The leading man of a cult-favorite ’80s superhero show was spotted making coffee in sweltering Los Angeles this week at the age of 75.
Born to two 1950s TV stars, the ‘nepo baby’ built his own career in the 1970s and played a central role in Brian De Palma’s horror classic Carrie.
During the last decade, he also auditioned for the role of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and narrowly lost the role to Mark Hamill.
Fans of the late Hayden Panettiere may recognize him from his guest role as a meddlesome journalist in a 2008 episode of her show Heroes.
He cut a nonchalant figure as he stepped out for drinks this week. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts with a pair of open-toed slippers and sunglasses.
Can you guess who he is?
The leading man of a cult-favorite ’80s superhero show was spotted making coffee in sweltering Los Angeles this week at the age of 75
Born to two 1950s TV stars, the ‘nepo baby’ built his own career in the 1970s, playing a central role in Brian De Palma’s horror classic Carrie
He cut a casual figure as he stepped out for drinks this week, wearing a T-shirt and shorts with a pair of open-toed slippers and sunglasses.
He is none other than William Katt, who fans of 1980s television will recognize as Ralph Hinkley, aka Hanley, in The Greatest American Hero.
The series was a sci-fi comedy in which Ralph, a special education teacher, gains superpowers from a Unitard bequeathed to him by aliens.
Connie Sellecca, later of Hotel fame, played his lawyer sidekick, while Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice star Robert Culp played an FBI agent, completing the crime-fighting trio as the bumbling Ralph learns to use his new skills.
Katt has admitted that he and Culp “really didn’t like each other when we first met. I mean, there was real friction there,” via Pioneers of television.
Fortunately, their tension “worked” for them on screen, in that it reflected the animosity between the characters they played, Katt noted.
However, they mended fences at a “come to Jesus meeting” three weeks after the shooting, reasoning that “we’re going to be working together for a long time and we should have some kind of détente and rapprochement so that we could work together and be in the same room at the same time without getting into a fight.”
The cordiality they achieved eventually blossomed into a genuine friendship that they maintained until Culp died in 2010 at the age of 79, after suffering a fatal head injury when he fell due to a heart attack.
Although The Greatest American Hero was canceled after three seasons, the theme song Believe It Or Not rose to number two on the Billboard Hot 100.
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He is none other than William Katt, who fans of 1980s television will recognize as Ralph Hinkley, aka Hanley, in The Greatest American Hero.
Connie Sellecca (left), later of Hotel fame, played his lawyer sidekick, while Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice star Robert Culp played an FBI agent
Katt later confessed that he “wasn’t really interested in television” when the show was offered to him, as he was acting off-Broadway with Dianne Wiest, but the script for The Greatest American Hero “made me laugh a lot,” via Sidewalks TV.
He rewatched the show more than 20 years later when it became available on DVD and “thought it was very funny,” he said. “I don’t know if I really appreciated it at the time, but in the years that followed I did.”
William Theodore Katt was born two days after Valentine’s Day 1951 to two parents who both became beloved TV stars during that decade.
His father Herman Katt, under the screen name Bill Williams, became a household name as the title character in the western series The Adventures of Kit Carson.
Meanwhile, his mother Barbara Hale won an Emmy for her turn as Della, the secretary to Raymond Burr’s title character in the hit legal drama Perry Mason.
Katt recalled being “a bit of a thug” and a “free spirit” as a child, saying he had “no rules” growing up in the “rural” San Fernando Valley in suburban Los Angeles, except that he had to be “home before dark,” via What’s under the bed?.
When he started his own career in the early 1970s, he worked on TV shows such as M*A*S*H, Emergency., Gunsmoke, Kojak and Ironside.
Katt suffered a brutal professional blow that decade when he lost the lead role in George Lucas’s 1977 smash hit Star Wars.
Katt starred in the 1976 classic Carrie as Tommy, the jock who takes Sissy Spacek’s telekinetic title character to a ball that turns into a bloodbath
He remembers auditioning for the film with Kurt Russell, switching back and forth between the roles of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.
Katt playfully joked, “I think I ruined it for” Russell, who “could have been a great Han Solo” if “my hair wasn’t too long at the time.” It’s too long now. And we didn’t get the part. But I thought, looking back on it, we did a pretty good job.”
However, Lucas happened to be holding Star Wars auditions alongside Brian De Palma, who was trying out actors for his 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie.
Katt’s ‘booby prize’ for not winning the role in Star Wars is that he was cast in De Palma’s film as popular athlete Tommy Ross.
As a favor to his girlfriend, Tommy agrees to take Sissy Spacek’s telekinetic title character on a pity date to the prom, where they are both showered in pig’s blood in a public humiliation that drives Carrie to seek grisly revenge.
“Well, it was great,” Katt recalled of the shoot. “I mean, we were all in our early twenties at the time. I think I was 23, 24. We were all just young boys and girls and we got paid to go and just have fun. And of course do the work.’
He spared particularly warm words for his “very gracious and sweet” co-star John Travolta, sharing that years before Grease “I remember one day he was trying to teach some of us a gentle shoe dance,” in an interview with Cemetery dance.
The Greatest American Hero further cemented his fame in the 1980s, becoming perhaps the best-remembered role on his resume.
Katt is pictured with his mother Barbara Hale (center) and Raymond Burr (left) during the 1980s revival of Perry Mason, the show that made the last two TV icons
Later that decade, he starred alongside his mother in a series of nine TV movies, a spin-off from Perry Mason, with Hale stepping back into the shoes of Della Street.
Katt, meanwhile, played Paul Drake Jr, a private investigator who follows in the professional footsteps of his father Paul Drake, a character played in the original series by Hedda Hopper’s son William Hopper.
It was Burr, whom Katt had known since childhood as Uncle Raymond, who called him while he was on tour in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance and asked if he would be interested in joining the revival of Perry Mason.
“So I did that and I spent the next five years doing those shows, and that was just amazing, working with my mom,” he told the Missouri radio station. KIX 105-7.
As the 1980s rolled into the 1990s, he bounced around as a guest on shows like Cybill; Animaniacs; Batman: The Animated Series; Burke’s Law and Walker, Texas Ranger.
Avid viewers of Heroes may remember his turn in the season three episode The Butterfly Effect, playing reporter Jim McCann.
Katt is still acting and this year appeared in the independent drama series When We Get There in a cast that included Alfred Molina.
