Background and career
Montel Brian Anthony Williams (born July 3, 1956) is an American television host and actor. He is known for hosting the daytime tabloid talk show The Montel Williams Show, which ran in syndication from 1991 to 2008. He currently hosts The Balancing Act and Military Makeover with Montel airing on Lifetime. Williams founded the Montel Williams MS Foundation after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999. He is noted for his service in both the United States Marine Corps and the United States Navy, from which he retired after 22 years of service.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 3, 1956, Williams attended Andover High School in neighboring Linthicum, Maryland, where he was elected president of his class in both his junior and senior years. He was a good student, athlete, and musician, and he was active in countywide student government issues in Annapolis, Maryland. Williams was raised as a Roman Catholic and served as an altar server in the Catholic Church. Montel's father, Herman Williams Jr., was a firefighter who in 1992 became Baltimore's first African American fire chief. Montel's mother is biracial.
Williams enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1974. He completed the one-year Naval Academy Preparatory School course and then Marine four-year officer training program at the U.S. Naval Academy. He graduated in 1980 with a degree in general engineering and a minor in international security affairs. He completed naval cryptologic officer training, and spent 18 months in Guam as a cryptologic officer for naval intelligence. He was later supervising cryptologic officer with the Naval Security Fleet Support Division at Fort Meade, Maryland. There, Williams worked for the National Security Agency, where he was involved in the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, known as Operation Urgent Fury. On several occasions, he worked to secure the release of United States citizens—typically military personnel who had been captured in foreign lands—returned to U.S. soil. After 17 years of active duty and five more as a reservist, Williams retired in 1996 from the Naval Reserve at the rank of lieutenant commander after 22 years of service. His awards include two Meritorious Service Medals, two Navy Commendation Medals, the National Defense Service Medal, the Navy Achievement Medal, two Navy Expeditionary Medals, the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, and two Humanitarian Service Medals. As a civilian, Willams was again honored in 2008 with a Navy Superior Public Service Award for his "continuous support and recognition of Sailors, Marines and their families throughout his 17 years on television".
Williams began The Montel Williams Show (syndicated by CBS Television Distribution) in 1991. In 1996, Williams received a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. Ratings for the show peaked during the 1996–97 season, with a 4.4 average rating. He was again nominated for Outstanding Talk Show Host in 2002, and the Montel Williams Show was nominated for Outstanding Talk Show in 2001 and 2002. On January 30, 2008, Variety reported that CBS TV Distribution had terminated The Montel Williams Show when key Fox-owned stations chose not to renew it for the 2008–09 season. On May 16, 2008, the last episode of The Montel Williams Show aired. Speculation followed the end of The Montel Williams Show, which was canceled immediately after Williams criticized mainstream news media's preference for stories about Hollywood stars over those about military personnel and events. Commentators felt his statements may have alienated the Fox TV Network. On November 10, 2010, Oprah Winfrey invited Williams, along with former talk show hosts Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake, and Sally Jessy Raphael, as guests on her show. This was the first time that the fellow talkers had appeared together since their programs left the air. Williams' work has been criticized by the Independent Investigations Group, which declared The Montel Williams Show to be noteworthy Truly Terrible Television with its satirical TTTV award (for similar reasons, awarded to "every episode featuring Sylvia Browne"). Controversial self-declared psychic Sylvia Browne featured frequently on The Montel Williams Show from 1991 until its finale in 2008. Williams described Browne as "the most-appearing guest on a talk show in the history of television" and "the longest-running guest in daytime television", and her appearances included particularly controversial incidents relating to kidnap victims Shawn Hornbeck and Amanda Berry. Williams was criticized for allowing his high-profile show to serve as a channel for Browne, and in 2015, two years after Berry was rescued, Williams apologized to her for "anything said on my show [that] caused her pain." In February 2019, an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver featured a segment on television psychics and Williams' association with Browne was criticized.
Williams has also guest-starred in episodic television and off-Broadway plays. Among other roles, he portrayed a Navy SEAL, Lieutenant Curtis Rivers, in three episodes of the television series JAG. He also produced and starred in a short-lived television series called Matt Waters, which appeared on CBS in 1996. He played an ex-Navy SEAL turned inner-city high school teacher. In 1997, he played Lt Col Northrop, a USAF nuclear missile silo commander, in the fictional movie The Peacekeeper. In 2002, he played the judge presiding over Erica Kane's (Susan Lucci) murder trial on the ABC soap opera All My Children. In 2003, he made a guest appearance on the soap as himself to promote an episode of his own show on which several AMC stars were scheduled to appear. In 2004, he hosted American Candidate, a political reality show on Showtime. Williams has also guest-starred on The New Adventures of Robin Hood and Guiding Light. Williams also appeared in a Perry Mason movie in 1993 titled The Case of the Telltale Talk Show Host. His character, Boomer Kelly, was a former football player who was appearing on a radio talk show whose owner was found murdered. He was also a voice actor in 2008 in the political satire film War, Inc., providing the voice of the main character's GPS tracking device/counselor. On October 1, 2019, Williams appeared in an episode of the Fox drama The Resident entitled, "Flesh of My Flesh". Williams played himself, as a TV personality covering a nearly impossible cancer surgery being performed on an adoptive mother of seven.
Williams produced and narrated the Starline Films documentary film 4CHOSEN: The Documentary, which tells the story about the New Jersey Turnpike shooting in 1998, and the racial profiling case that followed the incident. In 1999, Williams directed the film, Little Pieces, starring Grace Morley and Amy Acton.
