Up Till Now: The Autobiography

everybody, I’m William Shatner’s mother.” In department stores, in every restaurant, “I’m William Shatner’s mother.” On occasion I’d get on an airplane and the stewardess would tell me she’d had my mother on a flight. I didn’t need to ask how she knew it was my mother. I would tell my mother over and over, please don’t do that. It’s embarrassing. I hate it. Don’t do it. And she would look at me sadly and say, “Okay, I won’t do it.” And then she would turn around, “Hi, I’m William Shatner’s mother.”
    My father used to remind me with tremendous emphasis, “She’s still your mother.” Meaning no matter what she’s done, how much you don’t understand her, you will treat her with respect. She’s still your mother.
    She was an elocution teacher. She was not, as she often corrected my father, an execution teacher, she was an elocution teacher. I want you to do something for me please, try to pronounce these words aloud as you read them: ten tin men, ten tin men. The difference between “ten” and “tin” is elocution. My mother was probably a frustrated actress; there really was no place for a middle-aged Jewish mother of three to perform in Montreal, so she would act out monologues at home. When I was seven or eight years old she enrolled me in the Dorothy Davis School for Actors, which was run by Miss Dorothy Davis and Miss Violet Walters in the basement of someone’s home. It was in that basement that I learned the skills necessary to succeed in the difficult thespian world—specifically, get up on stage, say my words, get off the stage—skills that eventually allowed me to play such memorable roles as Prince Charming and Tom Sawyer at a theater in the local park. I am proud to say I am the most famous graduate of the Dorothy Davis School for Actors.
    I don’t remember being taught how to act, we just acted. And the school charged admission to watch us act. Actually, I don’t believe acting can be taught, but what you can learn is the discipline of learning your words, having to appear, and having to say them.
    I was a lonely kid. I’d walk to school by myself. In school, on Valentine’s Day, I would send myself valentines. Those would be the only ones I would receive. One year I got six valentines from myself! Truthfully, I don’t know why I didn’t have many close friends. It might have had something to do with the neighborhood in which we lived. While all my relatives lived in the Jewish section of Montreal, my family lived in a comfortable house on Girouard Street, in the more affluent, mostly Catholic area NDG, Notre Dame de Grace.
    There was always trouble between the Jewish kids and the Catholic kids, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. When I had to go to Hebrew school I’d walk on the opposite side of the street, actively pretending I didn’t even realize the synagogue was there—until I got in front of it. Then I’d look both ways and run for the door. I actually planned my strategy for getting there safely. Not that I minded a fight, I wasn’t a big kid but I never backed down from anybody. We had fights almost every day. My nickname was “Toughie,” as in, Hey, watch out everybody, here comes Toughie Shatner! Actually, you might not want to mention that to little Lenny Nimoy, another Jewish kid growing up at exactly the same time in Boston. I’d hear stories about Jewish soldiers who had come back from the war; one or two men taking on a whole gang of anti-Semites and beating them into submission with an ax handle.
    I played football and skied in high school and I loved both sports, but it was acting that made me feel complete. Acting made me special, and I was good at it. I never had difficulty pretending to be someone else. At camp, not only did I make the adults cry, I literally drove a camper crazy. I was working as a counselor with my friend Hilliard Jason—he required me to call him Hilliard. We ran a bunk filled with kids who had survived the Holocaust, kids who had seen their parents slaughtered, kids who just as easily could kill you with a pencil as become friends. I was able to control them because I was the camp storyteller. At night, in the dark, I would read Poe and Kafka with great elocution. One night I read “The Tell-tale Heart”— “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me”—and one child broke down in fear. He let free all of those emotions kept inside for so long and it was too much for