Treat Williams
Richard Treat Williams (born December 1, 1951) is a Screen Actors Guild Award–nominated American actor and children’s book author who has appeared on film, stage and television. Williams was born in Rowayton, Connecticut, the son of Marian (née Andrew), an antiques dealer, and Richard Norman Williams, a corporate executive. Williams graduated from the Kent School in Connecticut and Franklin and Marshall College.
Williams made his film debut in the 1976 thriller Deadly Hero followed by The Eagle Has Landed. He came to world attention when he starred in the Miloš Forman film Hair (1979), based on the Broadway musical of the same name. He has gone on to appear in over 75 films and several television series, including, most notably, 1941 (1979), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995) and Deep Rising (1998).
Williams was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his part in Hair as George Berger. He got a second Golden Globe nomination for starring in the excellent Sidney Lumet film Prince of the City (1981) and a third for his performance as Stanley Kowalski in the television presentation of A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1996, Williams was nominated for a Best Actor Emmy Award by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for his work in The Late Shift, a HBO movie, in which he portrayed agent Michael Ovitz.
Prince of the City (1981) is an American crime drama film about an NYPD officer who chooses to expose police corruption for idealistic reasons. The character of Daniel Ciello (Treat Williams) was based on real-life NYPD Narcotics Detective Robert Leuci and the script was based on Robert Daley’s 1978 book of the same name.
Originally, Brian De Palma was going to direct with David Rabe adapting the book and Robert De Niro playing Leuci but the project fell through and Sidney Lumet came aboard to direct under two conditions: he did not want a big name movie star playing Leuci because he did not “want to spend two reels getting over past associations,” and the movie’s running time would be at least three hours long.
Lumet cast Treat Williams after spending three weeks talking to him and listening to the actor read the script and then reading it again with 50 other cast members. In order to research the role, the actor spent a month learning about police work, hung out at 23rd Precinct in New York City, went on a drug bust and lived with Leuci for some time. By the time rehearsals started, Williams said, “I was thinking like a cop.”
Lumet had apparently felt guilty about the two-dimensional way he had treated cops in the 1973 film Serpico and said that Prince of the City was his way to rectify this depiction. Prince of the City was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but lost to the boring On Golden Pond.
Williams has recently had small roles in Howl and 127 Hours (both 2010), but has generally been seen in lesser quality work, he’s a great character actor, deserving of much better than he’s been given over the last 3 decades.
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