William Shatner and his daughter Melanie Shatner Gretsch have both revealed they battled stage 4 cancer.
Melanie, 61, discovered a lump in her breast in July 2022 after a clear mammogram just five months earlier. “I woke up in the middle of the night, and my finger moved up right beneath my breast. I felt a little bump and thought, ‘It’s just a bug bite,’” she told People. Testing confirmed HER2-positive breast cancer that had spread to lymph nodes in her chest, leading to chemotherapy, a double mastectomy and 30 rounds of radiation.
Just as she neared the end of treatment, Shatner, 95, was diagnosed in June 2023 with stage 4 malignant melanoma that had spread to his lungs and brain. “They said, ‘You got cancer. If you came in later, you would have been dead.’ See? That’s my life,” William Shatner said. “I think the universe is taking care of me.”
During one of the hardest nights of Melanie’s treatment, she called her father in a panic. “I was having a moment and was hysterical,” she recalled. “I called you and said, ‘I think I’m dying.’” He arrived at her home 15 minutes later. “He gave me, what I think of ever since I was a little girl, a ‘daddy bear hug,’” she said.
Dr. Omid Hamid, chief of translational research and immuno-oncology at The Angeles Clinic and Research Institute, who helped develop the immunotherapy that treated Shatner, said the survival outlook for his diagnosis was once grim.
“Twenty years ago the average survival rate for those with his diagnosis was six to eight months,” Hamid said, adding that Shatner “is doing phenomenally well.”
Both were declared cancer-free by late 2024. “It was the third time in my life I had heard him cry,” Melanie said of telling her father the news.
The pair are now launching a weekly podcast, No Time but Now, premiering July 29, featuring interviews with health experts and fellow survivors. “We’re a very together family,” Shatner said. “We’re bonded by all kinds of difficulties that we’ve overcome.”
