William Hickey

While playwright Mart Crowley was a 2009 guest on the CUNY TV - Thirteen/WNET talk show "Theater Talk," Crowley said that during the first production of his 1968 play "The Boys in the Band," William Hickey was originally cast in that play, in the role of Emory (eventually played both on stage and in the 1970 movie by Cliff Gorman). Crowley remembered that Hickey "was a terrific actor, of course, and I don't think it's telling any stories out of school [to say] that he had a problem with addiction, because he was always struggling, and losing parts, and not being hired because of it. And after he auditioned, got the part, we only had a--what, a week? to get it up--the play, the workshop production, and he didn't show up for rehearsal the first day. And then when he didn't come the second day, the director, Robert Moore, said to me, 'we just can't. we've got to go with somebody else. Who was that guy who was so over-the-top who came in?' We looked down the list and it was Cliff Gorman. So we called him quick!".

Hickey co-stared in two films with Debbie Harry, Tales from the Darkside (1990) and Sandman (1995), a short film where they play romantic interests.

Hickey was in two films with Barnard Hughes, A Hobo's Christmas (1987) and Da (1988) the year after. The two were in separate episodes of The Doctors and the Nurses, Tales from the Darkside, The Defenders, As the World Turns, and Guiding Light.

Son of Edward & Nora Hickey. Best known as the ancient Mafia don in Prizzi's Honor (1985), Hickey had a long, distinguished career in film, television, and the stage. Began career as a child actor on the variety stage.

He was in two films based on the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Happy Birthday Wanda June (1971) where he played Colonel Looseleaf Harper, and Between Time and Timbuktu (1972) as Corporal Stoney Stevenson, who ends up meeting Wanda June herself.