“He never spoke to me again”: The Hollywood icon William Shatner accidentally offended
You would think that almost everyone would enjoy a well-meaning compliment now and then, something to boost the ego a little, put a smile on your face, perhaps.
Well, get that thought out of your head right this instant, because actually it can apparently cause ‘cognitive dissonance’ if the person you’re complimenting has low self-esteem, or, as William Shatner once discovered, you’ve just managed to accidentally insult a Hollywood legend.
To be fair to Shatner, he is not only now a Hollywood legend himself, but he is also well into his 90s while still acting like he’s about half that age, doing things like shattering his shoulder falling off horses and releasing heavy metal albums. Plus, the incident we shall investigate occurred some 65 years ago, when he was just a slip of a lad at 29 years young, and you don’t know any better at that age.
Shatner, who was still some years away from interplanetary teleportation as Captain James T Kirk, and even more years away from doing bizarre jazz interpretations of Elton John songs while chain smoking, was signed up to do the three-hour 1961 epic Nazi justice courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg, a movie that was so stuffed full of big screen talent that they could legitimately have marketed it as superstar soup.
Just take a look at the cast: Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Spencer Tracy, and it was that last legend of the silver screen that Shatner would fall foul of after a moment of getting starstruck while on set. He recalled to Entertainment Weekly, “One day, he did a speech, and he knew it completely. And I was amazed that a movie actor would not do multiple takes or have it written out for him”.
This seemingly innocent exclamation of praise did not go down well at all with Tracy, who, to be fair to him, had some 40 years of theatre experience behind him, having made a Broadway debut as far back as 1923. Shatner added, “So I did approach him. I said, ‘Mr Tracy, I just want to express my admiration that you learned lines!’… He looked at me, and he said, ‘I was on the stage before you were born, son’. And he left. He never spoke to me again.”
Directed by Stanley Kramer, one of Steven Spielberg’s favourite directors, Judgment at Nuremberg tells the story of four Nazi judges accused in court of crimes against humanity, the film examining issues including how individually responsible German people were for their actions during Hitler’s regime, the Second World War and the Holocaust.
A critical and commercial success, the film was nominated for 11 Oscars, including one for Tracy as ‘Best Actor’, and won three. It has since been recognised as one of the finest courtroom dramas ever made, and was a late career highlight for Garland, coming some 22 years after The Wizard of Oz. Shatner was concerned about the actress’s wellbeing having previously seen her drunk on stage in New York while filming, but said, despite her fragility, she was an enormous talent.
Meanwhile, Shatner, who worshipped Tracy, was left disappointed by his hero, whom he described as ‘aloof’. Tracy played the Chief Judge in the movie, while the former portrayed a young officer designated as his assistant. Regardless, he loved his time filming the movie, describing it as a ‘beautiful’ experience.
