“I click on our video chat link 10 minutes ahead of time. But Shatner has arrived even earlier: there he is, as soon as my Zoom screen opens, poking away at his computer. “I like to get in early to ease my mind. But it’s OK, I can meditate afterwards,” he says.”…
" Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in Star Trek, and who himself had struggled with alcoholism. Nimoy and Shatner were the same age and both Jewish, and I ask if their shared Judaism played a part in their friendship. I am Jewish, too, I add, in case the question sounds weird.
“You don’t look Jewish,” says Shatner, but not even he can maintain a straight face when saying that obvious lie, and he collapses into giggles. “But yes – of course! Leonard was only four days younger than me, and Boston [where Nimoy was born] is a lot like Montreal [Shatner’s home town], these old cities with big buildings where the snow drifts through the streets. I think he had a much more Jewish upbringing than me; he learned to speak Yiddish and I did not. But the similarities between us were incredible.”
Shatner revealed in his 2016 book about Nimoy, Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship With a Remarkable Man, that the two men grew apart towards the end of Nimoy’s life, and he never understood why. Has he figured it out since?
“No, and he was my dearest friend. We talked about all kinds of things in the darkness of the limousine, about divorce and children. But something happened, I don’t know what, it was so bizarre. But his daughter told me not long ago: ‘He really loved you.’ And that moved me to tears,” he says.
I tell him that their fallout reminds me of what happened to Harold Ramis and Bill Murray, two long-term collaborators and friends whose friendship blew up after Groundhog Day. Ramis pleaded with Murray for them to reconcile, but it didn’t happen until Ramis was on his deathbed.
“Oh my God! I knew nothing about that! How can I find out more about the Ramis and Murray feud?” he asks.
You could Google “Ramis and Murray feud”, I say.
“Wow! I’ll look that up as soon as we’re done. Wow!” he says excitedly." https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/may/20/william-shatner-interview-love-loss-and-leonard-nimoy?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB