William Atherton

William Atherton is one of those actors Hollywood absolutely needed — someone who could make you genuinely hate a character while still being completely riveted by him. He trained at Carnegie Mellon and cut his teeth on stage before landing serious dramatic roles in the mid-70s with The Sugarland Express and The Day of the Locust, proving he had real range. But let's be honest: his legacy is built on being the most infuriating bureaucratic villain in cinema history. Walter Peck in Ghostbusters and Richard Thornburg in Die Hard are practically a two-film masterclass in oily, smug antagonism — the kind of characters audiences love to despise. That takes genuine craft. He never played it campy; he played it completely straight, which made it so much funnier and so much more satisfying when things went wrong for him.

Name (English)

William Atherton

Name (Japanese)

ウィリアム・アザートン

Reading

うぃりあむ・あざーとん

Born

July 30, 1947 (age 79)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Boar

Origin

Orange, Connecticut, United States

Occupation

television actor / film actor / stage actor / actor

High school

Amity Regional High School

University

Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts

Awards & achievements

• 1972 Theatre World Award

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A2%E3%83%A0%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A2%E3%82%B6%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88%E3%83%B3

Tags

• Connecticut
• television actor
• film actor
• stage actor

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.