Iconic actor William Shatner is celebrating an equally iconic milestone birthday.
Shatner, whose career has spanned more than six decades, turns 95 on Sunday. He first rose to fame in the 1960s as Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek, a role that would become one of the most recognizable in television history and help define science fiction for generations.
“I thought of Kirk as being so courageous in life that when he faced things that he didn’t know about, like the strange, the weird… the entities that the writers thought up, when he faced death, he would face death with a sense of adventure. ‘Oh, what’s going to happen now?'” Shatner told ScreenRant in 2024.
While Star Trek made him a household name, Shatner continued to build a long and varied career across television and film. Decades after his initial rise to fame, he earned major critical acclaim for his work on the legal dramas The Practice and Boston Legal.
In 2004, Shatner won a Primetime Emmy Awards award for Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama Series for his role as the eccentric and sharp-witted Denny Crane on The Practice. The following year, he won another Emmy, this time for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for reprising his role in The Practice’s spinoff, Boston Legal. The back to back wins marked a major career milestone and introduced him to a new generation of viewers.
Beyond acting, Shatner has also worked as an author, director and producer, and has remained active well into his later years. In 2021, he even made headlines by traveling to space, becoming the oldest person to do so at the time.
And yet, Shatner never seems to look his age, nor does he show any signs of slowing down.
“I don’t have any secret potions,” he told The Guardian in 2021. “It must be genetic. I ride a lot of horses and I’m into the bewilderment of the world, so I open my heart and head into the curiosity of how things work.”
As William Shatner turns 95, his enduring legacy, from pioneering science fiction television to award-winning performances, continues to captivate audiences around the world.
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