William Devane

William Devane is one of those actors who quietly built one of the most dependable careers in American entertainment without ever becoming a tabloid fixture, and honestly that's part of what makes him so compelling. Growing up in Albany, he came up through stage work before carving out a niche in 1970s cinema — his turns in Marathon Man and Rolling Thunder showed he could carry serious dramatic weight alongside the biggest names of that era. Then came Knots Landing, where he played Greg Sumner for nearly a decade and proved he could hold a primetime audience in the palm of his hand. His run as Secretary of Defense James Heller on 24 added another dimension entirely — gravitas without grandstanding. He's the rare kind of actor whose face alone tells you a character has lived a complicated life, and that's a gift no acting school can manufacture.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

William Devane

Name (Japanese)

ウィリアム・ディヴェイン

Reading

うぃりあむ・でぃゔぇいん

Born

September 5, 1939 (age 86)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Virgo / Rabbit

Origin

Albany, New York, United States

Occupation

stage actor / film actor / television actor / screenwriter / voice actor

High school

Albany High School

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William%20Devane
• 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%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A7%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q451880

Tags

• New York
• stage actor
• film actor
• television 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.