Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for his spirited and sometimes harrowing rendering of the lives of marginal black men through his breakout role as Omar Little in The Wire, died on Monday at the age of 54 years old. Williams was reportedly found dead inside of his home in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
Williams was born in Brooklyn to a father who hailed from South Carolina, while his mother had emigrated to the United States from the Bahamian capital of Nassau. He was raised in the Vanderveer Projects in East Flatbush and attended George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School, suffering early trauma when he was sexually molested as a child. After battling drug addiction and piling up a record of arrests, he enrolled at the National Black Theatre in Harlem.
Soon Williams was hanging around the clubs and bars of Manhattan, frequenting dance studios and record labels as he sought to embark on a career as a dancer. He became a background dancer for the singer Kym Sims, performed on tour with Missy Elliott and Ginuwine, and provided choreography for the hit Crystal Waters single ‘100% Pure Love’ which was nominated for Best Dance Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.
The following year, Williams was celebrating his 25th birthday at a bar on Jamaica Avenue in Queens when he was slashed with a razor blade during a scuffle. The wound left Williams with a distinctive scar running slantwise from the top of his forehead past the bridge of his nose, and immediately boosted his acting and modelling opportunities while adding grit to music videos by Madonna and George Michael.
In 1996, the rapper Tupac Shakur spotted a Polaroid of Williams during pre-production for the movie Bullet, casting him as the brother and henchman of his drug kingpin Tank. Williams subsequently played a drug dealer in the Martin Scorsese picture Bringing Out the Dead, and had bit-parts in the television shows Law & Order and The Sopranos, before being cast as the stick-up man Omar Little in the crime drama The Wire.
Set between the teeming tower blocks and dilapidated docks, the fractious police departments and grubby government offices of Baltimore, in The Wire the writer and creator David Simon diagnosed the institutional glut and creeping decay of the modern American city. Omar Little was at once the keening product of such a society and its fatal reckoning, adhering to a strict moral code and spurning profanity while doling out ominous punishment to street-level crooks and drug vendors. Somewhere between Pied Piper and Robin Hood, the swish of his dustcoat and the stubby frame of his sawed-off shotgun caused hoods to scatter with the tremulous cry of ‘Omar comin”.
Williams portrayed the character with a wispy air while deep pathos imbued his every gesture, carrying the weight of his gun, somehow fraternal though his pursuit was for the most part solitary. Pensive eyes and the tenderness of his personal relationships belied the sudden violence of his criminal endeavours. Williams received critical acclaim for the groundbreaking nature of his role, with Omar openly gay in a world of hardened gangsters. The accretion of small details imbued the grand gesture, as Omar Little became one of the defining characters of a new golden age in television.
Williams subsequently guest starred in a number of police procedurals and had recurring roles in shows including Alias, The Kill Point, and The Philanthropist. On the big screen, he scored memorable cameos in Gone Baby Gone, The Road, and Brooklyn’s Finest. And from 2010 another star turn saw him join the main cast of Boardwalk Empire, where he brought a dark grandiosity to the role of the Atlantic City bootlegger and community leader Chalky White.
Behind the scenes however Williams continued to battle drug addiction, developing a cocaine habit during the course of his six-year run on The Wire. He was kicked out of his apartment in Vanderveer and spent much of his spare time in the drug houses of Newark, by his own admission dicing with death until he sought rehabilitation through a local church.
Williams admitted that the line between himself and his characters sometimes became blurred, but also said ‘The characters that mean the most to me are the ones that damn near kill me’, adding ‘It’s a sacrifice I’ve chosen to make’. Describing his wider approach to acting, Williams explained:
‘I use my job to engage empathy and compassion for people society might stereotype or ostracise. No one wakes up and says “I’m going to become a drug dealer” or “I’m going to become a stick-up kid”. No. There is a series of events that makes them feel this is the only way out. As a black man growing up in the hood, I bear witness to some of those events.’
He played character parts in 12 Years a Slave, Snitch, Inherent Vice, and The Gambler, featured in the blockbuster reboots RoboCop and Ghostbusters, and starred as part of ensemble casts in the action thriller Triple 9 and the civic drama The Public. On television he tried his hand at comedy with recurring roles in Community and The Spoils Before Dying.
Returning to HBO, Williams starred opposite his longtime friend Queen Latifah in an award-winning portrayal of the life of blues singer Bessie Smith. He played a homosexual Vietnam veteran in the serialisation of the investigative novels Hap and Leonard. But his sterling performance in The Night Of forced Williams to confront old personal demons, drawing from the experience of friends and family members as he reckoned with the tension and trauma of life behind bars.
Michael K. Williams became an advocate for prison reform, calling for an end to mass incarceration under the auspices of the American Civil Liberties Union. He appeared in When We Rise, a docudrama chronicling the history of the gay rights movement in America, and he brought nuance to the part of Bobby McCray in the acclaimed crime drama When They See Us. Directed by Ava DuVernay, the miniseries shone a spotlight on the criminal justice system through its depiction of the prosecution of the Central Park Five.
The drama would prove one of Williams’ final screen roles. The same year he appeared in the neo-noir feature Motherless Brooklyn, and in 2020 he was part of the ensemble thriller Arkansas. His magnetic screen presence played out one last time in the horror drama Lovecraft Country, where the part of Montrose Freeman earned him a pending nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series at the upcoming 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards.
Williams also found time to extol Flatbush and the joys of Caribbean cooking alongside Anthony Bourdain on the final episode of No Reservations, while he explored illicit trade and juvenile detention in documentary series for Vice News. His untimely death on Monday was met with heartfelt tributes from friends and collaborators including David Simon, Edward Norton, Riz Ahmed, and his Wire co-stars Jamie Hector and Wendell Pierce.
