On This Day

Birthday of William Shatner

March 22nd 1931

12:34 22 March 2024

Canadian actor, filmmaker and musician William Shatner was born on this day in 1931. Shatner made his film debut with a small role in the Canadian movie ‘The Butler’s Night Off’ (1951) where he was billed simply as ‘A Crook’. His breakthrough came when he landed one of the leading roles in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ (1958). Further significant roles followed in ‘Judgement at Nuremberg’ (1961) and ‘The Intruder’ (1962) before he boarded the USS Enterprise in 1966 for the first time to play his most famous role as Captain James T. Kirk in the TV series ‘Star Trek’. The show was cancelled after 3 seasons and Shatner spent the rest of the decade and the 1970s making guest appearances on TV shows such as ‘Ironside', 'Petrocelli', 'Police Woman' and ‘Hawaii Five-O’ and starring in mostly low-budget B-movies including ‘The Devil’s Rain (1975) and ‘Kingdom of the Spiders’ (1977).

A major career resurgence came with ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ (1979), the first of a series of big-budget ‘Star Trek’ films, one of which Shatner also directed: ‘Star Trek V: The Final Frontier’ (1989). The actor has also surprised filmgoers with his comedic talents in the films ‘Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), ‘Loaded Weapon 1’ (1993}, ‘Miss Congeniality’ (2000) and 'Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous' (2005).

In 2021 life imitated art when William Shatner boldly went where few have gone before and flew into space aboard a Blue Origin rocket and in doing so became the oldest human to travel in space at the age of 90. Happy Birthday Bill.