Treat Williams

Williams was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on December 1, 1951, the son of Marian (née Andrew), an antiques dealer, and Richard Norman Williams, a corporate executive. He moved with his family to Rowayton, Connecticut, when he was three. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather was William Henry Barnum, a U.S. senator from Connecticut and third cousin of the showman P. T. Barnum. Williams was a distant relative of both Robert Treat Paine—a signatory to the Declaration of Independence—and Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States.

Williams played football in high school and college. He graduated from the Kent School in Connecticut and Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As a teenager, he acted in high school and local theatre productions, and began to think seriously about an acting career during his first year of college: "I loved football very much, but I didn't think you could be a jock and be in the theatre company at the same time … I started to get serious about learning as much as possible about the craft of acting in my freshman year." At one point, he was performing in three college shows simultaneously: "a comedy, a Shakespeare and a musical".