93), an Emmy Award-winning Canadian actor, became most famous for portraying Captain James T. Kirk of the starship USS Enterprise in all 79 aired episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, 21 of the 22 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and the first seven Star Trek films. He also directed and co-wrote the story for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. His image also appeared in Star Trek Beyond, in a photograph that was among Spock's possessions bequeathed to his alternate reality counterpart.
In addition, Shatner appeared indirectly (through archive footage) in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" and his archive voice-over was used in the Star Trek: Enterprise fourth season episode "These Are the Voyages...". He has also voiced the role of Kirk in a number of video games and he is the credited author for a series of Star Trek novels involving Kirk, the first of which was The Ashes of Eden. (His primary "ghost" writers are Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens.)
Outside of the Star Trek franchise, Shatner is well-known for his roles on several other television shows, including Bob Wilson in the "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" episode of The Twilight Zone, the title character on the 1980s police drama series T.J. Ho**er, and his Emmy Award-winning portrayal of famed attorney Denny Crane on the ABC drama The Practice and its spin-off, Boston Legal. He is also remembered for hosting the informational program Rescue 911 from 1989 through 1996 and is currently recognized as the official spokesperson for Priceline.com, having appeared in advertisements for the company since 1998. Prior to his work on Star Trek, he starred in Incubus, one of a handful of movies to be filmed entirely in the constructed language known as Esperanto.
In 2021, Shatner was a passenger on private spacecraft company Blue Origin's second Human spaceflight, NS-18, becoming the oldest Human ever to fly into space. This makes him one of a select few Star Trek performers to have actually been to space, along with Mae Jemison, E. Michael Fincke, and Terry Virts, although unlike them, he was a space tourist rather than an astronaut.