In March 2024, William Shatner told Parade magazine, “We’ve in effect remarried. But we haven’t done another ceremony.” He meant Elizabeth Anderson Martin, his fourth wife, whom he married in 2001 and divorced in 2020. She has never addressed his claim in public.
Fast facts
- Elizabeth Anderson Martin was born Elizabeth Joyce Anderson on December 30, 1958, in Versailles, Kentucky
- She married William Shatner on February 13, 2001, in Lebanon, Indiana
- The couple separated in 2019 after 18 years of marriage, and the divorce was finalized in 2020
- She has worked as a professional horse trainer and judge, and founded the veterans’ charity The All Glory Project in 2010
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He kept saying it, year after year
Shortly after their divorce settlement was finalized in March 2020, Shatner told the Mirror there were no hard feelings. “Nothing makes me sad at this age,” he said. “It’s all good here. I wish everyone well.”
Asked by The Guardian in May 2021 whether he and Martin might get back together, he didn’t give a straight answer. “That’s always hanging there, and that makes the relationship really good. Maybe that’s the explanation and I’ve found the solution.”
By January 2023, they were photographed together at the Living Legends of Aviation Awards in Beverly Hills. He told the Mirror, “My wife… she is the zest of life. She brings the flavor.”
More appearances followed. They were at the Los Angeles premiere of the documentary You Can Call Me Bill in March 2024. That October, they attended the red carpet premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s KOOZA. The following March, they turned up together again, at a gala in Las Vegas marking Shatner’s 94th birthday. By August 2025, photographers had caught Martin wearing a ring, and outlets began asking whether a second wedding was coming. Neither has confirmed one. He turned 95 in March 2026.
What the record shows outside his account
All of that comes from Shatner himself. The wedding, the divorce, and the years since also left a paper trail that doesn’t run through him at all.
The Associated Press covered their wedding on February 13, 2001, at the Boone County Courthouse in Lebanon, Indiana, reporting that the bride, 42, was a former high school homecoming queen marrying the 69-year-old Star Trek actor. Martin’s sister, Gayle Anderson, gave the Indianapolis Star exactly one line when reporters came asking. “It’s absolutely true,” she said. “That’s all we’re saying.”
Court filings show the couple separated in February 2019, after 18 years of marriage. Shatner filed for divorce that December, four days after Martin’s brother died, and she asked publicly at the time for space to grieve. The settlement followed roughly three months later, in March 2020.
A career that started long before him
Elizabeth Anderson Martin’s own account of her career, the one kept by her charity and her professional listings, goes back decades before any of this.
She began riding at five and got her first horse at eight. By fourteen she was teaching lessons and judging youth competitions, and a scholarship took her to a professional judging clinic before she had finished high school. Purdue University and Butler University followed, one for equine and animal science, the other for telecommunications. She and her first husband, Michael Glenn Martin, built a stable together in Montecito, California, starting in 1991. He died in August 1997. She kept the business running alone for three more years, until 2000. Her charity’s own biography of her credits nine judging cards, 25 years as a professional trainer, and 30 years teaching saddleseat riding.
That career kept going during the marriage. She started her art business, Elizabeth Shatner’s Art By Nature, and began co-hosting Shatner’s Hollywood Charity Horse Show in 2000, a year before the wedding. In 2004, she co-wrote a song called “Together” with the British duo Lemon Jelly for Shatner’s album Has Been, a credit that still appears on the album’s official listing. In 2010, she founded The All Glory Project, a nonprofit that uses horses and gardening to help military veterans, naming it after a horse she had shown.
What she has never said
Martin has spoken publicly about her own work more than once. In 2016, discussing her charity’s programs, she said, “Horses, dogs and art are the modality to reach souls in need. They help when drugs and doctors can’t.” In 2018, she told Louisville’s WAVE 3 News that her organization had “formed a network across the United States of equine-assisted therapy centers that are already accredited.”
Neither comment touches the marriage or the divorce. Nowhere on the public record has Martin addressed Shatner’s repeated claim that the two of them are, in his words, in effect remarried.
