Treat Williams, Star of ‘Everwood’ and ‘Prince of the City,’ Dies in Motorcycle Accident at 71

Treat Williams, the versatile actor who starred as a New York City neurosurgeon who moves his family to Colorado on the WB series Everwood and in such films as Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City and Milos Forman‘s Hair, died Monday in a motorcycle accident in Vermont. He was 71.

His agent, Barry McPherson of APA, confirmed Williams’ death in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Williams, of Manchester Center, Vermont, was aboard a motorcycle and wearing a helmet when he collided with a car on Route 30 near Dorset, the Vermont State Police said in a statement.

An initial investigation indicated that the driver of the car “stopped, signaled a left turn and then turned into the path of a northbound 1986 Honda VT700c motorcycle operated by Williams. Williams was unable to avoid a collision and was thrown from his motorcycle. He suffered critical injuries and was airlifted to Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York, where he was pronounced dead.”

The driver of the car had minor injuries and did not need to be hospitalized, police said. 

A heartthrob in his younger days, Williams portrayed the bad guy Xander Drax in The Phantom (1996), and his film résumé included turns in John Sturges’ The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Steven Spielberg‘s 1941 (1979), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Smooth Talk (1985), Dead Heat (1988), Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995), Deep Rising (1998) and The Deep End of the Ocean (1999).

He was nominated for an Emmy in 1996 for playing agent Michael Ovitz in the HBO movie The Late Shift, about the battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno to succeed Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

Williams starred as Andy Brown on all 89 episodes over four seasons of the Greg Berlanti-created Everwood from 2002-06, and he played another doctor on the 2007 TNT series Heartland.

More recently, he portrayed the stubborn contractor/developer Mick O’Brien on the Hallmark Channel series Chesapeake Shores from 2016-22 and made his last appearance as NYPD detective Lenny Ross on the CBS drama Blue Bloods last month.

Richard Treat Williams was born on Dec. 1, 1951, in Stamford, Connecticut, and raised in nearby Rowayton. The house that he grew up in was owned by Judy Abbott, daughter of famed Broadway director George Abbott, and Bobby Griffith, who was legendary Broadway producer Hal Prince’s creative partner, lived down the street.

“I had an idyllic childhood, but I didn’t initially realize how idyllic it truly was until I grew older,” he told Vermont Magazine in an interview last year. “Our backyard was the Long Island Sound. My mother had a little sailing and swimming school. I taught at her school, and I used to race blue jay and lightning boats on the sound.”

He left home at age 14 to attend Kent School in Connecticut and gave up a spot on the football team in college to join the theater company at Franklin & Marshall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Judy Abbott was an agent at William Morris, and she would become his first rep.

Williams made his onscreen debut as a cop in the 1975 film Deadly Hero, directed by Ivan Nagy, then played an earnest detective for Richard Lester in Terrence McNally‘s hilarious The Ritz on a London stage and then in the 1976 film version.

He stepped in to play Danny Zuko in 1978 in the original Broadway production of Grease and kept the role for three years. In 1979, he was memorable as the hippie George Berger in Hair (1979), based on the famed Broadway musical.

On his 12th audition for the film, Williams said he started to undress until he was naked at the end of a monologue. “They applauded, and I told them, ‘This is all that I’ve got, I don’t know what else I can give you,'” he recalled. “Milos came up to me after I walked out and told me that he was going to give me the part. That was the final audition.”

In Prince of the City (1981), Williams sparkled as narcotics detective Danny Ciello, who exposes corruption in the NYPD after years of bending the law.

“Sidney said he needed to know whether I had the gravitas — I was 28 at the time — to handle the darker repercussions of what the character did,” Williams says in the 2019 book Sidney Lumet: A Life. In preparation for the part, he spent weeks with a narcotics unit in the Bronx.

Later, Williams took on the iconic role of Stanley Kowalski opposite Ann-Margret as Blanche Dubois in a 1984 ABC adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.

He also worked on Broadway in Over Here, Once in a Lifetime, The Pirates of Penzance, Love Letters and Follies.

Survivors include his wife, Pam Van Sant, whom he married in June 1988, and children Gill and Elinor.

Williams was an avid pilot and skier who seemed to be enjoying the fact that things were slowing down for him as he worked mainly on television. On Thursday, he posted a photo on Twitter and wrote about playing with his dog.

Chasing sticks with Woody today. Nothing more is necessary pic.twitter.com/RdMcitzFEh

— Treat Williams (@Rtreatwilliams) June 8, 2023

“I like to think I’ve already proven myself on the ‘crazy meter’ and the ‘dramatic meter’ with Prince of the City or with Hair,” he said in the Vermont Magazine piece. “If you’ve done those roles where you’ve gone the distance, why not just relax and know that you have the chance to do a two-page scene every third day?”

People magazine was the first to report his death.

Ryan Gajewski and Abid Rahman contributed to this report.