All the world knows that William Shatner is a man of many parts - some of them ridiculous - as the 71-year-old actor-writer-director would be all too happy to prove, if asked.
The leading part, only slightly ridiculous, is James Tiberius Kirk, variously ranked as a captain, admiral and civilian, in retirement. Though two new generations have supplanted Kirk and his crew, with the head of the third set of space adventurers seen briefly these days on the big screen in Star Trek Nemesis, Shatner's Kirk and the never-ending voyage are inseparably linked.
When the time came to make a feature-length parody of the Star Trek phenomenon, the highly amusing 1999 Galaxy Quest centered on Tim Allen as Jason Nesmith/Cmdr. Peter Quincey Taggart, the egomaniacal star of the long-canceled show and of its appearances at science-fiction conventions and ribbon-cuttings. There could be no doubt that Taggart was Kirk, or that Nesmith was Shatner.
Yet one Galaxy element was a bit misleading. Alan Rickman's Sir Alexander Dane/Dr. Lazarus, the Spock figure, was drawn as a long-suffering Shakespearean, trapped forever in a rubber suit. ("I played Richard III," he keens.)
Leonard Nimoy, who came to be known as the cerebral member of the Trek ensemble, came to his pointy-eared Vulcan with no notable classical credits. Shatner, on the other hand, made his Broadway debut in 1956 in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, directed by the legendary Tyrone Guthrie and produced in association with this hemisphere's most outstanding classical company, the Stratford Festival of Canada.
Born in Montreal, Shatner graduated from the city's prestigious McGill University with a bachelor's degree in commerce but wrote and directed a musical as an undergraduate. He joined the Stratford Festival in 1953. Understudying Christopher Plummer in Henry V, he went on when the leading man was suddenly hospitalized. One observer reported: "His performance, full of abrupt stops and inappropriate pauses when he could not remember the dialogue, was acclaimed by critics as remarkably intuitive and full of passion. Always quick to respond to positive feedback from his audience, Shatner began to incorporate these techniques into subsequent performances."
Perhaps it was this discovery that shaped his playing of Kirk. His vocal delivery, brusque, sometimes blustering, clipped and sometimes choppy, full of dramatic pauses, became known as "Shatnerian."
Two years after he acted at Broadway's Winter Garden Theatre with Anthony Quayle and Colleen Dewhurst in the bombastic Marlowe epic, which lasted 20 performances, Shatner took on a lead in a more commercial play, Paul Osborn's adaptation in The World of Suzie Wong, starring France Nuyen. That David Merrick production ran for 508 performances. And, in 1961, having made his movie debut, Shatner returned to Broadway one final time, in A Shot in the Dark, starring Julie Harris and featuring Walter Matthau. During the '50s, he was also active in the so-called Golden Age of live television.
The first major movie role (he had previously played a priest in Oedipus Rex) was Alexi (Alyosha in Dostoevsky), the saintly youngest sibling in The Brothers Karamazov. Lee J. Cobb was the father, and Yul Brynner and Richard Baseheart were the older brothers. Working alongside such big names did not lead to other major roles, though he did have a supporting part in the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremburg and a major role in 1964's The Outrage, a reworking of Kurosawa's Rashomon, starring Paul Newman. Roger Corman's The Intruder (1961) gave Shatner a dynamic, challenging role as a Southern racist agitator, but the picture flopped.
Then, in 1966, the historic moment arrived, as Shatner was cast in Gene Roddenberry's modestly budgeted Star Trek. Three years later, it was all over, and, as he neared 40, Shatner's star seemed to burn out. After the series was canceled, his first wife, Gloria Rand, left him and reportedly took him to the cleaners. Low on money, with few acting prospects, he lived in a truck bed camper for a time.
In the late '60s, before the fall, Shatner achieved another kind of immortality by recording "The Transformed Man." His dramatic reading of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" is considered a camp classic.
But the '70s were rough, with pictures like Big Bad Mama (1974), The Devil's Rain (1975) and Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). In 1975, he starred in another series, Barbary Coast. But it was not until he and his cohorts rejoined for a big-screen spectacular, the 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture - jump-started after the enormous success of Star Wars - that Shatner again shot into space as a star.
He went on to make six more chapters in the hugely popular series and directed the 1989 Star Trek: The Final Frontier. Between his gigs as Kirk, he also landed in a successful TV series, T.J. Hooker, in a cop's part he parodied in the 2002 Showtime, an unsuccessful pairing of Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy as reality TV detectives. He had previously spoofed himself in both Airplane II: The Sequel and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon.
Making fun of himself has become one of his chief diversions, in such films as Miss Congeniality, in which he lent a smarmy style to a beauty pageant host. But since his comeback as Kirk, Shatner has kept himself incredibly busy, writing Star Trek novels as well as the TekWar science fiction tales, which became a television series in 1994.
The rise after his fall has not been entirely happy. On Aug. 9, 1999, his third wife, Nerine, died in a swimming pool at their home in Studio City. He has since married Elizabeth Anderson Martin.
In recent years, Shatner has found a new career and made millions as a pitchman for Priceline.com. And his "Shatner Inc." oversees films, television shows, special-effects productions, Internet enterprises, book publishing and horse breeding.
Malcolm Johnson is a film critic for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.