How Old Is William Shatner? Age, Wife & Kids

The Short Answer: 95 Years Old

William Shatner is 95 years old. Born in Montreal, Canada, he became one of television’s defining leading men as Captain Kirk — the swaggering, Shakespearean starship captain of the original Star Trek series — and then refused to be defined by the role, building a second, third, and fourth act across six decades.

His longevity is the story: Emmy-winning dramatic turns in middle age, a self-aware comedy persona, bestselling memoirs, competitive horse breeding — and then, at an age when most people have long retired, a rocket ride that made him the oldest human ever to leave the planet. At 95, he remains a working performer and a living link to television’s golden age.

Captain Kirk: The Role That Defined Him

Shatner’s portrayal of James Tiberius Kirk — captain of the starship Enterprise — ran from the original series through seven feature films, ending with Star Trek Generations. His Kirk was theatrical where modern heroes are brooding: a captain who quoted poetry, seduced aliens, and chewed scenery with total commitment.

The role typecast him for years, and Shatner has been candid about the lean times — doing commercials, sleeping in his truck between gigs. But he outlasted the typecasting through sheer work ethic and a willingness to laugh at himself, eventually embracing Kirk as a beloved alter ego rather than a burden. Few actors have ever been so completely identified with a single character — and so completely at peace with it.

His relationship with the Star Trek fandom is its own saga — from the early years of keeping fans at arm’s length to becoming convention culture’s most beloved elder statesman. He’s headlined countless conventions, and his panels — half storytelling, half stand-up — are legendary.

Four Marriages

Shatner has been married four times. His first wife was Gloria Rand, to whom he was married during the early Star Trek years; they had three daughters together before divorcing. His second marriage was to actress Marcy Lafferty, his third to Nerine Kidd — whose tragic drowning death devastated him and which he has written about movingly — and his fourth to Elizabeth Martin, a horse trainer who shared his equestrian passion. That marriage also ended in divorce.

Shatner’s memoirs treat his marriages with unusual frankness for a celebrity autobiography — acknowledging his own failings as a husband during the years when career came first, and expressing enduring affection for the women who shared his life.

Three Daughters

Shatner’s three daughters — Leslie, Lisabeth, and Melanie — were born during his marriage to Gloria Rand. All three have largely stayed out of show business, living private lives away from their father’s fame, though they appear with him at family events and in his documentaries.

He is also a grandfather several times over, and his social media occasionally features the warm, goofy grandpa side that contrasts with the Captain Kirk persona. For a man whose public image was built on swagger, his private pride is clearly his family — the daughters who grew up while he was beaming across the galaxy.

To Space at 90: The Oldest Human in Orbit

In one of the great third-act twists in entertainment history, Shatner flew to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket at age 90 — becoming the oldest person ever to travel to space. The flight, a short suborbital hop past the edge of the atmosphere, fulfilled a dream that Captain Kirk had only pretended to live.

What he said afterward surprised everyone: instead of triumph, he described an overwhelming sense of grief — seeing Earth’s fragility from above moved him to tears. The moment, broadcast worldwide, reframed him from pop-culture punchline to something like a philosopher — a 90-year-old man weeping at the beauty and vulnerability of the planet. It may be the most memorable thing he’s ever done, Kirk included.

He later described the experience as the most profound of his life — “I saw death,” he said of looking into the blackness of space, contrasting it with the vibrant blue of Earth. The fragility of the planet moved him in ways he hadn’t expected, and he’s spoken about it ever since with evangelical urgency.

The Reinventions: Denny Crane and Beyond

Long before the rocket, Shatner engineered one of TV’s great comebacks as Denny Crane on Boston Legal — an eccentric, aging lawyer whose catchphrase (“Denny Crane!”) became a cultural tic and won Shatner an Emmy Award. The role weaponized his age and persona instead of hiding them, and it introduced him to a generation that’d never seen Star Trek.

Around the same persona he built a parallel career as a spoken-word performer (his dramatic readings of pop songs are legendary), a bestselling memoirist, a documentarian, and a serious competitive horseman — he breeds and shows American Saddlebreds at a championship level. At 95, the throughline of his life is refusal: refusal to retire, to be embarrassed, to stop.

The Spoken-Word Albums

Shatner’s spoken-word albums are a genre unto themselves — dramatic, eccentric readings of pop songs that began as a curiosity and became a beloved cult institution. His interpretations — pausing, bellowing, whispering through lyrics — are performed with total Shakespearean commitment, which is exactly why they work.

What started as a punchline became a genuine artistic statement: Shatner treats a Beatles lyric like King Lear, and the audacity is the art. Collaborations with serious musicians followed, and the albums found an audience that appreciated the high-wire act — is he in on the joke? (He is. That’s the joke. That’s also not the joke.)

At 95, the spoken-word career stands as proof of his core philosophy: commit completely, and the audience will follow — even if they’re laughing.

Author and Documentarian

Shatner has written dozens of books — memoirs, Star Trek novels, and reflections on aging — making him one of the most prolific celebrity authors alive. His memoirs are unusually candid: funny, self-lacerating, and frank about marriages, failures, and the weirdness of fame.

As a documentarian, he’s turned the camera on his own obsessions — Star Trek fandom, his fellow captains, the mysteries of the universe. His interview style is pure Shatner: interruptive, curious, and disarmingly personal. He’s as interested in the person across from him as in the subject, which makes his documentaries feel like conversations.

The throughline is curiosity — at 95, he still wants to know how everything works, including himself.

The Horseman

Few fans know that Shatner is a championship-level horseman — a breeder and competitor in American Saddlebred shows, a pursuit he’s taken as seriously as acting for decades. His fourth wife shared the passion, and his farm has produced champion horses.

He’s spoken about horses as his sanctuary: the one place where Captain Kirk doesn’t exist, where the work is physical and honest and the applause comes from judges, not crowds. The discipline of training — early mornings, endless patience — mirrors the work ethic that carried his acting career.

It’s the least Hollywood thing about him, which may be why he loves it most.

The Space Flight: Captain Kirk Goes Up

Shatner’s Blue Origin flight — the nonagenarian, the weightlessness, the tears on landing — was the perfect final frontier for Captain Kirk: the actor who’d pretended to explore space for decades, finally actually going. At an age when most people avoid stairs, Shatner rode a rocket.

The reaction — the overwhelmed emotion, the “overview effect” soliloquy — was pure Shatner: the performer processing the profound in real time, on camera, unfiltered. The clip — the old captain, weeping at the beauty of it — became instant legend: art and life, colliding at the Kármán line.

It was also the capstone: six decades after the Enterprise, the man who’d inspired generations of astronauts finally joined them — briefly, gloriously. The oldest person in space, playing the role he’d rehearsed his whole life. Beam him up, indeed — he finally went himself.

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