William Shatner has revealed he and his daughter faced stage four cancer together after they were both diagnosed around the same time. The Star Trek actor, 95, shared that in June 2023 he was diagnosed with stage four malignant melanoma which spread to his lungs and brain. The diagnosis came just as his daughter Melanie was in the final stretch of her treatment for stage four breast cancer after she received her diagnosis in 2022.
Health struggles revealed
Speaking to People, the pair shared details of their health struggles. For Shatner, concerns were raised after a lump grew on his cheek, which a doctor initially said was a blocked salivary gland and told him to “just massage it”. However after it continued to grow, a month later he was warned by a plastic surgeon friend he “better get it out” after realising it was a tumour. Shatner then underwent surgery, which was followed by two years of immunotherapy to target the cancer in his lungs and brain. As his daughter explained, Shatner did not let the treatment “stop his life”. “He kept working and moving forward,” she said.
Daughter's diagnosis
Meanwhile Melanie – whose mother was Canadian actress Gloria Rand, who died in 2017 – had discovered a lump on her breast in 2022 and initially thought it was a bug bite after having a clear mammogram five months earlier. Although the technician initially found nothing concerning, Melanie said “something pushed me back” and asked for it to be rechecked – with testing then confirming she had cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes in her chest. “I was devastated,” Shatner said of being told of his daughter’s diagnosis. After undergoing 18 months of multiple rounds of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy and 30 radiation therapy treatments, Melanie was about to finish treatment when her father was diagnosed with cancer too. She said: “I remember vividly thinking, ‘I don’t have the strength to take care of myself and lose my father at the same time’.”
Both now cancer free
However, Shatner remained positive, adding: “They said, ‘You got cancer. If you came in later, you would have been dead’. See? That’s my life. I think the universe is taking care of me.” The father and daughter are now both cancer free, with Melanie saying overcoming cancer “changed my life” and she was “not so afraid anymore”. Meanwhile her father added: “We’re a very together family. We’re bonded by all kinds of difficulties that we’ve overcome.” The actor went on to share that he was now “healthier than I’ve been in years”.
Shatner's career and spaceflight
Shatner is best known for playing Captain James T Kirk in the Star Trek franchise from 1966 to 1994. In 2021 he also became the oldest person to fly in space after being a passenger aboard Blue Origin NS-18. Last week it was also announced he would be doing his first heavy metal performance later this year, with his newly formed band The *uckers. He will take to the stage at Riot Fest in Chicago in September after the punk rock festival spent more than a decade trying to get him to perform.
