“I always felt like the kid that sat at the foot of the gods,” said Treat Williams, who has died aged 71 following a road accident. And it is true that the first decade of his movie career was dominated by one high-calibre director after another.
John Sturges put the doughy-faced, darkly handsome actor toe-to-toe with Michael Caine in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), adapted from Jack Higgins’s novel about a plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. Miloš Forman gave Williams his first lead, as the hippie Berger in the screen version (1979) of the 1967 musical Hair. He was an ill-tempered army corporal in Steven Spielberg’s wartime comedy 1941 (also 1979). Sidney Lumet drew on his cocksure swagger and his air of moral ambiguity in Prince of the City (1981), a thriller about police corruption. And Sergio Leone cast him as a union boss in the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
It was Lumet’s film that announced Williams as a formidable talent, with a special aptitude for ensemble playing. He starred as Danny Ciello, a corrupt drugs squad detective who becomes increasingly isolated as he informs on his colleagues in the elite Special Investigations Unit. The character was based on the detective Robert Leuci. Williams lived with Leuci while preparing for the part. He also attended drug busts and hung out with police officers. “By the time we started rehearsals, I was thinking like a cop,” he said.
Janet Maslin in the New York Times commended the “playful, arrogant, effectively brazen quality” of his portrayal. Equally integral is the seam of self-disgust that runs through Ciello, first when he is exploiting his power over drug addicts and dealers, then when he turns on his own kind.
Williams went on to display a menacing eroticism in Smooth Talk (1985), directed by Joyce Chopra and based on Joyce Carol Oates’s 1966 short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? When he turns up in the second half of the film as Arnold Friend, a vision of adult masculine prowess that the teenage protagonist (Laura Dern) seems to have been yearning for, he is simultaneously ridiculous, alluring and intimidating.
Williams was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and raised in nearby Rowayton, the son of Richard, a pharmaceuticals executive, and Marian (nee Andrews), an antiques dealer who also ran a sailing school. He was educated at Kent school, Connecticut, where he first began acting, and at Franklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania. He studied in New York at the Actors Studio, where his classmates included Mickey Rourke, and was hired as understudy to four parts (including Doody, played on stage by John Travolta) in the Broadway production of Grease. Eventually he took over the lead role of Danny Zuko, which he played for three years.
Having already appeared on stage in the London production of The Ritz, Terrence McNally’s comedy about a hounded businessman hiding out in a gay bath-house, he was then cast in Richard Lester’s 1976 movie version.
Auditioning for the film of Hair was a lengthy and arduous process. During his 12th audition, he recalled: “I started removing all of my clothing. At the end of the monologue, I was standing stark naked in front of them … They applauded, and I told them: ‘This is all that I’ve got, I don’t know what else I can give you.’” It was enough.
Discouraged when Hair, 1941 and the comedy Why Would I Lie? (1980) continued a run of box-office flops, he began an alternative career flying planes in Los Angeles. A call from Lumet, who was looking for an un-starry and largely unknown cast for Prince of the City, put him back on track.
He continued to alternate between film and theatre, following Lumet’s picture by appearing in Ohio in Carlo Goldoni’s farce The Servant of Two Masters and on Broadway taking over from Kevin Kline as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance. On television, he played the boxer Jack Dempsey in the TV movie Dempsey (1983), Stanley Kowalski – opposite Ann-Margret as Stella – in A Streetcar Named Desire (1984), the title role in J. Edgar Hoover (1987) and the super-agent Michael Ovitz, co-founder of CAA, in The Late Shift (1996), for which he was Emmy-nominated.
In Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995), he played a thug working as an undertaker and using corpses as punch-bags. He was also in the noir-ish Mulholland Falls, the superhero adventure The Phantom (both 1996) and the thriller The Devil’s Own (1997), starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt.
Better than these were two projects that displayed his versatility: the monster movie Deep Rising (1998), in which he does battle with sharp-fanged sea-serpents, and The Deep End of the Ocean (1999), starring Williams and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple reunited with their son many years after he was kidnapped.
He starred in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending (2002), played James Franco’s father in Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, and the writer Mark Schorer in Howl (both 2010), which also starred Franco as Allen Ginsberg. He had a recurring role on the series Everwood (2002-06), as a widowed neurosurgeon settling in Colorado with his children, and on the cop drama Blue Bloods (2016-23). He also appeared in many Hallmark channel productions, including the series Chesapeake Shores (2016-22), as well as the Netflix musical Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square (2020).
He is survived by his wife, Pam Van Sant, whom he married in 1988, and their children, Gill and Ellie.
• Richard Treat Williams, actor, born 1 December 1951; died 12 June 2023
