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."
