Newly divorced and working as a juvenile corrections officer in Ohio, Hal Williams once said he sat down and asked himself a simple question: what did he really want to do "before the maker comes and gets me"? The answer was acting, and he set off for California within days to chase it, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Williams, who went on to become one of American television's most familiar supporting players as Officer "Smitty" Smith on Sanford and Son and patriarch Lester Jenkins on 227, died July 15, 2026, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 91.

Williams was born December 14, 1934, in Columbus, Ohio. Long before any soundstage, he worked in juvenile corrections and family services in Ohio and later took an overnight shift at a Los Angeles post office to make ends meet while he tried to break in. He had acted in community theater back home, and in 1968 he moved to California to try it for a living, describing the choice years later in blunt terms: acting was what he wanted to do before it was too late to try.

Steady work came before stardom did. In 1975 he played the inmate Lester DeMott on the prison comedy On the Rocks, and by then he had already landed the role that would define his early career: Officer "Smitty" Smith opposite Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson on NBC's Sanford and Son, beginning in 1972. Williams and co-star Howard Platt, who played Officer "Hoppy" Hopkins, built a comic rapport around the show's two beat cops that outlasted any single script. "We did it one time in rehearsal and the producers thought it was funny," Williams recalled to Cleveland's WKYC of how the duo's signature bit began. "We did it in the first or second episode and it clicked," he said, according to TheWrap. The role ran more than 20 episodes and carried into the 1980 to 1981 spinoff Sanford. The city of San Bernardino handed him ceremonial keys to the city in both 1980 and 1981, a small-scale honor that nonetheless tracked his rising profile.

Williams built a career on range rather than repetition. He played Harley Foster in recurring appearances on CBS's The Waltons from 1973 to 1980, a drill sergeant in the film Private Benjamin and its television adaptation, and Rudy Bryan on Fox's The Sinbad Show. Guest roles stacked up across decades of episodic television, among them Good Times, The Jeffersons, Hill Street Blues, Magnum P.I., Night Court, L.A. Law, Moesha, and Parks and Recreation. He also spent years as a board member of the Los Angeles Actors' Theatre and, earlier in his career, co-hosted a televised telethon benefiting sickle cell anemia research.

In 1985, Williams landed the role that made him a father figure to a generation of sitcom viewers: Lester Jenkins, husband to Marla Gibbs's Mary Jenkins on NBC's 227. Regina King played their daughter Brenda in her first television role, and the series ran through 1990, placing Williams alongside Gibbs as a fixture of the decade's Black sitcom households. He later appeared opposite Bernie Mac in the 2005 comedy Guess Who and played Denzel Washington's father in Robert Zemeckis's 2012 drama Flight. His final credited role came in two 2024 episodes of the rebooted Matlock, closing out a screen career that had opened more than five decades earlier. Reflecting late in life on a career built more on reliability than top billing, Williams put it plainly: "I've been a straight man for a long time. It doesn't bother me, because all I ever aspired to be was a working actor," he told The Hollywood Reporter.

Williams's public career unfolded alongside a private loss. His son, Mark Kevin Alec Williams, known to family as "Chip," died at 20 on March 26, 1977, after being caught in a sudden storm while hiking in the Angeles National Forest, according to the Mark K.A. Williams Memorial Scholarship. Mark had made the Dean's List at California State University, Los Angeles while majoring in telecommunications and had already written two feature film scripts of his own. In his son's memory, Williams founded the scholarship as a nonprofit funding students pursuing degrees in film, broadcasting, and telecommunications, a commitment he kept up for the rest of his life.

Just days before he died, Williams traveled to Ohio for "Sanford & Son: The Last Episode," a reunion event held July 10 and 11 that brought him back together with Howard Platt, the show's original truck, and fans who lined up for autographs and a Q&A. He died at his home in Rancho Mirage on a Wednesday morning, according to TMZ. He is survived by two children, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Williams spent more than five decades rarely far from a camera, moving from Smitty's beat on Sanford and Son to Lester Jenkins's living room on 227 to a two-episode return on Matlock near the end of his life. What persists past the reruns is the scholarship that carries his son's name, still funding students pursuing film and broadcasting degrees, and the plain description he gave his own career: that of a working actor, straight man included, who simply kept working.