Remembering Treat Williams

Talking to Vermont Magazine’s Joshua Sherman last year, Williams described his childhood as “idyllic.” Growing up in Connecticut, he raced boats on the Long Island Sound and eventually gave up football for theater. He played a detective in a London production of Terrence McNally’s comedy The Ritz and reprised the role in Richard Lester’s 1976 adaptation. For three years, he played Danny Zuko in the Broadway production of Grease before landing his breakout movie role.

In Miloš Forman’s Hair (1979), Williams is George Berger, the leader of a “tribe” of hippies who introduce a young Oklahoman (John Savage) to all the hedonistic pleasures the 1960s had to offer. “It was amazing to be a part of that film,” Williams told Sherman, “because growing up in the late 1960s, I would drive around in my mother’s convertible Mustang singing along to the album from the Broadway production of Hair on her eight-track player.”

Delivering a monologue during his twelfth audition, “I started removing all of my clothing,” Williams recalled. “At the end of the monologue, I was standing stark naked in front of them. After the monologue, they applauded, and I told them, ‘This is all that I’ve got, I don’t know what else I can give you.’” He walked out, and Forman followed—and gave him the part.

Williams’s performance in Hair earned him the first of three Golden Globe nominations. The second was for his leading turn as a New York cop who reluctantly agrees to cooperate with a special commission investigating police corruption in Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981). “The tough urban realism Lumet perfected in cop dramas like Serpico, Q&A, and Prince of the City has been reflected in first-rate TV shows like Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, and The Shield,” wrote Scott Tobias at the A.V. Club in 2007. “But those shows had multiple seasons to draw out the breadth of institutional corruption, while Lumet miraculously covers this territory in 167 minutes. He succeeds by staying close to Williams as the world crumbles around him.”

Williams was nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award for his portrayal of Arnold Friend, a menacing stranger in his thirties who approaches fifteen-year-old Connie (Laura Dern), in Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk (1985). In what Sheila O’Malley calls “an incredible two-hander scene,” Arnold looms in front of the house where Connie lives. As she “retreats behind the screen door,” writes Honor Moore in the essay accompanying our release, “Arnold’s seduction—Williams’s portrayal, with his expert jabbing, acrobatics, flirtatious gestures, and provocative talk, is extraordinary—makes short work of her stab at being her own person.”

In 1996, Williams was nominated for an Emmy for playing Michael Ovitz in Betty Thomas’s HBO movie The Late Shift, and he was nominated twice for Screen Actors Guild Awards for leading the cast of Everwood, the WB series about a neurosurgeon who moves his family to Colorado. Everwood ran from 2002 to 2006, and last year Williams was back at HBO, taking a small but key role as a retired detective in We Own This City, the series developed by George Pelecanos and David Simon, the team that shot to fame with The Wire.

“After years of cop reporting,” tweeted Simon on Monday, “Prince of the City was the only film that made me believe anyone else knew the truth about the drug war. So honored when Treat Williams signed on to deliver our own, later critique of the disaster. RIP to a legendary actor and a fine, gracious man.”