Shatner Worries About Mortality In the Midst of Work

Having lost his third wife, Nerine Kidd, in a tragic accident, William Shatner (Kirk) is said to be concerned with keeping his affairs in order.

"It's a big subject for us," he said in an article at PR Inside, which noted that Shatner's current wife, Elizabeth Martin, had also been widowed at the time she and Shatner became close. "I'm trying to provide for everybody before I die."

The 75-year-old actor is not slowing down his workload, however. He provides the voice of Ozzie the Possum in the animated film Over the Hedge, which opened last weekend to fairly positive reviews and did respectable box office, finishing behind The Da Vinci Code and ahead of Mission: Impossible III. "The action scenes are fun, the characters are well-drawn and voiced, and I thought the film's visual look was sort of lovely," said critic Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times.

"Casting William Shatner as Ozzie the Possum was a stroke of demented geek genius. Here’s a character that has to feign death repeatedly, only to deliver deathbed dialog in Shatner’s classic, stilted (and often exaggerated) style. Every moment of this made my geek heart giggle with glee," declared the review at Ain't It Cool News.

The first season of Shatner's Boston Legal arrived in stores on DVD on Tuesday, and the show has been picked up to return to ABC in the fall for a third season. "James Spader's Alan Shore...and Shore's loyal relationship with mentor Denny Crane (William Shatner, suffering from onset senility -- 'mad-cow disease,' he calls it) are what made the series watchable from the start," noted a review at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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