Back in February, our “guess my parent” card offered one clue: “Dad is a far out actor known for his commanding presence.” If you guessed the man who sat in the captain’s chair of the Starship Enterprise, you were right. William Shatner, who turned 95 on March 22, raised three daughters with his first wife, Gloria Rand, and all three are grown women now with families and stories of their own.
One of them stood beside him in public just this week. On Thursday, November 12, Shatner and his youngest daughter, Melanie, took the stage together at the End Well conference at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles to talk about the stage 4 cancers they fought side by side. What she said about the night she called her father is one of the sweetest things you will read about him. But first, meet the girls who grew up as Captain Kirk’s kids.
How Did Three Little Girls End Up on the ‘Star Trek’ Set?
Shatner married fellow Canadian actress Gloria Rand in 1956, and the marriage lasted until 1969. Leslie arrived on August 31, 1958, followed by Lisabeth on June 6, 1961, and Melanie on August 1, 1964. By the time Star Trek premiered in 1966, the family was living in Los Angeles and their father was working punishing hours on a show nobody yet knew would outlive the decade.
That schedule is why the set became a second playground. The 1966 episode “Miri,” about a planet where only children survived a plague, was cast largely with the sons and daughters of the cast and crew. Shatner’s girls were among them, though Trek fans still argue over exactly which of the sisters you can spot in the background. Melanie would come back years later as a grown-up, playing a yeoman in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in 1989, the film her father also directed.
Shatner has been honest that he wasn’t always home. “I must have been a hands-on dad because that’s what my children tell me,” he told The Guardian in 2014, as People and Hello! both later reported. Each of his daughters took that childhood somewhere different, and the oldest went about as far from show business as you can get.
Which Daughter Chose a Life Away From Hollywood?
Leslie Shatner, now 68, turned up as a child on her father’s show and then left acting alone. She trained as an occupational therapist, the kind of specialist who helps people relearn the everyday tasks most of us never think about, and according to People and Hello! she runs her own practice in Orange County, California.
She married Gordon Walker, and the couple raised two sons, Grant and Eric Walker. Grandfatherhood is a role he clearly treasures. “Being a grandparent is the greatest joy for me,” Shatner said in that same 2014 interview. Leslie has kept her family almost entirely out of the press, which may be the most un-Hollywood thing a Shatner could do. Her younger sister, on the other hand, ended up working right alongside their dad.
Lisabeth Turned Dad’s Toughest Shoot Into a Book
Lisabeth Shatner, now 65, dabbled in acting as a young woman, but writing and sculpture pulled at her harder. Her biggest project put her inside one of the most stressful stretches of her father’s career. When he stepped behind the camera to direct Star Trek V, Lisabeth followed the production from the early meetings through the last day of post-production. The result was the 1989 book Captain’s Log: William Shatner’s Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which carries both of their names on the cover.
That kind of all-in curiosity runs in the family. “I never say no to a new experience. I learned that from my dad,” she told the website Whoosh in 2002, a line both People and Hello! have since quoted. It is hard to argue with her, since this is the same father who rode a rocket into space at 90 and fronted a heavy metal band at 95.
Lisabeth married Andy Clement in 2005. Like Leslie, she has chosen a quiet life, and whether she has children of her own has never been made public. The youngest sister, though, is the one who has let the world in, and she has had a hard few years.
What Melanie Told the Crowd About the Night She Called Her Dad
Melanie Shatner, now 62, was the sister who gave acting the longest run. Besides her Star Trek work, she took small film roles in the 1990s and turned up on Knots Landing before stepping away. In 1999 she married actor Joel Gretsch, and they have two daughters, Kaya and Willow.
In 2022, Melanie found a lump that turned out to be HER2-positive breast cancer, and it had already spread to her lymph nodes. We first told you about her diagnosis, and the melanoma her father faced in 2023, back in July when the two revealed they had battled stage 4 cancer together. On Thursday she filled in the moment that still stays with her. “It was like 10 o’clock at night,” she said, “which for both of us is like 4 in the morning. I called him and I just started to cry and I said, ‘I’m so scared I’m going to die.'”
He didn’t wait to hear more. “I could hear the sheets rustle, and he got out of bed and he said, ‘I’m coming over,'” she recalled, according to Us Weekly. “I need my daddy to come and look under the bed for monsters, and tell me there aren’t any, and ‘you’re going to be fine.'” He arrived with what she called “one of those great dad bear hugs,” as Entertainment Weekly also reported, and told her, “This is going to be a blip in your life.”
The next year the roles flipped, when Shatner learned the lump on his cheek was melanoma. Both father and daughter were declared cancer-free in late 2024, and since July the two have co-hosted a weekly podcast, No Time But Now, talking with doctors and fellow survivors about living fully. Melanie told the End Well audience, EW reported, that the diagnosis turned out to be “the biggest blessing of my life.” Her father had something even bigger to share about the future.
Why the Whole Shatner Family Is Planning a Forest
Asked about the end of life, the man who once played a captain staring down his own mortality in The Wrath of Khan answered with a picture rather than a fear. “I have in my will that there will be a tree over my body,” he said at the conference. “The whole family is doing that.”
Think about what that means. Someday there may be a small grove somewhere in California, with Leslie and Lisabeth and Melanie each planted near the man who used to drive all night to get home to them. Melanie once said exactly that about him to Senior Voice Alaska, as Hello! reported: “He would do whatever it took to get home to see us, even if it meant driving all night.”
For now, there are no trees yet, only a 95-year-old who is still working, three daughters who still pick up when he calls, and at least four grandchildren who know their grandfather as the guy who shows up. “We lucked out,” Shatner told the crowd about the cancer he and Melanie survived together, according to Us Weekly. “It worked for us.”
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