Actor Treat Williams: versatile, rock-solid, widely respected. And now, gone. He died Monday in Dorset, Vermont, after his motorcycle collided with an SUV turning into a parking lot, according to Vermont State Police.
For Williams, the days preceding that day were typical of his family life in rural Vermont. Last year, in a Vermont Magazine feature, Williams spoke gratefully of his marriage to Pam Van Sant, and their two children. “Every day I wake up so grateful to see the view that I see out of my window and to be living up here,” he said. He and Van Sant married in 1988 and the union lasted 35 years.
He was 71.
Williams worked with several world-class film directors — Milos Forman, Steven Spielberg, Sidney Lumet, Sergio Leone — without quite reaching world-class movie star status himself. One or two conspicuous commercial hits would’ve helped. But that’s rarely about the actors, or the acting; stardom often lies a bridge too far, even for even a fine and consistently valuable actor such as Williams.
From “1941″ to “Everwood” to his final appearance, across six episodes of “Blue Bloods,” as well as a string of yuletide specials in the Hallmark Cinematic Universe, Williams enjoyed a working actor’s half-century on stage, on film and on TV. The screenwork constituted the Hollywood part. The theater — mostly but not entirely in New York — was the other main part. By all accounts he was a wonderful colleague and, to reword the title of his 1981 Lumet film, a prince of two cities and three mediums.
On screen I first saw Williams in “The Ritz” (1976), outlandishly broad but he’s very funny in it. (At one point he’s pawed, eagerly, by Rita Moreno’s Googie Gomez, reprising her Tony-winning turn in the stage version of Terrence McNally’s gay bathhouse romp.) Williams cut his teeth in Broadway musicals, first with the Andrews Sisters World War II nostalgia trip “Over Here!” In that one he worked alongside fellow soon-to-be-knowns John Travolta, Marilu Henner and Ann Reinking. (In one clip on YouTube you can spy Williams in the background, at the 2:35 mark.)
Williams also did Danny Zuko on Broadway in “Grease,” a few years into its long, long run. I saw his Pirate King after Kevin Kline left “The Pirates of Penzance” in the early ‘80s — a vocally challenging, physically demanding role Williams handled with aplomb. By then, he’d proven to the movie world he could sing, dance and act, thanks to Forman’s 1979 film version of the musical “Hair.” It more than holds up; a screening of “Hair” at the 2017 Ebertfest in Champaign, Illinois, revealed a work of serious staying power, thanks in large part to Williams. His brashly exuberant turn as Berger surely provided Aaron Tviet his primary reference point in Apple TV’s second season of “Schmigadoon!” aka “Schmicago!”
I haven’t seen it in far too long, but in director Joyce Chopra’s unnerving “Smooth Talk” (1985), Williams and Laura Dern enact a remarkable duet of adult sexual predator and teenage victim. Its welter of dramatic ambiguities are striking, perhaps more so today than ever. The project came for Williams at the tail end of his brush with conventional stardom in, among others, “Hair”; Spielberg’s grandiose slapstick folly “1941″ (1979); Lumet’s police corruption saga “Prince of the City” (1981); and, in a supporting role, Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984).
What-ifs are inevitable, and painful, when an actor dies suddenly. He might’ve done so much more, given the chances and the material. With Williams, it’s equally tantalizing to imagine the career he might’ve had as a young, vital presence a decade earlier — a James Caan sort of ‘70s stardom.
But we live in our own time. For Williams, that meant a steady stream of portrayals that improved, humbly, just about everything he did for our benefit. And our reward.
