Montel Williams Biography

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 1999.

Early life

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 3, 1956, Williams attended 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. His father, Herman Williams, Jr., was a firefighter who in 1992 became Baltimore's first African-American Fire Chief. Montel has five siblings including his 52-year-old brother James.

Career

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 Twentynine Palms, California.

While at Twentynine 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 was appointed as a Midshipman in the Navy. 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.

Williams planned to return to the Marines as an officer after graduating from Annapolis, but he suffered a severe reaction when he was one of 100 seniors who received the wrong dose of an immunization. Williams was in the hospital for 2½ weeks and lost the vision in his left eye. He eventually made a partial recovery and could serve as a naval intelligence officer, specializing in languages.

Commissioned a Lieutenant, 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. Williams retired after 22 years of service as a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy Reserve. 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 led to the Montel Williams Show on television

The Montel Williams Show

Williams began The Montel Williams Show (syndicated by CBS Paramount Television) in 1991. 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. On May 16, 2008 the last episode of The Montel Williams Show aired.

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.

Acting

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. 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 also appeared in a Perry Mason movie in 1993 called "The Case Of The Telltale Talk Show Host". His character, Boomer Kelly, was a former football player that was appearing on a radio talk show whose owner was found murdered.

Production

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.

Spokesperson

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". 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." In 2010, Williams became chief spokesperson for the Poker Training Network, now Card Geniuses, a MLM-based poker instruction and playing website. Montel currently is a spokesperson for Money Mutual, a payday lending service.

Other work

On April 6, 2009, Williams began hosting a daily radio show, Montel Across America, on Air America Media. On January 21, 2010, Air America ceased broadcasting, leaving Williams without a radio outlet.

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. Later episodes of Living Well with Montel advertised a home pressure cooker and an identity theft protection service. In June 2010, Williams began doing infomercials for LifeLock, a security fraud company.

Personal life

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. 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. He is also featured in Making Music Magazine.

Williams participated in the 2007 World Series of Poker main event, and planned to donate any potential winnings to US 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 online gaming sites from accepting money transactions from the U.S.

Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999. In the following year, Williams created the MS Foundation, a non-profit organization with a focus on research and education. Williams has openly stated that he uses medical cannabis, stating it helps to ease his Multiple Sclerosis-caused neuropathic pain. Williams has become a vocal advocate of cannabis, supporting efforts to pass medical cannabis laws in states, as well as calling for full legalization. He has also said that snowboarding is his "best therapy" for MS, commenting that "When I stand up I need first to hold on to something and think about the positioning of my legs. If I were to just start walking I would fall. I have to get my brain to find my legs and then I will usually take a test step, but I say something at the time to anyone who might be watching to distract from what I'm really doing. Then I'll find places to grab as I walk and talk, sometimes even walking backwards because I have more control that way. People have no idea that I'm doing this. But when I'm snowboarding and my feet are strapped in, my brain seems to have a direct connection to my legs. After snowboarding it's night and day for my balance and walking. There's a real physical change before I get up to the mountain and when I come down. The benefits last for days."

Bibliography

See also