William Shatner and his current wife, Elizabeth, on 4/14/07, thanks to WENN
The day after MSat covered the new book planned by William Shatner’s brother in law, an article came out in the print edition of the New Zealand Herald where William talks about that day and the allegations that he didn’t attempt to rescue his wife. His former brother-in-law claims that William did not attempt to rescue his wife Nerine from a pool where she had drowned, because of his $25,000 toupee.

While William doesn’t directly address the claims, he talks a lot about the day his wife died, and what his life was like with her.

On her death and the aftermath:
‘Can you imagine what it was like?’ he asks, his face twisted in anguish. “After the OJ Simpson debacle, I suppose I should have known what was going to happen. The media was asking, ‘Did Shatner kill his wife?’”

“I remember diving into the pool,” he says. “I had enough breath for one deep dive. One of her arms was floating above her and I grabbed her by that arm and lifted her, pulling her towards the shallow end. I laid her by the pool. Her skin was blue. I remember every second. For someone to suspect I killed her? I gave my life to my wife because I loved her. I devoted myself to her until the day she died. And believe me, alcoholism had Nerine by the throat.”

“Sometimes I berate her for not having stopped drinking. Sometimes I tell her it’s okay, that I am thinking about her, that she is alive in my mind. But you never get over it.”

Nerine almost killed his daughter:
“She (Nerine) had picked her up from a spa in Palm Springs and, apparently, as she drove home, she would stop at gas stations, go into the ladies’ room and down a small bottle of whatever she was drinking. She was exiting the freeway and for no reason slammed on the brakes. If there had been a car behind her it would have slammed into her at freeway speed. What kind of insanity is that? To drive drunk with a young person in the car.”

On their wedding day and marriage:
“Our wedding day was beautiful. Nerine was sober and we went to bed that night ecstatic. I woke up the next morning at eight and she was drunk. Later, I found she had hidden bottles of vodka all over the house.”

“Nerine would ask, after a drunken, rowing evening ‘What’s wrong Bill? Why are you crying?’ She would have forgotten the whole episode.”

Shatner also makes a point of addressing a couple of rumors that have followed him for years:
“I wasn’t wearing a corset (while filming Star Trek). I had fallen off a horse and broken some ribs. I had to be strapped up and some kind soul told the tabloids I’d got so beefy that I needed a corset to get into Kirk’s costume.”

“And no, it isn’t a toupee” he says, tugging his hair.

New Zealand Herald print edition 14 June 2008

Whatever happened on the day of Nerine’s death, it is obvious that she was quite a handful – too much for one person – and that it was a horrible accident. Police later found that Nerine had valium and a blood alcohol reading of 0.28, as well as a broken neck from the pool impact. Thanks to KitKat for the link.

Some commenters have noted that everyone should learn what to do in an emergency, and courses are available to teach you first aid through your local branch of the Red Cross.

William Shatner with his current wife, Elizabeth Anderson Martin, at the Primetime Emmy Awards on 9/16/07
William Shatner’s new memoir, “Up Til Now,” gives some details about the accidental drowning death of his late wife, Nerine. However, a family member of Nerine’s is now issuing a tell-all book of his own about the Star Trek icon, saying that he was not a caring husband and was more concerned about himself than her- right up until the day she died.

According to The Globe, Boston Legal star William Shatner will not be happy to learn that his deceased wife Nerine’s brother is writing a tell-all book about his sister’s mysterious death in 1999, and he’s calling Shatner a liar. William Shatner’s wife Nerine was an alcoholic who was in and out of rehab, and her AA sponsor had warned Bill never to leave her alone. Shatner left her with a housekeeper one day and returned to find her on the bottom of their pool. He called 911 instead of diving in to pull her out. The brother claims that Shatner didn’t jump in the pool because he was wearing a new $25,000 toupee and didn’t want to ruin it! The former brother.-in-law insists “The normal reaction is to pull the person out of the pool and start CPR.” He’s got a point there.

[From Janet Charlton's Hollywood]

While numerous stories about the size of his ego have been circulating for decades, I think I’m going to have to side with Shartner on this one. It seems way out of line for this brother to be slamming his former brother-in-law over what was ruled an accident by police. I also don’t think it was Shatner’s responsibility to make sure that a grown woman was never left alone. If she was really in that bad of shape, she should have been in an in-patient rehab facility, not a mansion with a pool. It sounds to me like this brother is trying to make a buck off Shatner’s name while people still remember his wife’s death. Shatner has since remarried.

William Shatner wants us to know he’s not all ego. He’s just finished writing his autobiography, and was recently offended at being left out of the latest Star Trek movie, despite his character being dead. He knows that when he dies, it isn’t going to mean much.

“I’m not going to be remembered any more than anyone else. Maybe on the day there will be a little more fuss than, say, some guy in Poughkeepsie (New York). Fame and remembrance are so fleeting. None of us is remembered.

“Some of the great names I grew up with, five years after they were dead, no one remembered them.

“No matter what age you are, you are liable to die. But the older you get, the odds go up that it’s going to be very soon. It’s not going to be very long. But I’m having such a good time with the world that I live in, I don’t want to go anywhere.”

Contact Music

I actually think that William’s death will be quite a big deal. My husband is a Star Trek fan (wisely not revealed to me until after we married), and he was introduced to it by his father, and now they watch it together with my kids. Star Trek seems to be one of those shows that is going to survive across generations and genders. Who doesn’t like a bit of intergalactic travel and watching Captain Kirk mate with non-humans?

In case you think that William’s legacy is limited to Star Trek and Boston Legal, don’t forget his music career – my personal favorite being his rendition of Blur’s Pulp’s ‘Common People’, complete with lyric sheet in front of him, karaoke style. By the end of this rendition he’s positively purple in the face.

William Shatner and his wife, Elizabeth Anderson Martin, are shown at the Annual Alzheimer’s Benefit ‘A Night At Sardi’s’ on 3/5/08 thanks to WENN.

77 year-old former Star Trek star William Shatner has an autobiography out called Up Till Now that the publisher promises is “touching and very funny.” Among the anecdotes Shatner provides in his book is the fact that a lot of female Star Trek fans wanted to sleep with Captain Kirk, not him. He also hinted that those kind of situations didn’t do much for him in the performance department:

[William Shatner] insists he couldn’t enjoy flings with the series’ most devoted followers because he was so turned off by their bizarre bedroom behaviour.

In his new autobiography, Up Till Now, Shatner explains how women would pretend they were being “beamed up” by the Starship Enterprise commander, shrieking: “So, this is what it’s like to
be in bed with Captain Kirk!”

He writes: “You can’t imagine how much of a downer that is in every sense of the word.”

[From Contact Music via Fark]

Captain Kirk on the Star Trek TV series was hot. He was always wearing that tight yellow uniform shirt and seducing the 60s minx female aliens. I could see asking him to pretend he was Kirk in bed. You want to get with the guy with the piercing eyes who saves the day, not the actor who does bad cover versions of hit songs.

Among Shatner’s other relevations in his autobiography is the fact that the actress who played Lt Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, told him she hated him. Their interracial kiss on Star Trek in 1968 was a big deal at the time. Nichols jokingly told Shatner during his Comedy Central roast “Let’s make TV history again… and you can kiss my black ass!”

In a January, 2008 interview with Details Magazine, Shatner said that after Star Trek ended in the early 70s he was going through an expensive divorce and had to live out of his pickup truck. He also talked about the painful loss of his third wife, Nerine Kidd, who drowned in 1999.

Shatner has played lawyer Denny Crane on ABC show Boston Legal since 2004. He told Details that it was a “stupid oversight” that JJ Abrams didn’t give him a cameo in the latest film version of Star Trek although Leonard Nimoy has a part. His future plans include ideas for a talk show and animated films. He has been married to his fourth wife, Elizabeth Anderson Martin, since 2001.

William Shatner and his wife Elizabeth are shown below at the “Star Trek: The Tour” Press Conference and Preview on 1/17/08, thanks to PRPhotos. You can learn more about “Star Trek: The Tour” on their website.

William Shatner isn’t happy that he isn’t going to be featured in the next Star Trek Movie, even going so far as to question whether the movie could be a success without him.

“It wasn’t really hurt as much as it was a case of, ‘How can you not put one of the founding figures into a movie which is resurrection? I was there at the birth and I wanted to be there at the rebirth. I would love to have been, but I don’t think I can take it personally it’s when they’re telling the story, and they couldn’t include the character, well that’s too bad and doesn’t make good business sense. I’ve become even more popular than I was playing Captain Kirk. Am good Box Office and I get publicity like this, we’re talking about the movie, which is publicity for the movie. I could have done a good job for them but they’re going in a different direction and it will be a wonderful film.”

TrakWeb

It turns out there’s a reason that William wasn’t included in the film, when even Leonard Nemoy will be featured as an older Spock. Movie co-writer Roberto Orci says the reappearance of Captain Kirk is unlikely.

“There are two things,” Orci said in an interview in November. “One, from our point of view, we are still hoping to find a way. Secondly, one of the difficulties that was brought up and discussed with Shatner when we all met him and pitched him ideas is that Trek fans are sticklers for their canon. [And,] unfortunately, Shatner’s Capt. Kirk was killed in Star Trek VII [1994's Generations].”

SCI FI Wire

Actually, I can’t believe that this philistine is allowed to write this movie. Doesn’t he know that while Captain Kirk was killed in 1994’s Star Trek Generations movie, he was found alive and sucked 150 years into the future? If you can make that storyline is believable, surely you can manage to bring Kirk back again.

My suggestion - as someone who has never, ever watched any Star Trek - is that a Captain Kirk lookalike should be found in the future again, this time practising law with a Boston firm. He leaps into his filing cabinet and comes out dressed as Captain Kirk, and turns out to be his illegitimate child fathered during the mysterious time that he was missing in action. Then, William Shatner still gets to be in the movie, put in a plug for his television role, and the integrity of the Star Trek franchise is maintained. Sort of.

Note by Celebitchy: I have watched some Star Trek in my day thanks to my brother Mike. Captain Kirk was kind of a blow hard but he was also pretty hot I have to admit. He’s an old guy now, but he could make an appearance as some kind of descendant of Kirk if it takes place 150 years into the future. Vulcans can do this thing where they implant their essence into someone else, and a quick glance at Wikipedia reminds me that Spock died in The Wrath of Khan but was able to cheat death by implanting his soul into McCoy, after which his body was revived and his essence removed from McCoy and implanted back into to. If Captain Kirk is dead and it’s 150 years in the future it’s not likely he’s going to make an appearance in the new film. Vulcans have a life expectancy of 250 years so it’s possible that Spock is still around.