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William Alan Shatner, OC, is a Canadian actor, author, director, producer, musician, and former astronaut. He is best known for his role as James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek television series, as well as the first seven spin-off feature films. He is also well-known for hosting the long-running CBS docudrama series Rescue 911. Additionally, he voiced General Shanker, the main antagonist of Escape from Planet Earth, Mayor Phlegmming in the 2001 Warner Bros. hybrid film Osmosis Jones, and Ozzie the opossum in the 2006 DreamWorks animated film Over the Hedge.

His Disney roles include voicing Kazar, the main antagonist of the Disney CGI film The Wild, as well as Jason of the Argonauts in the Hercules episode "Hercules and the Argonauts". He also made a cameo in Episode 109 of Muppets Tonight and was a singer for the song "To Infinity and Beyond" in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Shatner was born in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighborhood of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to a Conservative Jewish household. His parents were Ann (née Garmaise) and Joseph Shatner, a clothing manufacturer. He is the middle (and only son) of three children; his older sister was Joy Rutenberg (19282023) and his younger sister is Farla Cohen. His patrilineal family name was Schattner; it was his grandfather, Wolf Schattner, who anglicized the spelling. All four of Shatner's grandparents were Jewish immigrants; they came from settlements in Ukraine and Lithuania, which were then under the rule of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire.

Shatner attended two schools in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Willingdon Elementary School and West Hill High School, and is an alumnus of the Montreal Children's Theatre. He studied economics at the McGill University Faculty of Management in Montreal, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1952. In 2011, McGill University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Letters. He was granted the same accolade by the New England Institute of Technology in May 2018.

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  • In 2021, Shatner flew to outer space aboard a Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule. At age 90, he became the oldest person to fly into space and one of the first 600 to do so. Minutes after the flight, Shatner articulated his instance experiencing the overview effect.[1]

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