Early Life and Education
Shatner was born on March 22, 1931, in the Côte Saint-Luc neighborhood of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the son of Anne (née Garmaise) and Joseph Shatner, a clothing manufacturer. He has two sisters, Joy and Farla. His paternal grandfather, Wolf Schattner, anglicized the family name to "Shatner". All of Shatner's grandparents were Jewish immigrants (from Austria, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine), and Shatner was raised in Conservative Judaism. He attended three schools in Montreal: Willingdon Elementary School in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG), Baron Byng High School, and West Hill High School in NDG, and is an alumnus of the Montreal Children's Theatre. Shatner also studied economics at McGill University in Montreal, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree. In June 2011, McGill awarded him an honourary doctorate of letters. The Students' Society of McGill University building on McTavish Street is popularly (though not officially) named "Shatner".
Shatner has said that he faced anti-semitism while growing up in Montreal.
Read more about this topic: William Shatner
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)