He was a Hollywood jerk. He was one of those actors that we recognize, without always having his name in mind, and yet, Treat Williams marked a number of famous films with his charisma. The 71-year-old American comedian succumbed to his injuries after crashing into a car in the northeastern state of Vermont. “Treat Williams was unable to avoid the collision and was thrown from his motorcycle. He suffered critical injuries and was airlifted to Medical Center in Albany, NY, where he was pronounced dead,” according to the Vermont Federal Police statement.

Treat Williams, a former airline pilot, emerged from obscurity in 1979 as Berger, the hippie leader in Milos Forman’s film Hair, for which he earned a Golden Globe nomination. From then on, his career was launched: his magnetism on the screen and his good looks attracted the attention of many directors: Spielberg (1941), Sidney Lumet (The Prince of New York, 1981), Sergio Leone (Once upon a time in America)… They also carved out a fine reputation as a singer and dancer on the stages of Broadway, notably in the first version of Grease, in which he played Danny Zuko, played in the cinema by John Travolta.

In total, he slips into the skin of more than 120 characters in the cinema, but also on TV where, from the end of the 1990s, he offered himself a new youth. The Everwood series puts it back in the spotlight. For four successive seasons, he plays a surgeon, Andrew Brown, who leaves New York, after the death of his wife, to settle with his children in Everwood, a modest small town in Colorado, where he reconnects with true values. of life. If the series Chicago Fire and Blue Bloods (with Tom Selleck) will subsequently offer him recurring roles, the actor had converted to a small career as an author of children’s books.

After having an affair with comedian Dana Delany (Desperate Housewives) in the early 1980s, he had been married for several years to actress and producer Pam Van Sant, with whom he had two children.