Hey, That’s No Way to Treat a Williams

Yesterday we learned the sad news that actor Treat Williams (b. 1951) perished on his motorcycle at the age of 71. That’s old to be riding a hog, but not as old as I thought he was. We saw him in Dolly Parton’sChristmas on the Square special during the pandemic, and he looked a far cry from the shirtless, shaggy Jim Morrison look of the 1979 film version of Hair where we first encountered him. Decades will do that.

I learned something I should have known a long time ago by reading his bio this morning, and that’s that he was among the millions of Americans I am distantly related to. He was from Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I have some ancestors. We’re both related to the Barnum family, and to the Founding Father Robert Treat Paine, the obvious source of Williams’ Christian name. The Treats and the Paines were both old American families dating to the earliest days of the colonies. His surname also makes me wonder if he’s also related (as I believe I am) to Rhode Island founder Roger Williams.

Also, I want to say, based on the photo above, how is it that he never played Jack Kerouac? He even had that broken looking nose!

Williams was originally a stage actor — he went on as a replacement in the role of Danny Zuko in the original Broadway production of Grease, and was in the 1974 Sherman Brothers show Over Here! He had quite a big role in Richard Lester’s screen adaptation of Terrence McNalley’s The Ritz (1975), then returned to the stage for a 1978 revival of Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetimewith John Lithgow, Jayne Meadows, George S. Irving, Max Wright, etc. Then came two big movies in 1979, Milos Forman’s Hair, and Steven Spielberg’s 1941. The following year he stepped into the Broadway revival of Pirates of Penzance as The Pirate King. I saw that production! Then in 1981, he starred in Sidney Lumet’sPrince of the City, and the true tabloid tale The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper. This may be Treat Williams high water mark as a rising star. He turned in tons of great performances in plenty of terrific screen projects after this, but did not become one of Hollywood’s top stars. He was always solid, but perhaps a little too subdued to radiate.

But he really was in lots of great movies over the last four decades including, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), a tv production of A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Ann-Margret (1984), Smooth Talk (1985), Dead Heat (1988), the title role in J. Edgar Hoover (1989), Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead (1995), Mulholland Falls (1996), The Phantom (1996), and a 1999 remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth . By the turn of the century, a lot of his output had begun to consist of low-budget horror and straight-to-video action movies, but there were still things like Woody Allen’sHollywood Ending (2002), Danny Boyle’s127 Hours (2010), and (speaking of Kerouac) the 2010 Allen Ginsberg bio-pic Howl. From 2002 to 2006 he starred on the WB series Everwood, and he had recurring roles on Chicago Fire (2013-2018), Chesapeake Shores (2016-2022) and Blue Bloods (2016-2023).

He was riding his bike in Vermont when he was hit by a car yesterday. It was…kind of a Danny Zuko way to go.