Hal Williams

Halroy Candis Williams, known professionally as Hal Williams, was an American actor whose six-decade career made him a familiar face on network television. He was born in Columbus, Ohio. Major 2026 obituaries, including The Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times, give his date of birth as 14 December 1934. Other published sources have given 1938, and Columbus Dispatch reporting cited 15 December 1939. He was widely reported as 91 at his death on 15 July 2026, which matches a 1934 birth and does not match 1938 or 1939. East High School graduation in 1953, documented by Columbus Monthly, also fits a late-1934 birth better than 1938 or 1939. This profile uses 14 December 1934 as the preferred date and records the conflict. It does not treat any single year as the only possible birth year.

He grew up on Columbus's East Side, spending much of his childhood with a great-grandmother while his parents worked at Curtiss-Wright Aviation. He hunted rabbits in then-open fields near Stelzer and Morse and spent Saturdays at East Side movie houses such as the Empress. He delivered newspapers for The Columbus Dispatch, attended Franklin Junior High and East High School, where he ran track and appeared in school musicals, and graduated from East in 1953. No college degree is consistently documented in major obituaries. His professional training came through community theater in Ohio and on-the-job Hollywood work from 1968 onward. He later attended culinary school in the 1980s.

Before Hollywood he worked with children in social services and the juvenile detention system, including time associated with Franklin Village and the Ohio Youth Commission, and he performed in Columbus community theater in the early 1960s. After a divorce left him a father of three, he decided in 1968 to try acting full-time. He drove west from a Brentnell Avenue home, giving little notice to anyone but his parents, who thought he had lost his mind. He gave himself three years in California and left the children temporarily with his parents in Ohio until he could house them in Los Angeles. He later said he was scared to death, and that if he did not do it then he would never get the guts to do it.

In Los Angeles he auditioned around overnight shifts at the LAX post office and other jobs. Advice from actress Maidie Norman steered him to trade-paper casting notices in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. Commercials and stage work followed. By about 1971 and 1972 he held overlapping recurring roles, still working nights at the post office until a postmaster who had seen him on television told him to choose between Uncle Sam's mail and acting. From 1972 he played Officer "Smitty" Smith on Norman Lear's Sanford and Son, often paired with Howard Platt's Officer "Hoppy" Hopkins in a bit where Hoppy's stiff police jargon was translated into plain speech for Fred and Lamont. He and Platt worked the slang routine out in rehearsal when scripts needed help. He also recurred as Harley Foster on The Waltons, appeared on Kung Fu, Harry O, The Jimmy Stewart Show, and That Girl, and was a series regular on ABC's prison comedy On the Rocks. Guest work on The Jimmy Stewart Show and That Girl is dated to 1971 in the sources used here.

In 1980 he played Drill Sergeant L.C. "Ted" Ross opposite Goldie Hawn in the film Private Benjamin, then continued the role as Sgt. Ted Ross on the CBS television adaptation from 1981 to 1983. He also appeared in Herbie Rides Again (1974, as a police officer), Hardcore (1979), and Roots: The Next Generations (1979). He reprised Smitty on the Sanford series in 1980 and 1981. In 1981 he performed in the stage play Nevis Mountain Dew at the Los Angeles Actors Theatre. From 1985 to 1990 he starred as construction-company owner and husband Lester Jenkins on NBC's 227, across 116 episodes, opposite Marla Gibbs, with a young Regina King as their daughter Brenda. The sitcom, developed from a stage play associated with Gibbs's Crossroads Theater circle, offered a durable portrait of a middle-class Black family in a Washington, D.C., apartment building. Later television included The Sinbad Show (1993-1994, as Rudy Bryan), guest turns across network dramas and comedies, a 2019 cameo as himself on A Black Lady Sketch Show, and, in 2024 and 2025, Autry on the CBS Matlock reboot (two episodes). Film credits included The Rookie (1990, as Detective Powell), Guess Who (2005, as Howard Jones, Bernie Mac's father), and the voice of Whip's dad in Flight (2012). He also appeared at The Waltons 40th anniversary gathering in 2012.

Off screen he served on the board of the Los Angeles Actors' Theatre founded by Ralph Waite and created the Mark K.A. Williams Memorial Scholarship Foundation after his son Mark, a broadcasting student, died at 20 on a camping trip in the Angeles National Forest. The foundation supported students of color in television and communications. Colleagues remembered him as a mentor who insisted Black fathers on television should be loving, present, and compassionate. He told interviewers he aspired simply to be a working actor, preferred professionalism and knowing one's lines, and told Columbus Monthly he chose a profession in which you grow older while you keep working. He was married twice in publicly documented unions: Gay Anderson from 1975 to 1976, and Renee W. Himes from 1978 to 1984. He had three children. He was predeceased by Mark and survived by two children, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. The names of the two surviving children, and the name of the spouse from the marriage that ended before the 1968 move, are not consistently given in major obituaries and are not supplied here. Parents who worked at Curtiss-Wright Aviation, and the great-grandmother who raised him for much of his childhood, are documented without names that major obituaries treat as settled. WikiTree names for the parents are secondary and are not repeated here. He cooked large dinner parties and spoke of a memoir and a cookbook honoring his great-grandmother.

In July 2026 he returned from an Ohio Sanford and Son reunion celebration with Howard Platt and gave a warm WKYC television interview days before his death. He died of natural causes on the morning of 15 July 2026 at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, after recent health issues, his manager Zna Portlock Houston confirmed to TMZ, Deadline, and the Los Angeles Times. Public burial or funeral details were not made widely public in the major obituaries reviewed for this profile. Tributes from Marla Gibbs, Regina King, Jackee Harry, Holly Robinson Peete, and others stressed both his craft and his kindness. Across more than five decades he remained what he said he aspired to be: a working actor whose hit shows still feel like home.