William Atherton biography

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Actor. Born July 30, 1947, in Orange, Connecticut. William Atherton took to acting at a very young age, becoming the youngest member ever of New Haven's Long Wharf Theater company while still a high school student. Atherton left his home state to attend college in Pittsburgh, earning his bachelor's of fine arts in drama from the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. After further training in the theater arts at California's Pasadena Playhouse, Atherton moved to New York City to pursue a professional career as a stage actor.

After starring in several off-Broadway roles in the early 1970s, Atherton got his big break in film while appearing in a 1971 stage production of The Basic Training Of Pavlo Hummel. The legendary actor George C. Scott, a member of the board of the theater producing Pavlo Hummel, suggested the 23-year-old Atherton for the cast of his upcoming film The New Centurions. The 1972 film was Atherton's first movie, and the young actor was "green to the point of imbecility," he later admitted. "It was kind of like instant education, which I think I passed with a C. At least I passed," he said with a laugh.

For his next film, Atherton was cast as the jailbird husband of Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express, the first big feature film of an up-and-coming director named Steven Spielberg. "We were all in Texas, and we were all 24, 25 years old, and we had a fabulous time," Atherton said. "[Spielberg] was great. I've never had an experience as unique and consistently great as that one." Critics singled out both Spielberg and his young stars as new talents to watch.

Atherton next tackled dramatic roles in films like The Day Of The Locust (1975) and Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1977). The films were critically well received but weren't huge box-office draws. Following Looking For Mr. Goodbar, Atherton took a break from work in Hollywood, spending the next seven years focused almost entirely on Broadway and off-Broadway stage roles.

In 1984, Atherton returned to the big screen in his biggest role, a scene-stealing turn in the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters as uptight Environmental Protection Agency agent Walter Peck. "The movie became enormous," Atherton said. "We knew it was going to be big, but it was a culture shift. It's just like getting hit by the bus."

In his next role, Atherton played the obnoxious Professor Herry Hathaway in the movie Real Genius, now regarded as something of a cult classic. Then in 1988, he played the slimy, self-promoting television reporter Richard Thornburg in the Bruce Willis action thriller Die Hard, a role he later reprised in Die Hard 2.