“IF THERE IS PASTA, THAT IS ENOUGH FOR US”

This is one of the most remembered phrases of all the dialogues that Treat Williams accumulated throughout his extensive career in front of film and television cameras – 131 titles –, playing the role of a mercenary in the film Deep Rising, of which He felt very proud and that for him it was the most fun filming of his life. He complimented his director on being “the most energetic” he had ever met. It was his last attempt to access the status of action film protagonist and make true the good omens, never realized, that were blowing for his career when he got his first prominent role in the iconic adaptation of the musical Hair, which he himself pointed out as the best cinematographic experience of his life, at the end of the magical decade of the seventies, and shortly after Sidney Lumet chose him to star in The Prince of the City, giving life to a character heir to Serpico played by Al Pacino. Williams recalled that it was a trip to the dark side at a time when he was still very young, and that until he saw it again three decades later he could not realize how much he had learned in that filming of what he described as “an American tragedy and a great study on the human condition,” with which Lumet wanted to make a more faithful portrait of the police than he had done years before with Serpico.

MORTAL ACCIDENT

Killing underwater monsters was the last resort for Treat Williams who, in a turn that was incomprehensible to many fans in a rising career, ended up alternating supporting roles in the movies, some as good as Critical Bill in Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead , which the actor remembered as one of the most iconic and interesting scripts he had read in his long professional career, with more stimulating roles for his concerns as an actor in feature films for television such as Dempsey, biography of the famous boxing champion Jack Dempsey; A Streetcar Named Desire, playing the role of Stanley Kowalski that Marlon Brando had immortalized on the big screen, or the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, in the film of the same name.

We could say that by adding the Everwood series to that list of titles we already have the best of the numerous list of works carried out by this hyperactive 1.80 meter tall actor who died last June in a motorcycle accident on Route 30 in Vermont, when he collided with a car that unexpectedly cut him off.

Williams was nominated for the Golden Globe three times, the first as a breakthrough actor for Hair, although the award finally went to the boy Ricky Schroder for crying his eyes out and making everyone cry in Champion. He was nominated again, in this case in the category of best actor in a drama, for his work in The Prince of the City, in a year in which he faced giants like Burt Lancaster, nominated for Atlantic City, or Henry Fonda, who won. for his work for On Golden Pond. He got his third and last nomination in those awards as best actor in a miniseries or television movie for his work in A Streetcar Named Desire, an award that Ted Danson finally won for the sinister pedophile drama Amelia, my daughter, my love.

AWARDS AND ILLUSTRIOUS ANCESTORS

Among his awards stands out the Drama League Award that was awarded to him for his work in the Broadway staging of the play Follies, as well as another award for the off-Broadway staging of the play Capitanes intrépidos, in the role that in the version film will be played by Spencer Tracy.

Treat Williams was the son of an antiques dealer who also ran a swimming and sailing school, and an executive who had fought as a paratrooper in World War II serving in the American forces that occupied Japan, and was the great-great-grandson of Senator William Henry Barnum. , related to the circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum, and descended from Robert Treat Paine, one of the signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence.

Williams left his parents’ house at the age of fourteen after spending what he defined as a happy childhood with them, and went to study, excelling in the practice of rugby in high school, a sport that he continued playing during his university years, until he left. He put aside any possibility of developing a sports career to begin his career as an actor after becoming interested in acting, participating in the school’s theatrical productions in the seventh grade.

In his first steps as an actor, a musical accompanist, Phyllis Grady, had a lot of influence, who took him to the Royal Theatre, where they were auditioning for the traveling production of the musical Grease. Williams went to the casting call and won the role singing a Neil Sedaka song that took him to the Broadway stage to serve as a substitute for the male leads played by John Travolta and Jeff Conaway.

Along with his career as an actor, Williams was trained as a professional pilot in 1969 by his school’s rugby coach, who was also a flight instructor, and worked in that job in the early 1980s, receiving the title as a flight instructor. of airplanes and helicopters. The actor continued training in that profession and in 2003 completed the two-week training to pilot jet aircraft.

He was married only once, to actress and producer Pam Van Sant. They married on June 25, 1988 and had a son, Gill, born in 1992, and a daughter, Elinor, born in 1998, but before that he had a romantic relationship with actress Dana Delany. ■

Article Translated from Spanish Via Google Translate