Van Zandt Jarvis Williams, (February 27, 1934-November 28, 2016) was an American actor best known for his role as the title character in the television series The Green Hornet. Williams starred alongside Bruce Lee as his sidekick Kato, and the series was broadcast for 26 episodes on ABC during the 1966-1967 season. He participated in a May 2015 interview with Comic Book Central interview which lends additional light on his life and career.
Career[]
In 1966, ABC-TV revived George W. Trendle's famous radio character, the Green Hornet, in a self-titled television series, produced by William Dozier through his Greenway/Greenlawn Productions company. Williams signed with 20th Century-Fox to portray the mysterious masked hero and his alter ego, newspaper editor Britt Reid, grandson of Dan Reid, the nephew of John Reid, aka The Lone Ranger. Williams played the role straight, unlike the camp comedy approach of the same producer's Batman show. He and co-star Bruce Lee also made guest appearances, in character, on the Batman series for two episodes, a two-parter in which they fought a villain called Colonel Gumm (Roger C. Carmel) and a "window" cameo in another episode earlier in the same season.
By the time he starred in The Green Hornet, Williams had become financially successful from investing in various commercial ventures; a TV Guide profile of 1966, titled "Banker with a Sting," characterized him as "your friendly neighborhood tycoon." He retired from acting in 1982 to open a Santa Monica, California communications company that leased time on six two-way radio repeater stations.
Bruce Lee died of a cerebral edema on July 20, 1973. Williams's acting career faded at that approximate time, although he made a few television guest appearances and starred in one more series, an NBC Saturday morning offering entitled Westwind. Williams had not looked back with much fondness on his acting career, complaining to People magazine, "I felt like a monkey in the zoo. There was absolutely no privacy."
In 1993, Williams made a cameo in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story as a director on the set of The Green Hornet television series. In 2010, he was also invited to make a cameo appearance as a cemetery guard in the feature film adaptation of The Green Hornet, but it turned out he would be unavailable for the required filming dates.
On December 5, 2016, producer Kevin Burns revealed that Williams had died of renal failure in Scottsdale, Arizona, on November 28, 2016, at the age of 82.