“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).
