Bill Williams

Their middle child, son William Katt, a blond stunner who went on to fame in the movie Carrie (1976) and the weekly series spoof The Greatest American Hero (1981), obviously got his incredibly good looks from his dad.

While Bill continued to perform throughout the 1970s and into the early '80s in character roles, he was seen less and less as his interest waned.

Bill and Barbara did appear together in the films Buckskin (1968) and The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), as well as occasionally on TV.

In 1960 he returned to his watery roots with the "Sea Hunt" inspired adventure Assignment: Underwater (1960) but the program was short-lived. He also appeared in guest assignments in such popular TV shows as "Rawhide," "77 Sunset Strip," and "Hawaiian Eye," not to mention multiple episodes of wife Barbara's series "Perry Mason," in which she co-starred as girl Friday Della Street.

He turned down the lead in the adventure series Sea Hunt (1958), which eventually went to Lloyd Bridges, because he didn't think an underwater show would work well on TV. After the show became a hit with Bridges, Bill decided to try a water-themed series of his own, but it was short-lived.

He scored big with the kiddies as the title hero in the syndicated The Adventures of Kit Carson (1951), which ran for three seasons, and later shifted to lighter, less strenuous work as Betty White's hubby in the promising but short-lived domestic comedy Date with the Angels (1957).

While he showed steady improvement and likability in films, he had a difficult time rising above the benign "B" adventure material he was shoehorned into playing (Fighting Man of the Plains (1949), Rookie Fireman (1950), The Cariboo Trail (1950), to name a few). In the early '50s he started checking out the relatively new medium of TV as a viable means of employment.

They married a year later and went on to co-star together in the light comedy A Likely Story (1947) and the film noir suspense film The Clay Pigeon (1949). They had two daughters and a son. Bill was a reliable "nice guy" lead and second lead.

By the time the war ended, RKO Pictures had him under contract and gave him co-star billing in such promising entries as Till the End of Time (1946) in which he played Robert Mitchum's ex-GI buddy, and the film noir piece Deadline at Dawn (1946) as a sailor who gets tangled up with both murder and lovelies Susan Hayward and Lola Lane.

In 1945 fellow RKO actress Barbara Hale asked the director of West of the Pecos (1945), Edward Killy, to hire Bill so they could spend time together (see Barbara Hale's personal quotes).

He made his debut in Murder in the Blue Room (1944) and could be glimpsed here and there as various student, soldier or rookie types for the first couple of years.

A solid film and TV player bearing a strong, honest persona for most his career, this innocent-eyed, boyishly handsome blond "B" actor of the 1940s and '50s was born in Brooklyn on May 21, 1915, and educated there at the Pratt Institute. A natural athlete, Bill Williams was a professional swimmer who broke into the entertainment business combining his swimming and dancing skills performing in aquatic underwater shows. Gaining experience as a performer in vaudeville and stock shows (both here and England), he started appearing in extra or bit parts in films following WWII army duty.