Tom Williams was an American actor and producer.
Williams became enamored with show business at an early age, particularly with singing, which led to him joining a barbershop quartet. Upon his discharge from the military, he worked part time in television in Chicago, appearing in commercials and on local television shows, and worked with an improvisational acting group.
In the mid-1950s, Williams moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He was cast in the 1959 Broadway comedy, Tall Story, in which he got to work with one of his idols, actor Hans Conreid.
Williams moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s. While attending a party at the home of musician/actor Bobby Troup and singer/actress Julie London, Williams met actor/producer/director Jack Webb, who cast Williams as the nephew of Bill Gannon (Harry Morgan) in the 1966 TV movie pilot that brought Dragnet back to network television.
While on the set of the Dragnet TV movie, Williams became so fascinated with the way Webb ran his set that Webb offered him a production assistant job once the Dragnet series was underway. Williams also worked on Adam-12 when it began production in 1968 and through 1970, he worked for Webb on both series. Following the cancellation of Dragnet, Williams worked his way up on Adam-12 as associate producer, and then producer during its last two seasons in the 1970s.
Williams returned to acting in the mid-1970s, appearing in guest roles on The Rockford Files, CHiPs, Chico and the Man, Emergency, The Waltons, and many others. It was during this period that he began doing quite a bit of voiceover work, specializing in baby cries and animal sounds, something he used to do as far back as his early teens. Williams provided these voices and sounds for hundreds of television commercials and series for over thirty years. His last professional credit was the voice of a laughing dog in a 2007 TV commercial for the Geico insurance agency.
Williams was a longtime board member of Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, an organization which honors broadcasters for outstanding achievements, and was still on the board at the time of his passing.
Williams died December 28, 2018, in Woodland Hills, California. He was 89.
