Ed Williams, the onetime broadcasting teacher who portrayed Ted Olson, the earnest lab scientist with a pocket protector and a kinky side, on the Police Squad! TV show and in the original Naked Gun movies, has died. He was 98.
Williams died Oct. 2 in Los Angeles, his granddaughter Stephanie Williams told The Hollywood Reporter.
Williams often played reverends, priests and ministers, and he was the man who married Annie Banks (Kimberly Williams) and Bryan MacKenzie (George Newbern) in Father of the Bride (1991), starring Steve Martin and Diane Keaton.
Williams had acted in plays at San Jose State and Stanford and in scores of radio productions produced by Lillian Fontaine, mother of Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, before he came to L.A. in 1955 and took a job with The Don Martin School of Radio and Television Arts and Sciences, putting aside his acting career.
It was not until the early 1980s, when he was teaching speech classes at L.A. City College, when he decided to resume auditioning and was hired to play Olson on ABC’s Police Squad!
“I made up for lost time and got a fairly decent part to start coming back into acting,” Williams noted in a 2017 interview with Matthew Worley of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters.
A wacky send-up of police procedurals that starred Leslie Nielsen as Det. Frank Drebin, Police Squad!, created by Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry and David Zucker, debuted in March 1982 and lasted just six, laugh track-free episodes.
However, the show would find new life at Paramount Pictures with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), followed by The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994). He and Nielsen were the only actors to appear in both versions. (The Naked Gun got a reboot this year, with Liam Neeson playing Drebin.)
Watch Williams have some weird interactions with youngsters as Olson here.
Edwin Wallace Williams was born on Nov. 26, 1926, in San Jose, California. As a kid, he listened to The Lone Ranger on the radio when his parents wanted him to practice the flute, and in high school, he starred as the accident-prone Henry Aldridge in What a Life!
After serving in the U.S. Navy, Williams acted in more than 200 plays for Lillian Fontaine and worked as a salesman at KSJO Radio, where he wrote, starred in and created sound effects for recordings that he used to woo clients.
While studying for his master’s degree in acting and directing at Stanford — he played the stuttering Billy Budd in one college play — he got a chance to audition for parts in the 1953 films Stalag 17 and The Robe at Paramount.
In 1955, he and his wife, Nancy, came to Hollywood, and at the Don Martin school, he took over for Frank Cady, who by then was recurring on The Adventures Ozzie and Harriet. (Later, Cady would play storekeeper Sam Drucker on Green Acres and Petticoat Junction.)
One subject Williams taught was “Top 40 Disc Jockeying,” and his students during his six-year stint there included “Real” Don Steele, who would become a popular DJ, and future Newlywed Game host Bob Eubanks.
He moved to L.A. City College in 1961 to teach broadcasting while also working as a booth announcer at KCET television.
There was a point when Williams did not audition for an acting role for 24 years, he noted. “I do not approve of professors that go out and moonlight and make a lot of money on the side and neglect their classes,” he said. “That used to make me mad to hear that.”
But in the mid-1970s, he got a less-hectic schedule as a teacher in the speech department, which led him to take another shot at acting. “I felt like the [guy] who’s been trained to be a surgeon, but he didn’t quite get in the operating room,” he said. “I wanted to get in the operating room.”
He went to acting school at night, played the president of the court-martial in a production of The Caine Mutiny at the Hollywood Legion Theater and auditioned for the Zucker brothers and Abrahams for Police Squad! “That got me going again,” he said.
After 28 years as LACC, he retired from teaching in 1989.
Williams appeared on an episode of the 1985-86 CBS series Crazy Like a Fox that was written by his former LACC student Paul Robert Coyle. He also said he was proud to play a chaplain in the 1988 NBC telefilm To Heal a Nation, starring Eric Roberts.
His résumé included the films Ratboy (1986), Nickel & Dime (1992), High Strung (1992) and Roger Corman’s Carnosaur (1993) and appearances on such TV shows as Madame’s Place, Cheers, MacGyver, Hooperman, Matlock, L.A. Law, Sisters, Father Dowling Mysteries and House. He was still acting into his 90s.
Survivors include Nancy, whom he married in September 1954; sons Fred and Ian; and grandchildren Stephanie and Maureen.
