| Montel Williams | |
|---|---|
Williams at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. |
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| Born | Montel Brian Anthony Williams July 3, 1956 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. |
| Occupation | Talk show host |
| Years active | 1991 – present |
| Spouse | Rochele See (1982-89) Grace Morley (1992-2000) Tara Fowler (2007-present) |
| Website | |
| www.montelwilliams.com | |
Montel Brian Anthony Williams (born July 3, 1956) is an American television personality, radio talk show host and actor. He is best known as host of the long-running The Montel Williams Show, and more recently as a spokesperson for the Partnership for Prescription Assistance (PPA). Williams is also active with the non-profit MS Foundation, which he founded after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late 1990s.
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Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland. As a resident of Glen Burnie, Maryland, he was bused to Andover High School in neighboring Linthicum, Maryland where he was elected president of both his junior and senior classes. He was a good student, athlete and musician and active in county-wide student government issues in Annapolis, Maryland.[1] His father, Herman Williams, Jr., was a firefighter who in 1992 became Baltimore's first African-American Fire Chief. Montel has five siblings.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 3, 1956, Williams enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps upon graduating high school in 1974. He went to boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, where he was promoted to platoon guide. After basic training, he was sent to the Desert Warfare Training Center at Twenty-nine Palms, near Palm Springs, California.
While at Twenty-nine Palms, his superiors became impressed with his leadership skills, and he was recommended for, and accepted to, the Naval Academy Preparatory school at Newport, Rhode Island. He completed the one-year course, and was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.
When he arrived at Annapolis on July 6, 1976, he was honorably discharged as a corporal from the Marines, and enlisted into the navy as a midshipman. While at Annapolis, Williams studied Mandarin Chinese and graduated with a degree in general engineering and a minor in International Security Affairs. It was at Annapolis that Williams first began to shave his head. Upon his graduation in 1980, he became the first black enlisted marine to complete and graduate both the Academy Prep School and Annapolis.
Montel Williams’ plans were to return to the Marines as an officer after graduating from Annapolis. These were shattered when he and 99 other seniors were given the wrong dose of a pre-commissioning immunization. Montel had a severe reaction, causing him to be in the hospital for 2½ weeks and lose the vision in his left eye. He eventually made a partial recovery and could serve as a naval intelligence officer, specializing in languages.
Commissioned an ensign, he spent the next one and a half years in Guam as a cryptologic officer for naval intelligence, where he served at sea and ashore. In 1982 he was transferred to Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where he studied the Russian language for one year. In 1983 he was transferred to Ft. Meade in Maryland, where he worked with the National Security Agency. What Williams did there is vague, due to the sensitive nature of intelligence work, but he performed various intelligence missions. He was offshore aboard ship during the invasion of Grenada.
After three years aboard submarines, Williams, now a full lieutenant, was made supervising cryptologic officer with the Naval Security Fleet Support Division at Ft. Meade. It was while counseling his crew that he discovered a gift for public speaking. In 1988, he began conducting informal counseling for the wives and families of the servicemen in his command. He was later asked to speak to a local group of kids in Kansas City, MO about the importance of leadership and how to overcome obstacles on the road to success—thus beginning a three-year career in motivational speaking.
Williams traveled the country talking to more than three million teenagers nationwide and gave up his naval commission to pursue speaking full-time. He left the navy with the rank of lieutenant, and received the Navy Achievement Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal, and the Navy Commendation Medal. In addition, he reached out to thousands of parents, educators and business leaders, encouraging them to work together to address youth issues, trends and to inspire youngsters to reach their highest potential. These efforts to reach out to the community eventually lead to the Montel Williams Show on television
Montel began The Montel Williams Show (syndicated by CBS Paramount Television) in 1991,[2] after a short stint as a rodeo clown in Switzerland.[3] In 1996, Williams received a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. Ratings for the show peaked during the 1996-1997 season, with 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 terminated The Montel Williams Show when key Fox-owned stations chose not to renew it for the 2008-09 season.[4] On May 16, 2008 the last episode of The Montel Williams Show aired.[5]
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 she had fellow talkers appear together since their programs left the air.[6]
On April 6, 2009, Williams began hosting a daily radio show, Montel Across America, on Air America Media.[7] On January 21, 2010, Air America ceased broadcasting, leaving Williams without a radio outlet.[8]
As of May 2009, he started hosting an infomercial for the Living Well Healthmaster, a blender product. It is presented under the title Living Well with Montel; the infomercial is structured similarly to his old talk show, featuring guests talking about their health problems, with the Healthmaster mixer being the solution. In November 2009, Williams began appearing in television commercials endorsing Money Mutual, an online payday advance lender.[9][10]
In June 2010, Williams began doing infomercials for LifeLock, a security fraud company.[11]
During May 24–27, 2011, Montel became a guest host news anchor on the comedic local Sacramento, California news station Good Day Sacramento. Where he would answer questions by viewers and also on his first day, he got dressed up as Paul Stanley.
Williams has also guest-starred in episodic television and off-Broadway plays. Among other roles, he portrayed a Navy SEAL lieutenant 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.[12] In 1997, he played Lt. Colonel Northrop a Nuclear Silo commander in the fictional movie The Peacekeeper.
Williams played the judge presiding over Erica Kane's (Susan Lucci) murder trial on the ABC soap opera All My Children in 2002. 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 Touched By an Angel and Guiding Light.
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.[13][14]
Williams is a national spokesman of the Partnership for Prescription Assistance (PPA), a patient-assistance program clearinghouse that helps low-income patients apply for free or reduced-priced prescription drugs. On November 30, 2007, while in Savannah, Georgia to promote PPA, he threatened reporters following an earlier interview at which Courtney Scott, a 17-year-old high school intern reporter for the Savannah Morning News, had asked him a question about whether restriction of pharmaceutical profits would discourage research and development of new drugs. Angered by the question, Williams subsequently terminated that videotaped interview; Williams later ran into Scott in his hotel and threatened to "blow [her] up".[15] Williams' public relations representatives later apologized for his hostile outburst in an issued statement, "I mistakenly thought the reporter and photographer in question were at the hotel to confront me about some earlier comments. I was wrong, and I apologize for my overreaction." [16] In 2010, Williams became chief spokesperson for the Poker Training Network,[17] a MLM-based poker instruction and playing website.
In the episode of South Park entitled the Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka, Jesus is repeatedly mistaken for Montel WIlliams by an enthusiastic Michael Jackson apologist whilst taping his public access talk show Jesus and Pals. [18]
Williams has two daughters, Ashley Williams (b. 1984) and Maressa Williams (b. 1988), with his first wife, Rochele See. Williams married Grace Morley, a burlesque dancer on June 6, 1992.[19] They have a son, Montel Brian Hank Williams (b. 1993), and a daughter, Wyntergrace Williams (b. 1994). The couple divorced in 2000. In July 2006, Williams proposed to girlfriend Tara Fowler, an American Airlines flight attendant. They married before friends and family on a beach in Bermuda on October 6, 2007.[20] He is also featured in Making Music Magazine.
Williams participated in the 2007 World Series of Poker main event,[21] and planned to donate any potential winnings to families affected by the Iraq war. He was eliminated in Day 2. During the event Williams also spoke out about the port security bill signed in 2006 that banned on-line gaming sites from accepting money transactions from the U.S.
Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999.[22][23] In the following year, Williams created the MS Foundation, a non-profit with a focus on research and education.[24] Williams has openly stated that he uses medical marijuana, stating it helps to ease his Multiple Sclerosis-caused neuropathic pain.[25] Williams has become a vocal advocate of marijuana, supporting efforts to pass medical marijuana laws in states, as well as calling for full legalization.[26][27]
Montel recently added The Fisher House Foundation to the charities he supports. While visiting wounded military at Walter Reed for 2 years, he learned of this foundation's work which is to make free housing available so the families of wounded soldiers can be near their hospitals . He has since become a board member and he and his extended family enjoy cooking special seafood dinners for the guests at individual Fisher Houses.
Montel Williams Interview on “The Gift”, a radio special on US military and their families by the Fisher House Foundation (12/25/2011)Link Label