Treat Williams, who drew wide attention with distinctive performances in the film version of “Hair” in 1979 and the police drama “Prince of the City” two years later before settling into a steady career in film and television that included a four-season run on the WB series “Everwood,” died on Monday in a motorcycle accident in Dorset, Vt. He was 71.
Mr. Williams was killed shortly before 5 p.m. when an S.U.V. that was southbound on Route 30 near the Vermont-New York border turned left into a parking lot and into the path of the Honda motorcycle driven by Mr. Williams, the Vermont State Police said in a statement.
Mr. Williams was “unable to avoid a collision and was thrown from his motorcycle,” the statement said.
Mr. Williams, who was wearing a helmet, was pronounced dead at a medical center in Albany, N.Y., after being airlifted there, the state police said. The 35-year-old man whose vehicle hit Mr. Williams was not hospitalized.
Mr. Williams was a familiar face in the movies and on TV, accumulating some 130 credits while also occasionally working on the stage. It was a stage performance that landed him his breakout role in “Hair” — he was a replacement player in the lead role of Danny Zuko in the long-running Broadway production of “Grease” in the 1970s, and when the film director Milos Forman saw him in that show, he invited him to take the role of the hippie Berger in his film of “Hair,” based on the rock stage musical of the 1960s.
Berger was a mop-topped rebel, and Mr. Williams had some help from the makeup department in creating his portrayal.
“All that hair in ‘Hair’ wasn’t my own,” he told The New York Times in 1980. “A lot of it was woven into my own hair right at the scalp. If I moved the wrong way in my sleep, I’d pull it and make my scalp bleed.”
His energetic performance impressed critics.
“As his name might indicate,” Janet Maslin wrote in The Times, “Treat Williams is one of the better things ‘Hair’ has to offer. Mr. Williams, who plays the leader of the film’s small and bedraggled band of hippies, is the only one of the players who really suggests the spirit of euphoria upon which the original ‘Hair’ meant to capitalize.”
Mr. Williams’s performance in “Hair” drew the attention of Sidney Lumet, who was preparing to direct “Prince of the City,” a fictionalized version of the story of Robert Leuci, a New York City detective who exposed corruption in the police department. Mr. Lumet told Newsweek in 1981 that Mr. Williams’s performance in “Hair” displayed “a life force, a kind of inner energy, bouncing off the screen.” He cast him in the lead role in “Prince of the City,” a demanding one.
“Williams is almost always onscreen,” Roger Ebert, film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times, wrote, “and almost always in situations of extreme stress, fatigue and emotional turmoil. We see him coming apart before our eyes.”
Such performances landed Mr. Williams on the cover of Newsweek in December 1981. He was pictured alongside William Hurt and Elizabeth McGovern. The headline was “A New Breed of Actor.”
“Versatility is a mark of the new breed,” the accompanying article said, “and Treat Williams is one of its most versatile.” About the time “Prince of the City” was being released, it noted, Mr. Williams was stepping into the role of the Pirate King in “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway, replacing Kevin Kline, who had won a Tony Award for his portrayal.
Versatility kept Mr. Williams working steadily for the next four decades. He played doctors, law enforcement officials, various villains, assorted military officers, lovable father figures. In “Confirmation” (2016), an HBO docudrama about the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Clarence Thomas, he played Senator Edward M. Kennedy. One of his most recent movies was “Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square,” a holiday film for Netflix in which he played opposite Ms. Parton and sang a song she wrote, “Memories.”
Richard Treat Williams was born Dec. 1, 1951, in Stamford, Conn. “Treat” is a Welsh name that has been in his family for generations. His father, Richard, was a World War II veteran who later worked for the Merck pharmaceutical company and elsewhere. His mother, Marian (Andrew) Williams, owned a sailing and swimming school on Long Island Sound.
Mr. Williams moved with his family to Rowayton, Conn., as a young child, he told Vermont magazine in a 2021 interview.
“Looking back on my younger years,” he told the magazine, “I had an idyllic childhood, but I didn’t initially realize how idyllic it truly was until I grew older.”
Mr. Williams began acting in seventh grade. Later, at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, he quit the football team to focus on acting. He also performed with a group called the Actors’ Company at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pa., where one of his earliest performances was in the Anthony Newley role in “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off,” in March 1971, when he was a sophomore in college.
“The part is one which taxes the talents of any performer — part mime, part actor and part singer,” Sam Taylor wrote in a rave review in The Lancaster New Era. “Williams displayed all of these ingredients in full supply.”
Mr. Williams graduated from Franklin and Marshall in 1973 and was soon working in New York. In 1975 he appeared in a revival of William Inge’s “Bus Stop” at the Equity Library Theater in Manhattan; his first film role came that year as well, in a police drama called “Deadly Hero,” as part of a cast that also included James Earl Jones.
For a brief moment after the box-office failure of a 1980 film comedy called “Why Would I Lie?” that he was in, Mr. Williams, a pilot, soured on acting and started flying planes for a company in Los Angeles.
“I wasn’t working with people I wanted to work with,” he told The Times in 1981. “I was very frustrated.”
But then Mr. Lumet called to offer him “Prince of the City.”
Among his later career highlights was “Everwood,” a WB television series about a New York neurosurgeon who starts a new life with his family in the mountains of Colorado after his wife dies in a car accident. The show debuted in 2002.
More recently, Mr. Williams played a retired detective on the 2022 HBO series “We Own This City.”
Information about Mr. Williams’s survivors was not immediately available.
Hours before he died, Mr. Williams, who lived in Manchester Center, Vt., posted a photo on Twitter that he appeared to have taken from the seat of his lawn mower.
“Mowing today,” he wrote. “Wish I could bottle the scent.”
Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.