William Windom (actor)
| William Windom | |
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 Playbill: Windom Plays Thurber |
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| Born | September 28, 1923 New York City, New York, United States |
| Died | August 16, 2012 (aged 88) Woodacre, Marin County California, United States |
| Cause of death | Congestive heart failure |
| Resting place | Cremated |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1950–2006 |
| Spouse(s) | Carol Keyser (1947–1955) Barbara Joyce (1958–1963) Barbara Goetz (1963–1968) Jacqulyn Hopkins (1969–1974) Patricia Tunder (1975–2012; his death) |
| Children | Rachel, Heather, Juliet, Hope, Rebel, Russell |
| Parents | Paul Windom (father); Isobel Wells Peckham (mother) |
| Awards | 1970 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series |
William Windom (September 28, 1923 – August 16, 2012) was an American actor. He was perhaps best known for his work on television, including two episodes of The Twilight Zone. He portrayed Glen Morley, a fictional congressman from Minnesota, a role based on Windom's own Republican great-grandfather and namesake, in the ABC sitcom, The Farmer's Daughter, with Inger Stevens as his beautiful young housekeeper.
Windom also achieved fame as the character of John Monroe on the sitcom My World and Welcome to It, for which he won an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series; as Commodore Matt Decker, commander of the doomed U.S.S. Constellation in the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine"; the character Randy Lane in the Emmy-nominated Night Gallery episode "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar"; perhaps the most common recurring character, Dr. Seth Hazlitt, on the Emmy-winning CBS series Murder, She Wrote, and for voicing Puppetino in Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night.
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Early life[edit]
Windom was born on September 28, 1923, in New York City. He was the son of Isobel Wells (née Peckham) and Paul Windom, an architect.[1][2] He was the great-grandson of the United States Secretary of the Treasury of the same name. He served in the United States Army in the European Theater of Operations in World War II, as a paratrooper with Company B, 1st Battalion 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.[3]
Career[edit]
Windom's first motion picture role was as Mr. Gilmer, the prosecutor of Tom Robinson in the 1962 Academy Award-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1968, he starred with Frank Sinatra in The Detective, having played a homophobic killer. The role received great reviews from The New York Times.
From September 1963 to April 1966, he co-starred in the television version of the previous film, The Farmer's Daughter, a series about a young Minnesota woman who becomes the housekeeper for a widowed congressman. In the 1969–1970 NBC series My World and Welcome to It, Windom played the James Thurberesque lead and received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series. After the cancellation of the series, Windom toured the country for a time in a one-man Thurber show.
He was a regular for a decade on the series Murder, She Wrote with Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer. His initial appearance in the role was in October 1985. (He had previously appeared as a guest star playing another character in April 1985.) The producers enjoyed his work, and consequently invited him to return at the beginning of the second season to take on the role permanently. He briefly left the show to work on another series in 1990, but the show was short-lived and he returned to Murder, She Wrote as a semi-regular for the remainder of the run of that series.[citation needed]
To fans of science fiction television, Windom was best known as the tortured Commodore Matt Decker in the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine", a role he reprised nearly 40 years later for Star Trek New Voyages.
Death[edit]
According to his widow, Patricia Tunder Windom, the actor died on August 16, 2012, at the age of eighty-eight at his home in Woodacre, California, from congestive heart failure.[1] He was survived by four of his children – Rachel, Heather, Hope and Rebel – and four grandchildren.
Filmography[edit]
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References[edit]
- ^ a b Grode, Eric. "William Windom, Emmy Winner and TV Everyman, Dies at 88". The New York Times. Retrieved August 19, 2012.
- ^ William Windom Biography (1923-)
- ^ The 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) Trooper Pictures during World War II
External links[edit]
- William Windom at the Internet Movie Database
- William Windom at the Internet Broadway Database
- William Windom at AllRovi
- William Windom at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
- In Memory of William Windom
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- 2012 deaths
- 1923 births
- Emmy Award winners
- Actors from New York City
- American film actors
- American television actors
- American stage actors
- American military personnel of World War II
- United States Army soldiers
- Deaths from congestive heart failure
- Cardiovascular disease deaths in California
- People from Los Angeles, California
- People from Marin County, California
