‘Star Trek’ Star & Melanoma Survivor William Shatner, 95, & His Youngest Daughter Beat Stage 4 Cancer Together

In a recent interview with TV Insider, the Hollywood legend, who celebrated his 95th birthday this past spring, reflected on being viewed as an example of how pursuing your passions can help keep you feeling young.

“Well, you know, my daughter and I are doing a podcast called ‘No Time to Die.’ We both had, at the same time, a diagnosis of stage four cancer three years ago, and through the magic of medicine, we’re both cancer-free,” he said.

“As a result of being told it’s possible you could die in a few months, it sharpened our attention to each other and my whole family.

He continued, “And also, what do you want to do with the remaining years? I’m always asking questions, because the older I get, the more fearful I will be to die with a question on my mind, like, ‘What about…,’ and I don’t have a chance to look it up on ChatGPT!'”

The dad of three, then joked about life’s biggest mystery, it’s meaning. Shatner revealed that his passion for learning is what keeps him motivated.

He asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” and playfully answered, “Damn…the meaning of life is … and boom! I’m dead!”

On a more serious note, he continued, “It’s the fear of not knowing what you could have learned. I get excited by comprehending and apprehending information.”

At 95, Shatner impressively still rides his horse and says a uniquely designed liver-shaped pillow with supportive “wings” has helped him get better sleep by cradling his neck.

As for how he views himself as a nonagenarian, he told TV Insider, “It took two years of treatment to become cancer-free. [At the time] it didn’t occur to me that I was gonna die. But at 95, I’m sensing the leaves are getting a little yellow and falling off the tree.

“But OK, chlorophyll [the natural pigment that gives plants their green color and acts as an antioxidant] will renew them! And that’s my attitude even as we speak.”

Shatner, who made history in 2021 as the oldest person to travel to space at age 90 aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, also noted that the experience transformed his view of life.

He reflected that seeing Earth from above deepened his appreciation for the mystery, beauty, and interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world.

“Everything is so profoundly mysterious. It’s right out of science fiction! It’s right out of Star Trek. But all of a sudden, it’s reality,” he explained.

In Shatner’s recent conversation with TV Guide Magazine’s Star Trek: The Captains Special Issue, he recounted when he was told he had stage 4 melanoma, which is considered one of the most dangerous forms of skin cancer.

“The doctor, a friend of mine, I said I got this lump, and put his doctor’s gentle fingers on my cheek, and he said to me, ‘Bill, you better get this out.’ With a kind of gravitas but not alarm, like a good doctor, and I went and got it out, said Shatner.

“It took two years of treatment to become cancer-free.”

In an earlier interview with Healio, Shatner also spoke about how he came across the lump that led to his diagnosis, saying, “I’m breezing along looking good and feeling good, and I noticed a lump on the side of my right ear.

He promptly reached out to his doctor and had the unusual lump evaluated. The results revealed it was cancer, and his physician explained the seriousness of the diagnosis while discussing next steps for treatment, including immunotherapy.

“The immunotherapy aspect of my treatment kind of knocks you out. You are fighting fatigue a lot. Yet, here I am,” Shatner explained after fully recovering from treatment.

As for his daughter’s cancer battle, she noticed a small lump in 2022 and promptly arranged follow-up imaging. A biopsy confirmed she had HER2-positive breast cancer, and she quickly to meet with an oncologist at UCLA Health to plan treatment, according to UCLA Health.

Additional testing revealed that Gretsch’s cancer had spread to lymph nodes in her chest. She ultimately began chemotherapy in July 2022 alongside HER2-targeted therapies.

After responding well to treatment, Gretsch moved forward with a double mastectomy in December 2022. She decided to not undergo breast reconstruction.

She told UCLA Health, “I don’t love that I have no breasts. I don’t love that when getting dressed it’s always a consideration of what it looks like on me.

“It does feel like it takes some femininity away. It makes me sad sometimes, but I’m really glad to be alive.”

Following her double mastectomy, pathology results brought encouraging news: the lymph nodes removed during surgery showed no remaining cancer, and only a small residual area of cancer was found in her breast tissue.

In February 2023, Gretsch began radiation while continuing HER2-targeted treatment. She finished additional chemotherapy by December 2023 and began a five-year course of estrogen-blocking medication due to her tumor’s hormone sensitivity. A follow-up PET scan showed no signs of cancer, UCLA reports.

Metastatic Breast Cancer and How It’s Treated

Breast cancer spreads through the bloodstream or lymphatic system. The blood carries cancer cells to different body parts, where they grow as new tumors.

Once breast cancer spreads, the cells may continue to grow slowly or stop growing and stay at equilibrium.

“Metastatic breast cancer is a treatable disease,” explains Dr. Kenneth D. Miller, medical oncologist at the Alvin & Lois Lapidus Cancer Institute at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore.

“Fortunately, we have so many new treatments for women with recurrent breast cancer and for many women who look at this as a chronic disease that they can live with often for many years.”

Breast cancer is sometimes classified as either local, regional, or distant.

• Local: Cancer is located in the breast and has not spread
• Regional: Cancer spreads from the breast to nearby lymph nodes
• Distant: Cancer spreads to distant parts of the body, including bones, liver, lungs, and/or brain

Treatment for metastatic breast cancer focuses on decreasing the spread of cancer cells, as well as relieving symptoms and improving quality of life.

Women with HER2-positive breast cancer, meaning they have high levels of a protein called HER2 on the surface of their cancer cells, like Shatner’s daughter Melanie had, targeted treatments are available. The drugs trastuzumab (Herceptin) and pertuzumab (Perjeta), which Melanie took, have transformed the outlook for some women with late-stage breast cancers. These therapies, which are often combined with chemo, are very effective at controlling breast cancer once it has spread.

Another notable treatment is for triple-negative breast cancer. This has historically been one of the most aggressive and most challenging to treat forms of the disease because it lacks any of the main drivers of breast cancer, the estrogen receptor, the progesterone receptor, and the HER2 receptor, and it doesn’t respond to treatments that target these receptors.

Now, in addition to chemotherapy, immunotherapy has been approved to treat triple-negative breast cancer.

Breast cancer that has spread to the bone, the cancer is often hormone receptor-positive, according to SurvivorNet experts. Women may think when this happens, they need aggressive chemotherapy. However, in most instances of hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer to the bone, the first line of attack is hormone therapy.

Hormone therapies are often combined with other medications to improve their efficacy. For example, CD4/CD6 inhibitors are a type of oral medication that is sometimes combined with hormonal therapies to help shrink breast cancers.

The Treatment That Helped William Shatner Take On Melanoma

Surgery remains one of the most common and effective treatments for melanoma.

For many early-stage cases, surgery alone can be curative. In more advanced situations, however, doctors often recommend follow-up therapies to strengthen results and lower the chance of the cancer returning. Adjuvant therapy refers to treatments given after surgery to boost results and lower the chance of melanoma returning. FDA-approved options for melanoma include:

• Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) – This medication is an immunotherapy that helps your immune system attack and kill cancer cells. It is a PD1 inhibitor drug that works by blocking the PD1 pathway used by cancer cells to hide from the immune system.
• Nivolumab (Opdivo) – Another form of immunotherapy, nivolumab is also a PD1 inhibitor that works similarly to pembrolizumab.
• Dabrafenib (Tafinlar) and trametinib (Mekinist) combination – This is a targeted therapy combo for patients with a BRAF V600E/K mutation fueling their cancer. About 50% of melanomas have BRAF mutations.
• Ipilimumab (Yervoy) – This medication is also an immunotherapy. Ipilimumab blocks the activity of a molecule called CTLA-4, a protein that prevents your immune system’s T cells from attacking your normal body cells and cancer cells.
• Interferon alpha (FDA-approved, but no longer recommended by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Melanoma Panel).

“We have known for a while now that immunotherapy is a very important weapon in the fight against melanoma,”  Dr. Janice Mehnert, associate director of clinical research at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, explains to SurvivorNet.

SurvivorNet spoke with Dr. James (Jim) Allison, a pioneer in immunotherapy research at MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for the development of the science known as checkpoint inhibitors.

“Immunotherapy is rather unique in that for the first time, we’re getting truly curative therapies in many kinds of disease– not just in melanoma but in lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Merkel cell cancer, head and neck cancer,” Dr. Allison tells SurvivorNet.

“I think that the most powerful combinations coming up are based on combining immune blockers or enhancers, but also drugs that can directly kill tumor cells to really have a double whammy,” Dr. Allison added.

RELATED: Watch “Breakthrough,” The Film About Nobel Prize Winner Jim Allison And The Invention Saving Millions of Lives; Learn How Immunotherapy Can Help Late-Stage Lung Cancer

How Immunotherapy Like Keytruda Works

Cancer cells often fly under the immune system’s radar by producing proteins that disguise them as “normal.” Checkpoint inhibitors such as Keytruda break that illusion, helping white blood cells recognize and attack those cancer cells.

Rather than killing cancer directly, these treatments empower the immune system to do the job, with fewer side effects on healthy tissue.

WATCH: Immunotherapy Helps Your Body Help Itself

Common side effects of Keytruda include:

• Fatigue
• Rash or itching
• Shortness of breath or cough
• Nausea, vomiting, or appetite loss
• Diarrhea or constipation
• Low thyroid levels
• Abdominal pain

Immunotherapy Side Effects During Treatment for Melanoma

A new study published in JAMA Oncology is shedding light on the long-term side effects of immunotherapy in melanoma patients—revealing that chronic complications may be more widespread than previously thought.

“Chronic and long-lasting side effects were more common than we expected and involved a variety of often overlooked organs like the thyroid, salivary glands, and joints,” said Dr. Douglas Johnson, senior author of the study and associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

WATCH: Tell Your Doctor About Immunotherapy Side Effects

Despite the findings, Dr. Johnson emphasized the groundbreaking nature of immunotherapy, especially anti-PD-1 drugs. “It has been an absolute game-changer for patients with melanoma,” he noted. “I think the first thing to recognize is how really transformative the Anti-PD-1 drugs have been… patients can have very long-term responses to treatment.”

Still, for patients with advanced melanoma—especially those who’ve undergone surgical removal and have a low risk of recurrence—Dr. Johnson advised more nuanced conversations around treatment. “So determining whether the risks of the side effects, weighing the benefits of treatment with the risks of the side effects, can be an important consideration,” he said. “What our study did was we basically saw that some of these side effects were more common, really, than had been previously reported.”

Reported side effects can range from mild to severe, including dry throat, inflammation of the eye blood vessels, numbness, or tingling. And for many, the decision comes down to weighing symptom severity with potential longevity benefits.

WATCH: Managing Immunotherapy side effects.

Dr. Anna Pavlick, another expert in melanoma care, added context around immunotherapy management. “Depending upon the severity, it depends upon how we manage it,” she said.

“The percentage of patients who have very serious side effects from immunotherapy is contingent upon whether patients will get one medicine or a combination of two medicines.”

She explained that patients receiving a single immunotherapy drug face a 10–15% chance of experiencing severe reactions like rash or diarrhea. But for patients with metastatic melanoma, a dual-drug regimen—though more effective at controlling the cancer—comes with about a 50% chance of developing side effects.

FDA-Approved Immunotherapy for Melanoma

There are several FDA-approved immunotherapies for melanoma. Each is approved for certain instances of melanoma.

• Tebentafusp-tebn (Kimmtrak)
• Aldesleukin (Proleukin)
• Atezolizumab (Tecentriq)
• Dostarlimab (Jemperli)
• Interferon alfa-2b (Intron A)
• Ipilimumab (Yervoy)
• Nivolumab (Opdivo)
• Peginterferon alfa-2b (Sylatron/PEG-Intron)
• Pembrolizumab (Keytruda)
• Talimogene laherparepvec (Imlygic)
• Imiquimod (Aldara)

The goal is to steadily reduce the risk of recurrence in all patients. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Some people may not be candidates for this therapy, and side effects vary from person to person.

Understanding Melanomas

Melanoma starts in the same cells that give your skin, hair, and eyes their color. In melanoma, the cells change in a way that allows them to spread to other organs.

Changes to a mole you’ve had for a while or a new growth on your skin could be signs of melanoma, according to SurvivorNet’s experts. You’ll want to watch them and tell your doctor about any changes you notice.

WATCH: How do you perform a skin check using the ABCDEs?

SurvivorNet experts recommend avoiding unprotected sun exposure because ultraviolet (UV) radiation can lead to melanoma. Tanning beds pose ultraviolet radiation risks for skin cancer and should be avoided. Many dermatologists recommend using spray tans to reduce the risk of melanoma skin cancer.

The most important thing to look out for when it comes to finding melanoma is a new spot on your skin or a spot that is changing in size, shape, or color, SurvivorNet’s medical experts say.

Treatment options for melanoma include targeted therapy and immunotherapy, which give people a better chance of living a long and healthy life than ever before. If you’re diagnosed with melanoma, there’s a good chance surgery will be the treatment your doctor recommends.

Cancer removal usually leads to a cure in the early stages of the disease. After surgery, the removed tissue and lymph nodes are examined to measure the melanoma and determine if it has clear margins. Clear margins mean the cells around the area of tissue that was removed don’t contain any melanoma. When no cancer cells are left around the removed area, your cancer is less likely to return.

WATCH: Beating Aggressive Melanoma: An Immunotherapy Success Story

For melanoma patients who need additional treatment after surgery, they are likely to receive adjuvant therapy (treatments administered after surgery). Adjuvant therapy is designed to improve outcomes and decrease the risk of recurrence.

What You Need to Know About Survivorship

Whether you’re beginning your journey into survivorship or are a seasoned survivor, you’ll quickly learn that it’s a term with many layers. At its simplest, ‘survivorship’ signifies the state of living beyond a challenging event or diagnosis, such as cancer. More specifically, it marks the period after treatment where a patient goes from merely surviving to thriving, as they navigate their newfound lease on life.

It’s important to remember that survivorship isn’t just an end state – it’s a continuous journey. It begins the moment a person is diagnosed with a significant health condition and continues throughout their life. You might hear people say things like, “from the moment of diagnosis, you become a survivor.”

It’s a powerful sentiment that reflects the courage and resilience involved in battling a serious illness.

Being a survivor also means redefining your life while coping with the aftermath of disease and its treatment. This phase might include the challenge of dealing with physical and emotional changes, attending regular check-ups, the fear of recurrence, or the need for long-term medication. Despite these hurdles, many survivors find unique strength, growth, and transformation during this time.

Survivorship is much more than just the absence of disease—it’s a new stage of life, a rite of passage. Your journey might not have been one you would have chosen, but through it, you’ll uncover a greater understanding of yourself and what you’re capable of. Each person’s survivorship journey is unique, and how you choose to travel is entirely up to you.

Remember—navigating this new terrain called ‘Survivorship’. It might be challenging, but remember, you’re not alone. There are ample resources and support systems designed to help you along the way.

Continued Medical Care
Don’t lose sight of the importance of continued medical care – always keep your follow-up appointments and adhere to any healthcare recommendations.

Remember, embracing these coping strategies can help you navigate your way into survivorship with greater ease and renewed energy. Just remember – slow and steady wins the race! You’ve overcome huge hurdles, it’s okay to take this new stage of your life at your own pace.

Resilient Learning To Overcome Any Obstacle

Additionally, health checkups are an integral part of maintaining wellness and spotting potential health issues early. This holds true for everyone, but even more so for a person who’s in the throes of survivorship.

One of the main reasons you’ll want to maintain routine health checks is to monitor for recurrence. While the hope is always for complete recovery, there’s a possibility of the disease returning—even with successful treatment. Regular checkups allow you to keep a vigilant eye on the situation, leading to early detection and treatment if any problem emerges.

Contributing: SurvivorNet Staff

Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.

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