Net Worth of William Shatner

We discuss the net worth of William Shatner in this blog post. William Shatner is an entertainment personality who was born in Canada and has a net worth of $100 million, is an actor, author, producer, director, screenwriter, and singer, among other things. His performance as Captain James T. Kirk in the “Star Trek” franchise has brought him the lion’s share of his fame. Shatner has also played key roles in a number of other successful television shows, such as “Boston Legal,” “The Practice,” and “T.J. Hooker.”

Net Worth of William Shatner: Biography

On March 22, 1931, Shatner was born into a Conservative Jewish family in the Montreal, Quebec, Canada suburb of Notre-Dame-de-Grace. His parents were immigrants from Russia. Ann and Joseph Shatner, a manufacturer, were his parents. Ann was his mother, and Joseph was his father. He has a sister named Joy Rutenberg who is his older sister, and a sister named Farla Cohen who is his younger sister. He was the middle child of three children in the family. His paternal grandpa, Wolf Schattner, was the one who anglicized the family name from its original form, which was Schattner. They arrived from communities that are now located in Ukraine and Lithuania, but which were at the time governed by Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire respectively when Shatner’s grandparents were born. All four of William Shatner’s grandparents were Jewish immigrants.

Willingdon Elementary School and West Hill High School are both located in the city of Notre-Dame-de-Grace, where Shatner received his education. Shatner is also a graduate of the Montreal Children’s Theatre. In 1952, he received his Bachelor of Commerce degree from the McGill University Faculty of Management in Montreal, where he had completed his studies in economics and received his degree. An honorary degree of Doctor of Letters was bestowed upon him by McGill University in the year 2011. In May of 2018, he was also honored with the same distinction by the New England Institute of Technology.

Net Worth of William Shatner: Career

While he was still a student, Shatner launched his career in the film industry. In 1951, he appeared in a bit part in a comedy-drama produced in Canada called The Butler’s Night Off. The film’s credits list him as Bill Shatner, and they refer to the character he played as “a crook.” After graduating, he performed and managed at the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa and Mountain Playhouse in Montreal before joining the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. One of the parts he played at the Festival was Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the play in which he made his debut on Broadway in 1956. His fleeting presence in the opening scene of Tyrone Guthrie’s prominent production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex brought him to the attention of television viewers across the entirety of Canada. In Henry V, he played the minor role of the Duke of Gloucester while also understudying Christopher Plummer in the role of the king. When Plummer was forced to withdraw from a performance due to a kidney stone,

The net worth of William Shatner continues with his great decision to present a distinct interpretation of his role rather than imitating his senior’s impressed Plummer as a striking manifestation of initiative and potential. Shatner’s decision to present a more distinctive interpretation of his role rather than imitating his senior’s impressed Plummer (In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Plummer played a Klingon foe to Captain Kirk’s character in a later installment of the franchise.) He later recalled him as the most promising actor that his Festival has employed, and for awhile, he was seen as a potential peer of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford. Guthrie, too, rated the young William Shatner very highly. He later recalled him as the most promising actor that his Festival employed. According to Pat Jordan, who authored an in-depth profile of William Shatner for The New York Times, Shatner’s subsequent failure to achieve the acclaim accorded to his starrier contemporaries was attributed to his personal professional philosophy of “work equals work,” and as a result, he participated in many “forgettable” projects that probably did more harm than good to his career.

Jordan came to this conclusion after reading an interview with Shatner that was published in The New York Times. In Jordan’s opinion, before to his significant casting as James Kirk, he was only seen as an actor who usually “showed up on time, knew his lines, worked cheap, and always answered his phone.” This was before his casting as James Kirk, which would change his life forever.

With the year 1954, Shatner made the decision to uproot his life from Stratford and relocate to New York City in the hopes of establishing a career on Broadway. In little time at all, he was offered his first TV part in America, and he took it, playing Ranger Bob on The Howdy Doody Show for kids with a slew of puppets and a clown named Clarabelle whose whole exchanges with Shatner were conducted via the honk of a bicycle horn. Soon after, he was given the opportunity to make his first TV show appearance in the United States. Four years passed before he was cast in his first major Hollywood film.

He played Alexei, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, in the MGM production of The Brothers Karamazov, which also starred Yul Brynner. In December 1958, he appeared opposite Ralph Bellamy as a Roman tax collector in Bethlehem on the day of Jesus’ birth in a Hallmark Hall of Fame live television production entitled The Christmas Tree. The production was directed by Kirk Browning, and the cast list included Bernadette Peters, Jessica Tandy, Margaret Hamilton, Richard Thomas, Cyril Ritchard, and Carol Channing. The Christmas Tree was broadcast on Hallmark Hall of Fame. His fame on American television was elevated to a new level when he played the lead character in “The Glass Eye,” an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that aired during the third season (1957–58) of the show.

In the cancelled 1959 CBS television series Nero Wolfe, starring Shatner as Archie Goodwin and Kurt Kasznar as Nero Wolfe, Kurt Kasznar was played by Shatner.

In 1959, Shatner appeared on Broadway in the play The World of Suzie Wong, playing the part of Lomax, and earned positive reviews for his performance. While he was still performing in that show in March of that year, he also performed the role of detective Archie Goodwin in what would have been television’s first Nero Wolfe series, had it not been cancelled by CBS after shooting a pilot and a few episodes.

Shatner appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone: “Nick of Time” (1960) and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (1963). A portmanteau film based on The Twilight Zone was developed twenty years later, and the climax of the film was a recreation of the latter episode. After making two guest appearances as Wayne Gorham in NBC’s 1960 Western series Outlaws alongside Barton MacLane, he went on to reprise his role as Alfred Hitchcock’s protagonist in the episode “Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?” from the fifth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A Shot in the Dark was a play that he was a part of on Broadway in 1961, co-starring with Julie Harris, and it was directed by Harold Clurman. Gene Saks and Walter Matthau were also a part of the play, and Matthau was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance.

In addition to the film The Explosive Generation, William Shatner appeared in two episodes of the NBC television series Thriller titled “The Grim Reaper” and “The Hungry Glass” (1961). In the film The Intruder (1962), directed by Roger Corman, he played the main character, and in the film Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer, he played a key role, both of which garnered very positive reviews (1961). He made a guest actor appearance on an episode of the Channing television show that aired on ABC during the 1963–1964 season. In 1963, he made his debut in the Family Theater play titled “The Soldier,” and the following year, he gained credit for his work in other episodes of The Psalms series. In the same year, he had a guest starring role on the television show Route 66. His episode was titled “Build Your Houses with Their Backs to the Sea.”

In 1964, Shatner appeared as a guest star in the second episode of the second season of the science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits that aired on ABC. The episode was titled “Cold Hands, Warm Heart.” In the same year, he also made a guest appearance on an episode of the CBS drama The Reporter titled “He Stuck in His Thumb.” Additionally, in that same year, he co-starred in the Western feature picture The Outrage alongside Claire Bloom, Laurence Harvey, Newman, and Edward G. Robinson.

In 1964, Shatner was also cast in an episode of The Man from UNCLE, which also starred Leonard Nimoy, who would go on to become Shatner’s co-star in Star Trek. In the pilot episode of the projected television series Alexander the Great, which he starred in with Adam West as Cleander in 1964, he also played the title role of Alexander. The TV series was not taken up, and the pilot was not shown to the public until the year 1968, when it was repackaged as a television movie in order to cash in on the renown that West and Shatner had gained in the interval. Shatner had high hopes for the series, but West seemed unsurprised when it was canceled after the pilot episode. West later referred to the pilot episode as “one of the worst scripts I have ever read” and said that filming it was “one of the worst things I’ve ever done.” Shatner, on the other hand, predicted that the series would be a huge hit.

In the episode titled “I Am the Enemy,” which aired in 1965 on 12 O’Clock High, Shatner appeared as a guest star playing the role of Major Curt Brown. Ironically, it was only the cancellation of the show after its first season of 13 episodes that enabled him to walk onto the bridge of the Starship Enterprise the following year. In the same year, he had the lead role in a legal television drama called For the People where he starred as an assistant district attorney married to a woman played by Jessica Walter. Incubus (Esperanto: Inkubo), a gothic horror film released in 1966 and starring William Shatner, was the second feature-length movie ever created in which all of the dialogue was spoken in Esperanto.

In 1966, he also appeared as the character Fred Bateman in an episode of the television show Gunsmoke. In the episode “Time to Kill” from The Big Valley from 1966, he played the role of Brett Skyler, a former attorney who turned counterfeiter. Johnny Moon, a righteous half-Comanche gunslinger, and Notah, a murderous warlord, were the two roles that he played in the 1967 spaghetti western White Comanche, which was a relatively unknown production at the time. Both of these roles were played by the actor.

The role of Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk in the television series “Star Trek,” which aired from 1966 to 1969, was Shatner’s first major break in the entertainment industry. Even though it was just in the voice acting capacity, he reprised his role as Captain Kirk in the animated TV “Star Trek” series in the year 1973.

Following the conclusion of the Star Trek television series in the 1960s, reruns of the show were syndicated, which led to the rise of Captain Kirk as a major figure in popular culture. The actor William Shatner started making appearances at Star Trek events.

Shatner was cast as the lead part in the television series “T. J. Hooker,” which aired from 1982 till 1986. In the 1980s as well, he appeared in five different “Star Trek” films reprising his role as James T. Kirk. During this time, he also started his career as a film and television director. Shatner was the director of a number of episodes of the television show “T. J. Hooker” as well as the feature picture “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.”

In the year 2000, the film “Miss Congeniality” had Shatner in a supporting role. He reprised the character in the sequel “Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous,” which was released in 2004.

Shatner was also chosen to play the role of Denny Crane in the concluding season of the legal drama “The Practice,” which was written by David E. Kelley. In the television series “Boston Legal,” Shatner played the part of Crane, and he remained with the show until its cancellation in 2008.

Relationships

Shatner has gone through the process of marriage multiple times. His first marriage, which took place in August of 1956, was to the Canadian actress Gloria Rand. They gave birth to three daughters: Leslie in 1958, Lisabeth in 1960, and Melanie in 1964. (1964). During the time when he was working on the first “Star Trek” series, Shatner ended his relationship with Rand. In March of 1969, Rand got a divorce from him.

The union between William Shatner and Marcy Lafferty, which began in 1973 and lasted until 1996, was Shatner’s second.

His third wife was Nerine Kidd Shatner, and they had three children together. They tied the knot in 1997. He was 66 years old, while she was only 38. When Shatner arrived home late on the evening of August 9, 1999, he found the death of his wife Nerine at the bottom of their swimming pool. The coroner subsequently determined that she had died of unintentional drowning based on the findings of the autopsy, which revealed that she had alcohol and Valium in her system.

Elizabeth Anderson Martin and William Shatner tied the knot in the year 2001. In 2019, Shatner initiated divorce proceedings against Elizabeth.

The honorary degree called the “Doctor of Letters” was bestowed upon him by McGill University in June of 2011. Additionally, in May of 2018, Shatner was presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the New England Institute of Technology.

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