Profile/William Shatner: Beloved of nerds across the universe, William Shatner is back with an Emmy, a new album, ads for All-Bran, and rumours of a 'Star Trek' comeback, writes Shane Hegarty
It's as if William Shatner has been beamed back. One moment, nothing. The next, he's in your living room again. Last week he won an Emmy Award. This week he showed up in All-Bran ads, the insinuation being that if you're going to boldly go, then go regularly. Next week he releases a new album.
You may have heard his version of Pulp's Common People, delivered in his own recognisable style. "I want to sleep. With. Common people. Like you." There is even a rumour that he's about to return to Star Trek. Almost 40 years after Captain Kirk first saved the universe, he could be about to come to the rescue of Enterprise, the latest, struggling television series in the franchise. However, that idea appears to have stalled in a row. Money might be obsolete in Star Trek's future, but it matters now.
He's 73, so there'll be the old jokes about how returning to the bridge of the Enterprise will stretch his jumpsuit more than his acting. He trained as a classical Shakespearean actor, although it is Leonard Nimoy (Spock) who has most come to represent the tortured thesp forced to slum it. The 1999 movie, Galaxy Quest, got great mileage from that. In it, ageing stars of a sci-fi series are plucked from a convention and into a real space adventure.
Tim Allen played a character based on both Kirk and Shatner: stomach sucked in, ego puffed up as he signs yet more autographs for yet more deluded fans.
But perhaps the main surprise about Galaxy Quest was that it didn't feature Shatner in a walk-on role, because he has never been shy of sending himself up in spoof movies such as Airplane 2 and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon.
He wasn't always Kirk, of course. His first major role came in 1958 alongside Yul Brynner in The Brothers Karazamov and he later appeared in Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg. He appeared in a couple of Twilight Zone episodes, most notably the classic in which he is the only aeroplane passenger who sees that the wing is being torn apart by a gremlin. In 1965, he starred in a supernatural thriller, Incubus, which remains the only feature film made in Esperanto. It has been described as "unwatchable in any language".
He wasn't even the first captain of the Enterprise. There was an original pilot featuring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike. Shatner only beamed in for the second pilot, but led the Enterprise across the galaxy between 1966-69. With jaw jutted, eyebrow raised and a girl in every nebula, he created a television icon. He kept us up to warp speed on the plot via his Captain's. Log.
He was one half of the first interracial kiss on US television, when aliens forced him into a lip clinch with Lieutenant Uhuru at a time when it was more acceptable for him to kiss a green woman than a black one.
With it all came rumours of an ego that no photon torpedo could dent - rumours of him stealing Nimoy's best lines; the sight of him battling aliens when he seemed to have lost the battle with his waistline; reports that Scotty (James Doohan) stopped talking to him years ago. Yet, Nimoy says it's all rumour and the cast recently came together for one last time when Doohan announced recently that he has Alzheimer's disease.
WHEN STAR TREK was cancelled, Shatner found it difficult to get work. He blamed typecasting and was reduced to putting in party appearances for a little cash in between small theatre roles. But by 1979, the trekkies had come to the rescue of their heroes and Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the first of seven movies he would star in, until Kirk met his death plummeting from a cliff in Generations. It was an inglorious exit for a man who had beaten up one half of the galaxy and bedded the other half.
In the meantime, the 1980s had seen him burst out of one uniform and into another for the hugely popular series TJ Hooker. He played a sergeant teaching young recruits, giving long moral lectures to young hoodlums and keen on sliding over the bonnet of his cop car.
He also became a sc-fi novelist. He has co-written several Star Trek novels and several original books, with his TekWar series turned into a Canadian television series. Meanwhile, he showed little preciousness about what jobs he'd take.
These days, you'll find him doing celebrity paintball in the US. For $100, ordinary fans can shoot at or storm forts with Captain Kirk.
His reputation as an interstellar stud followed him to earth. He has been married four times, and had to cope with tragedy when his third wife, Nerine Kidd, drowned at their home in 1999. When not filming, he breeds prize horses on his 360-acre Kentucky ranch. You can see it yourself the next time Generations is on TV, because it doubled as the venue for the seminal Star Trek moment when Kirk and Captain Jean-Luc Picard first met.
AS FOR THE music career, it's hard to know just how seriously he takes it. He mixes grand pronouncements with self-mockery.
The critics are quite taken by the new album, Has Been, which includes original songs and cover versions and enlisted the help of Joe Jackson, Henry Rollins and novelist Nick Hornby. #
His first album, The Transformed Man (1969), is considered something of a camp classic. "Camp classic" being a euphemism for "terrible". His version of Mr Tambourine Man was once voted the worst recording of all time. It was some feat given that he was competing with himself.
When George Clooney chose Shatner's version of Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds as one of his desert island discs, he said that "if you listen to it, you will hollow out your own leg and make a canoe out of it to get off this island."
He continues to show up on both the big and small screens. He's in the current comedy Dodgeball and, having won an Emmy for his appearance in legal drama The Practice, he will feature in spin-off series Boston Legal. His All-Bran ads follow a similar campaign in the US, in which he promoted it as more than just a cereal ("Add to stir fry or chilli").
His face is on ketchup bottles in the US, alongside the quote: "Fixes burgers at warp speed." He is not, then, too proud to make a buck from Star Trek. For years, Shatner would fly into conventions and split once the cheque was signed.
But after Kirk's "death" in 1994's Generations, he began to stick around a little longer. He would go anonymously to conventions, hiding behind an alien mask and watching merchandise stalls sell fake autographs. He wrote a book, Get A Life, about the conventions and surfed Star Trek chatrooms. Of course, nobody believed that he was the William Shatner, and annoyed fans bombarded his computer with X-rated messages in retaliation.
Yet, he has also kept his distance, managing to have a foot in both worlds.
The title of Get A Life comes from a Saturday Night Live sketch in which he tells a trekkie to do just that. And at an appearance at the Montreal comedy festival Just For Laughs, he once set the record straight for those who take it all a little too seriously.
"I've never had green alien sex, though I'm sure it would be quite an evening . . . When I speak, I never, ever talk like every. Word. Is. Its. Own. Sentence . . . And yes, I've gone where no man has gone before, but I was in Mexico and her father gave me permission!"
Who is he? Famously poured into a uniform and battled evil as television icon TJ Hooker. Oh, and there was a spaceship, Captain Kirk thing too
Why is he the news? He's got an album out this week, more than 35 years after his first
Most appealing characteristic: He is increasingly happy to send himself up
Least appealing characteristic: Despite that, it's been said that he has an ego the size of Jupiter
Most likely to say: "I'm an artist, you Klingon bastards!"
Least likely to say: "Beam me up, Scotty" - Kirk never actually said it