Regina King Speak Up After Hal Williams DIES 

Two days before he died, Hal Williams was in Ohio laughing with an old friend. He’d flown home to Columbus, the city that raised him, to stand next to Howard Platt, the man who played his partner in crime-fighting comedy 50 years earlier on Sanford and Son. Fans lined up. Cameras flashed. For one afternoon, Smitty and Hoppy were back together, trading the same easy chemistry that made millions of viewers fall in love with them in 1972.

He flew home to Rancho Mirage, California, tired from the trip. And on the morning of July 15th, 2026, at 91 years old, Hal Williams passed away peacefully in his own home. No dramatic decline. No headline-grabbing illness. Just a long, extraordinary life that came to a quiet close.

 The same understated grace that defined every character he ever played. So, today, we’re not just going to report that Hal Williams died. We’re going to tell you who he actually was. The postal worker who moonlighted as a TV star. The juvenile corrections officer who chose a completely different path in his 30s. The actor who quietly reshaped how black fathers were shown on American television.

Because if you only know him as Smitty, you’re missing most of the story. And by the end of this video, you’ll understand exactly why his fellow actors are calling him one of the most decent men to ever work in Hollywood. Stick around because his story doesn’t start in Los Angeles. It starts in a juvenile detention office in Columbus, Ohio.

 A place about as far from a sound stage as you can imagine. Hal Williams was born Hal Roy Candis Williams in Columbus, Ohio, on December 14th in the mid-1930s. He grew up in working-class neighborhoods on the city’s East Side, spending part of his childhood living with his great-grandmother while his parents worked in aviation manufacturing during the war years.

 He went to Franklin Junior High and East High School, and by all accounts, performance was already tugging at him. School musicals, track meets, long afternoons at the local movie theater on the east side, soaking up whatever stories were playing that week. But dreams don’t pay rent. So like most young men of his generation, Williams did the responsible thing. He got a steady job.

 Actually, he got several. Through the 1960s, Williams worked as a juvenile corrections officer for the Ohio Youth Commission. He also worked in child and family services, spent time as a probation officer, and briefly worked with a federal poverty program. This wasn’t a man playing around on the margins of society.

 He was in the middle of it, working directly with troubled kids, trying to help them find a better path. And here’s the thing that makes his story so compelling. He was good at that job. Stable, respected, the kind of career a lot of people would have simply settled into for the next 30 years. But something in him wasn’t satisfied.

He’d started dabbling in community theater on the side, catching whatever spare hours he could find between shifts. And the acting bug had already sunk its teeth in. Then his personal life hit a turning point. Williams went through a divorce, and as a father of three, he found himself asking a question a lot of people ask, but very few actually act on.

 What do I actually want to do before it’s too late? For How Williams, the answer was acting. Not community theater. Not a hobby. The real thing. So in 1968, in his 30s, an age when most people are told it’s too late to start over, Williams packed up and made the drive from Columbus to Los Angeles. Reportedly, he made the trip in about 48 hours straight.

His kids stayed behind with his parents until he could get settled. And once he found a place, they joined him in California. That’s not a small detail. That’s a man betting everything on a dream most people would call impossible, while still being responsible enough to make sure his children were taken care of first.

Keep that image in mind because it tells you almost everything you need to know about who Hal Williams was, both on screen and off. Landing in Los Angeles with no contacts and no credits is a nightmare scenario for most aspiring actors. Williams solved it the old-fashioned way, through a personal connection.

He reached out to Maidie Norman, an established black film actress whose brother had once worked alongside him back in Ohio. Her advice was simple and practical. Pick up the trade papers, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter every Friday and start submitting for anything you can find. So, that’s exactly what he did.

 He landed his first play through that grind. From there, an agent noticed him and asked if he’d ever considered doing commercials. Before long, Williams had booked three national ad campaigns, a foothold that opened the door to television guest spots. But, he wasn’t quitting his day job, not yet. Williams took a job working nights at a Los Angeles post office, specifically near LAX, which let him spend his days chasing auditions and casting calls.

It’s worth sitting with that for a second. This is a grown man in his 30s working an overnight shift at the post office, then showing up exhausted to audition rooms during the day, competing against actors half his age with none of his responsibilities. He gave himself a window, 3 years to make it as an actor or he’d walk away and go back to a real career.

It’s the kind of ultimatum that sounds dramatic in hindsight because we already know how the story ends. But, at the time, there was no guarantee. He could have easily spent 3 years auditioning and gone home with nothing to show for it. Instead, the guest spots started rolling in. Dan August, That Girl, Cannon, small roles, but real credits, real momentum.

And then, in the early 1970s, everything changed at once. By 1972, Williams somehow had recurring roles in three television shows simultaneously. Sanford and Son, Harry O, and The Waltons. Three different sets, three different characters, all while, you guessed it, he was still working nights at the post office.

 He didn’t quit that post office job until his children were grown and off to college and his acting career had proven itself financially stable enough to support the family on its own. Years after becoming a bonafide TV star, Hal Williams was still punching a clock at night because that’s the kind of responsibility that had been drilled into him back in Ohio.

 If you ask most people under 60 who Hal Williams was, they’ll say one thing, Smitty from Sanford and Son. The show, created by Norman Lear, was already a cultural phenomenon by the time Williams joined. Red Fox as the cantankerous junk dealer Fred Sanford, Demond Wilson as his long-suffering son Lamont. Into that world walked Officer Smitty Smith, a black lap officer who, alongside his partner Officer Howard Hoppy Hopkins, played by Howard Platt, became a fan-favorite comedic duo across 22 episodes between 1972 and 1976.

The bit that made them click was simple but brilliant. Hoppy would open a scene with stiff, overly formal police procedural language and Smitty would step in and translate it into plain English for Fred and Lamont. It was a small comedic engine, but it worked so well the writers kept bringing them back. Williams himself later explained that the routine actually started almost by accident in a rehearsal that got a laugh from the producers and simply stuck from there.

For black viewers watching television in the early 1970s, a scene like that carried more weight than it might seem today. Seeing two black police officers portrayed with humor, competence, and warmth, rather than as background props or stereotypes, was still relatively rare on network television. Williams later became known industry-wide and among fans for insisting that black characters, whether fathers, officers, or working men, be written and played with dignity.

That wasn’t an accident. It was a value he carried with him from role to role for the next five decades. Sanford and Son made Hal Williams a recognizable face in American living rooms. But what’s remarkable is that he didn’t let it define the limits of what kind of actor he could be. While he was cracking up audiences on NBC on Friday nights, he was quietly building a completely different reputation on a totally different kind of show.

At the exact same time Williams was doing comedy on Sanford and Son, he was also appearing on The Waltons, playing Harley Foster, a worker at the local lumber mill with a much heavier backstory. A man who had escaped prison after being wrongly convicted of killing someone in self-defense. It’s about as far from slapstick police comedy as you can get, and Williams moved between the two worlds for years, on and off, from 1973 through the early 1980s.

That range, sliding effortlessly from broad comedy to dramatic, morally complicated material, became one of the defining traits of his career. He also picked up a memorable guest role on Kung Fu, playing a friend of David Carradine’s character named Caleb, appearing in both the second and third seasons of that show.

Then in 1980 came one of his most beloved film roles, Sergeant L.C. Ross in Private Benjamin, the hit comedy starring Goldie Hawn as a pampered widow who enlists in the army and gets steamrolled by military discipline. Williams played the tough but fair drill sergeant character opposite Hawn, and audiences loved him enough that when the film was adapted into a CBS sitcom from 1981 to 1983, Williams reprised the role for all three seasons.

 This time, opposite Lorna Patterson. Think about what that means for a career. In the span of about a decade, Hal Williams had gone from working nights at the post office to starring across three completely different genres at once. Sketch-style sitcom comedy, hour-long family drama, and big-budget Hollywood film comedy.

 And he was excelling in all three simultaneously. That’s not luck. That’s a serious, disciplined craftsman who happened to also be one of the most likable presences on television. And his biggest sitcom role was still ahead of him. In 1985, Williams landed the role that many of his peers and fans consider his signature performance, Lester Jenkins on NBC’s 227.

The show followed a close-knit group of tenants and neighbors living in and around a Washington D.C. apartment building. Anchored by Marla Gibbs as Mary Jenkins and a young Regina King as their daughter, Brenda Williams played Lester, Mary’s steady, hard-working husband. A role that put fatherhood and marriage front and center in a way that felt genuinely warm rather than saccharine.

227 ran for five seasons and 116 episodes from 1985 to 1990. And it became appointment viewing for black households across America, and for plenty of others, too. What made Lester Jenkins resonate wasn’t flashy writing. It was Williams’ insistence on portraying a black father as loving, present, dependable, and funny without leaning on cliché or caricature.

That approach, making a black husband and father simply feel like a real whole human being on screen, was something Williams reportedly cared about deeply throughout his career, long before representation became a buzzword in the entertainment industry. His 227 co-star, Jackee Harry, who played the show’s scene-stealing neighbor, Sandra Clark, would later describe Williams as a stand-up guy who consistently pushed for exactly that kind of portrayal, and someone who could make her laugh on set no matter what.

Off the back of 227, Williams kept working steadily through the ’90s. He played Rudy, the father of Sinbad’s character on the Fox sitcom The Sinbad Show, which ran from 1993 to 1994. He picked up guest appearances across dozens of other shows and made-for-TV projects, including Roots: The Next Generations, and continued building one of the most extensive of any working black actor of his generation, more than 100 film and television credits by the time all was said and done.

Even as he moved into his later decades, Williams kept working. He stepped onto film sets for projects like Herbie Rides Again, The Cherokee Kid, Guess Who, the 2005 comedy starring Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher, and Robert Zemeckis’s 2012 drama Flight, alongside Denzel Washington. He also had a run on the stage, including a notable turn as Boycie McKennels in the 1981 Los Angeles Actors Theatre production of Nevis Mountain Dew.

Just 5 days before he passed, Hal Williams sat down for an interview with De Quickest, a television station in Ohio, reflecting on his career and on why Sanford and Son, a show that had been off the air for nearly 50 years, still resonated with new generations of viewers discovering it for the first time. His answer, in typical Williams fashion, was refreshingly simple.

 He credited the show’s humor for feeling authentic instead of forced, and said that’s what kept people laughing episode after episode, decade after decade. Anyone watching that interview could see it. A 91-year-old man, still sharp, still warm, still clearly in love with the craft that had defined his life. Commenters flooded that segment afterward, remarking on how healthy and alert he seemed for his age.

Then came the Sanford and Son reunion event in Ohio, where Williams reunited publicly with Howard Platt, the two men who played Smitty and Hoppy over five decades earlier, standing together one more time in front of fans who grew up watching them. By all accounts, it was a joyful, celebratory trip home. Williams returned to Rancho Mirage exhausted from the travel.

 According to his long-time manager, Zenna Portlock Houston, he had been dealing with some ongoing health issues in his later years. Two days after returning home, on the morning of Wednesday, July 15th, 2026, Hal Williams died peacefully in his own home. He was 91 years old. His representative confirmed the cause as natural causes.

 No specific illness was cited publicly. It’s worth pausing on that timeline because there’s something almost poetic about it. His final public appearance wasn’t a random red carpet or an obligatory press event. It was a reunion with the man who’d been by his side professionally for over 50 years, celebrating the very show that first made America fall in love with him.

 He got to go home to Ohio, laugh with an old friend, take in the applause one more time, and then he went home to rest. Two days later, he was gone. Within hours of the news breaking, tributes started coming in from people who had worked alongside him across six decades of television. his 227 co-star, posted a heartfelt tribute describing Williams as a stand-up guy, someone who consistently believed black fathers deserved to be shown on television as loving, present, and compassionate men.

She also spoke to his sense of humor, noting that he always carried himself with grace, and always managed to make her laugh. Ernest Harden Jr., who played his on-screen son during his time on Good Times, shared something that hit particularly hard for fans. He had actually spoken with Williams over FaceTime just one day before he passed.

According to Harden, Williams was in high spirits during that call, full of congratulations and encouragement. And in a detail that speaks volumes about the kind of relationships Williams built on set, he still referred to Harden as son decades after they last worked together. Holly Robinson Peete also paid tribute, describing Williams as a steady, comforting presence on American television screens for generations.

Someone whose gentle energy and kindness extended well beyond the camera. She specifically pointed to his 50-year friendship with her own mother as proof of just how deep and lasting his relationships in the industry ran. Beyond those personal tributes, the broader response from industry peers and longtime fans has centered on two consistent themes.

First, his sheer versatility, his ability to elevate practically every scene he appeared in, whether he had one line or was carrying an entire episode. And second, his historic role in shaping how black families and black men in particular were represented on mainstream American television at a time when those portrayals were still evolving and frankly still being fought for.

It’s easy, when someone passes away at 91 after a 50-plus year career, to reduce their story down to a list of shows and a cause of death. But how William’s story is really a story about persistence, patience, and quiet integrity. This was a man who didn’t even start pursuing acting full-time until he was already in his 30s, already divorced, already a father of three, already established in an entirely different career helping troubled kids in the juvenile justice system in Ohio.

He didn’t have the luxury of failing safely. He gave himself a deadline, worked a night shift at the post office for years even after landing recurring TV roles, and only fully committed to acting once his family’s financial future was secure. And once he made it, he didn’t coast. He worked across comedy, drama, and film.

He shared scenes with legends like Redd Foxx, Goldie Hawn, Denzel Washington, and Marla Gibbs. And by every account from the people who worked closest with him, he treated every single one of those collaborations and every co-star with the same warmth and generosity, the kind of onset reputation that doesn’t fade and that people are still talking about in detail more than 50 years later.

Perhaps most importantly, at a time when black characters on network television were too often written as one note or stereotypical, How Williams consistently pushed for something more human. Fathers, husbands, and officers who were funny, flawed, dependable, and dignified all at once. That wasn’t a footnote to his career.

According to the people who knew him best, it was the whole point. He got to spend his final days doing exactly what he loved, celebrating a show that changed his life, standing next to an old friend, hearing the applause of fans who grew up on his work before going home to rest. And when he passed, it wasn’t in a hospital bed hooked up to machines.

 It was peacefully in his own home surrounded by the life he built. That’s not a tragic ending. That’s about as good an ending as anyone could hope for. How Williams leaves behind three children, multiple grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and honestly, millions of people who grew up watching him on Friday nights feeling like Smitty or Lester or Harley Foster was practically a member of their own family.

More than 100 film and television credits. Five decades in the business. Three simultaneous recurring roles at the peak of his career. A reputation among everyone who worked with him as one of the kindest, most decent men in Hollywood. If you grew up watching Sanford and Son, 227, The Waltons, or Private Benjamin, drop a comment below and tell us which Hal Williams role meant the most to you.

And if this video helped you understand just how much this man accomplished, quietly, patiently, one decade at a time, do us a favor and hit subscribe because we’re covering the stories behind the icons who shaped American television, one legend at a time. Rest easy, Hal Williams. Thank you for the laughs, the lessons, and 50 years of showing us what it looks like to do this the right way.