Very realistic eyebrows!

A reader has alerted us to some pictures found here in which so little of Shatner's hair seems real that we can only really appaud the great way he has styled his eyebrows! The grabs are from the 1973 TV movie Incident on a Dark Street and it does indeed appear that not only is the hair on his head of the fake variety, but also the mustache and possibly the sideburns too. Bill must have a high tolerance for itchiness!

And staying on the subject of facial hair, below we have a still from a December 2002 appearance on the UK TV show Richard & Judy in which Shats is wearing a beard - something quite rare indeed. In this case, we will assume that the goatee is real. But with Shats' proclivity for all things toup, one never knows!

As proof of this proclivity, there is a particularly ironic story in the Shatner-Kreski book Star Trek Movie Memories (buy here) relating to Shats' work on the 1994 film Star Trek: Generations. It is the kind of story that would be entirely innocuous were it not for the fact that Shatner is so secretive about own his toupee wearing:


"I was driving with my daughter on the Sunday evening before our Monday morning shooting, and she looked over at me and asked, 'Dad, where're your Kirk sideburns?' and immediately my gut turned over, as if I'd forgotten to do my homework. I clasped my hands to the sides of my head and I realized that in all the weeks that I'd been preparing to do this film, the script consulting, the wardrobe fittings, nobody had mentioned my sideburns. Everyone just assumed that I must know the routine by now, and that I would have the intelligence to grow them myself, which is overestimating any actor, I feel. It's a lesson I want everybody to learn about actors. Never trust us, not for a minute.

"The following morning, with my head hanging low in embarrassment, I walked into the makeup room and said to Brian McManus, our makeup man, 'What am I going to do? I forgot to grow my sideburns.' - at which point he sighed, rolled his eyes and said 'Sit down.' He then took out a mustache, cut in in half, pasted the pieces on either side of my head, and proceeded to create instant pointy sideburns. They were a little thick, a little bushy, a little different color at first (so don't be surprised if Kirk looks vaguely reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe throughout this film's opening scenes), but they passed. Luckily, because there were going to be almost eight weeks between the end of my scenes aboard the Enterprise B and the beginning of my scenes with Patrick Stewart, I was able to grow back my own organic sideburns."


Oh, irony, thy name is Shatner!