Source:MeTV– Happy Birthday to Clarence Williams.
“Happy Birthday to Clarence Williams III! The actor who is best known for his role on The Mod Squad, turns 74 today!”
From MeTV
“The Mod Squad TV Show Theme Opening Season One. Great quality from DVD source. 1960s Clarence Thomas III Peggy Lipton Michael Cole. The Mod Squad was a police drama that featured three young, hip, crime fighters. One White, One Black, One Blonde, was the promotional hype-line. The casting was intended to appeal to a youthful, counterculture audience. The basic premise was that the youthful investigators were offered work fighting crime as an alternative to being incarcerated themselves. The show’s primary gimmick centered on the three cops using their youthful, hippie personas as a guise to get close to the criminals they investigated. The show was moderately popular during its initial run of five seasons and 123 episodes. Tige Andrews (Captain Greer), Michael Cole (Pete Cochran), Peggy Lipton (Julie Barnes), and Clarence Williams III (Linc Hayes) starred. The show portrayed a multicultural society and dealt with issues of racial politics, drug culture, and counterculture.
The show was loosely based on Police Officer Bud Ruskin’s experiences in the late 1950s as a squad leader for undercover narcotics cops, though it took almost 10 years after he wrote a script for the idea to be given the greenlight by ABC television studios.”
Source:Retro Rebirth– Michael Cole & Clarence Williams.
From Retro Rebirth
Happy Birthday to one of my favorite actors a great character actor, whose also one of the most underrated character actors in Hollywood. Williams is probably best known for his role as an undercover detective on the Mod Squad. Which I’m not sure is not even a very good show for the early 1970s even. And perhaps not even that believable when you’re talking about ex-cons who get the opportunity to get out of jail if they agree to become undercover police officers, or detectives. But it was a very hip show for its time, at least and perhaps that is the only thing that it had going for it. But seeing it on reruns especially the writing it looks pretty cheesy, even for that time period.
But Williams career is a lot better than just Mod Squad. He was in I’m Going to Get You Sucka, which is a very good African-American action/comedy from 1988.
Williams also had big roles on Miami Vice perhaps the greatest police detective show of all-time.
Hill Street Blues from the early 1980s on NBC about New York City police officers.
Reindeer Games from 2000 where he was one of the kidnappers in that movie.
TNT’s George Wallace from 1997 where he played a loyal servant to a Dixiecrat Alabama governor who used all sorts of racial if not racist rhetoric against African-Americans simply to stay in and expand his power in Alabama.
When I think of Clarence Williams, I think of the ultimate tough guy who always looks like he’s about to go nuts and just beat the hell out of someone, or a lot of people, or kill a lot of people. He generally plays the bad guy with Clint Eastwood’s Magnum Force from 1973 being an exception to that. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that he’s so good at that and is a big, tall, strong, guy, who looks like he kicks ass very well. Plus, he’s such a great character actor that he tends to get a lot of roles in action, or dramatic films and TV that have him playing roles like that. He’s a great character actor and who plays the badass as well as it can be played.
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