93 Years of Shatner

William Shatner, who turns 93 today, will always be best remembered for playing Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series. Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry deserves a lot of credit for the enduring popularity and influence of the program, but it was Shatner who made the main character indelible. By the 1990s, a lot of people had begun to think of Shatner as a shameless ham—the TV actor who overplayed every role. Indeed, he was so good at playing Kirk that he was hired to do so as both a pitchman for the online travel agency Priceline and in TV shows such as The Practice and Boston Legal, in which, as a New York Times Magazine profile once noted, “William Shatner the man was playing William Shatner the character playing the character Denny Crane, who was playing the character William Shatner.”