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The title of “Hardest Working Man in Show Business” may be taken, but it is the opinion of this magazine (with much respect to the Godfather of Soul), that it suits William Shatner just as well. Best known for his role as Captain James T. Kirk, the Klingon-battling, space vixen-seducing captain of the starship Enterprise, Shatner has spent more than 50 years as an actor in countless films, series and stage plays. For most of that time he has worked constantly, saying yes to everything, going twenty years without taking a vacation. Three kids, four marriages, and countless Star Trek conventions later, Shatner is 77 years old, and still at it. See him as Denny Crane on Boston Legal, or singing the praises of fiber on the box of your favourite cereal. William Shatner has been a lot of places and done a lot of things, and had a pretty good sense of humour throughout. The details of his remarkable life, from his humble beginnings in Montreal, to Hollywood stardom, from rags to riches to rags again and back, are recorded in a new autobiography, Up Till Now (Thomas Dunn Books, $29). “The Shat” was kind enough to answer some of our questions about life, love, and fame.
You’ve dabbled in a lot of things in your life, and been recognized for your acting, singing, horse-racing, piloting, and so forth. Is there anything that you do that you haven’t been publicly recognized for?
My culinary skills are not lauded, I’ll give you that. I grill a mean steak, and nobody knows about that. I used to be an archer, a swimmer, I love SCUBA diving, I have some scripts that need production. How am I doing?
That’s a pretty impressive list. Is there anything else that you are yearning to accomplish?
Wouldn’t it be an awful answer if I said, No, I’ve done it all? That I’m closing up shop and I’m gonna die? Of course, even though I’ve been around a long time and I still have the same hungers, the same desires that I had when I was 20. Nothing is accomplished until it’s all accomplished, I guess.
When you were starting out in New York, you were coming up with a lot of guys who went on to become Hollywood leading men, like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman and Lee Marvin. Why do you think your careers took such different paths?
Well, you know, in a way it hasn’t. Steve McQueen went on to do a series, the series was successful, and as a result he went into movies. He was a singular character, he was his own man even when I knew him. And I think that uniqueness brought him to the fore in movies, which cherishes that, as opposed to television which takes a more mundane view of the leading man.
In your book you make note of the fact that some of your other castmates on Star Trek actually didn’t like you very much. Why was that?
Some. Three. And they were writing books at the time. My suspicion is that a lot of that was due to the fact that they could get some mileage out of it. I didn’t know why they thought ill of me, and I don’t know to this day. It must have been something that I did inadvertently, or it could have been that I had ten pages of lines to learn and I may have seemed in another place, but then I was. I was playing the lead in a series and they were coming in every so often to play small scenes. That’s the nature of a television series.
I think people will be surprised to know that once Star Trek ended, you were pretty much broke, living out of a popup trailer in theatre parking lots with your dog? How was that?
It felt like the end of the road. It felt like after achieving some success, which was the hoped-for result, I still couldn’t make way. I still was anxiety-ridden about providing for my kids and stuff. So on many levels it felt like failure.
In the book you discuss your early days as a starving actor on the streets of Toronto, when the only friends you had were hookers. How did that come about?
Well I was alone in Toronto, and I’d come from Montreal. In those days Toronto had the blue laws, where restaurants, movie theatres, nothing was open. Select few. And I knew no one in the first months in Toronto, it was very much a closed group of people, so I wandered around the city alone, and I didn’t have any money. There was a hotel restaurant on Sherbourne, I believe it was called the Sherbourne Hotel, and they had an all you can eat meal for a couple of bucks. So that was my meal of the day. I would go there at 5:30 and eat breakfast, lunch and dinner all at the same time, while other working class families came there on their night out. So I sat, surrounded by family life and ate my meal, and at eight o’clock the restaurant closed and across the lobby was a bar, and the bar opened at that hour. And that was a whole different character, the girls of the night came and the guys who wanted to meet them.
Since I had no place else to go, I would just sit at a table and I gradually got to know some of the prostitutes that were doing business there. And I remember, sort of with amazement, learning that they were using the hotel as a place to turn their tricks. So they’d get up form the table and disappear for a while and come back and continue the conversation, and that was my life for six months or so.
You’ve been a working actor for a long time, doing hundreds of episodes on dozens of TV series throughout your career. At what point did you realize you’d made it?
Well, one of the songs on Has Been is entitled “It hasn’t happened yet.” I’m not unconscious of the fact that I’ve had some success, but the internal feeling of whatever the feeling of success is, I haven’t had. I don’t know what that self-satisfaction is, but whatever it is, I don’t feel it.
What’s next for The Shat?
Well, I’ve got 13 episodes of Boston Legal to film, which will take me to November, I’ve got a wonderful dramatic script called Shiva Club, which I’m looking for financing for, and a couple of times I thought I had it, to go in January or February. I’ve got this talk show, Raw Nerve, on A&E which seems to be going well. I’ve got some comic book ideas that I’m signing with a comic book company, and then there’s animation that I’m interested in. I’m working with C.O.R.E. which is located in Toronto, in which I’m a partner. C.O.R.E. may be the best animation house in Canada, and I’m part of the four partners who started it 15 years ago. So I’m hopeful that I’ll be working with C.O.R.E. on some animated stuff. My book is out, and is doing sufficiently well that they’re talking to me about doing another one. There’s a lot of stuff going on.
