American TV and film actor whose repertoire ran from Shakespeare to Star Trek
It may well be that the American actor William Windom, who has died aged 88 of congestive heart failure, appeared as a guest star in more TV series than anyone else in the history of the medium. While quantity is not necessarily an adjunct of quality, Windom made it so.
The character actor's career on television spanned seven decades, from his debut as a fiery Tybalt in a Philco Television Playhouse production of Romeo and Juliet (1949) to an episode of Star Trek: New Voyages (2004) in which he recreated the role of the unbalanced Commodore Matt Decker. Decker was first seen in one of the series's best chapters, The Doomsday Machine (1967), and it was enough to sanctify Windom in the eyes of Trekkies. The role had been written for Robert Ryan, but Windom's powerful portrayal made any possible comparisons redundant.
Among many other standout performances on television were two in the cultish Twilight Zone series, as an agitated military officer who turns out to be a doll in Five Characters in Search of an Exit (1961), and as a calm psychiatrist trying to sort out Robert Duvall's disturbed mind in Miniature (1963). Windom also had leading parts in long-running programmes such as The Farmer's Daughter (1963-66), as a widowed congressman who falls for the Swedish farm girl (Inger Stevens), governess to his children; and Murder, She Wrote (1984-96), in which he was Seth Hazlitt, the crusty old doctor, friend and confidant of the crime writer Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury).
The former role was close to his heart because Windom's great-grandfather, of the same name, had been a Minnesota congressman and secretary of the treasury in the 19th century.
Windom was born in New York City and educated at Williams College, Massachusetts. During the second world war he served as a paratrooper, and after it enrolled in the new American University in Biarritz, France. It was there that he started acting, and he continued on his return to the US. Windom made his Broadway debut in 1947 in roles of various sizes in an American Repertory Theatre season that included Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman (as young Erhart Borkman), Shaw's Androcles and the Lion, Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, and Alice in Wonderland (as the White Rabbit). In 1956, Windom showed a flair for comedy in a revival of Noël Coward's Fallen Angels.
When already 13 years into his long career in television, Windom made his big-screen debut in one of his best films, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), in which he played the smirking prosecutor who knows that he just has to play the race card to win against Gregory Peck, defending a black man charged with the rape of a white woman.
Further unsympathetic roles followed: an alcoholic whose sister (Joan Caulfield) is being wooed by a cattle rancher (Robert Taylor) in Guns of Wyoming (1963); a closeted, married gay man in The Detective (1968); a sleazy movie producer in The Angry Breed (also 1968); and Deborah Kerr's cuckold husband in The Gypsy Moths (1969). In Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Windom, trying not to look foolish, played the US president questioning an English-speaking simian couple who have landed in America by spaceship. "I tend to go overboard," Windom once remarked. "I go too far and then let the director bring me back where he wants me. It's like focusing a telescope."
Few of his feature films allowed for much humour, unlike television, which gave him more leeway. My World and Welcome to It (1969-70), based on the writings and cartoons of the American humorist James Thurber, gave him the chance to play a witty, nuanced character not unlike the original author. The shortlived sitcom won Windom an Emmy award and led to his touring one-man show on Thurber.
Of the show, which Windom performed around the US and abroad for some years, the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Windom has the gift of picking the terrible plainness of living and bringing it forward to say, 'See? Here's what we are, every one of us. And do you know, we're not bad.' "
Windom is survived by his fifth wife, Patricia, and four children.
• William Windom, actor; born 28 September 1923; died 16 August 2012
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/aug/23/william-windom
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