Who played green hornet

Van Williams, who portrayed the masked crime-fighter The Green Hornet in a memorable but short-lived companion TV series to Batman in the 1960s, has died. He was 82.

The actor, who earlier played bachelor private eye Kenny Madison on two Warner Bros. Television detective series, Bourbon Street Beat and Surfside 6, died Nov. 29 of kidney failure at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., his wife of 57 years, Vicki, told The Hollywood Reporter. He had just one kidney since he was 25, she said.

In The Green Hornet, an adaptation of the radio serial that debuted in the 1930s, Williams starred as playboy editor/publisher Britt Reid, who inherited The Daily Sentinel newspaper from his father, who died in jail after being framed for a crime he did not commit. Reid donned a mask, fedora and long coat to battle the bad guys as the Hornet.

Famed martial-arts expert Bruce Lee, then unknown in the U.S., played Kato, Reid’s manservant. He drove his boss around town in their ominous, gadget-packed Black Beauty car.

With Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward as the Dynamic Duo, enjoying huge popularity in its first season, that show’s 20th Century Fox-based executive producer, William Dozier, brought The Green Hornet to ABC, and it debuted on a Friday night in September 1966.

“When I was a kid I had actually been a fan of The Green Hornet when it was on the radio and in those serials at the theater, but I didn’t know if I wanted to star in a TV series like that,” Williams told interviewer Michael Barnum. “It was very similar to Adam West’s show … and seemed like something that would probably be the kiss of death to my career. You do that type of show and become so identified with it, like Superman’s George Reeves was, and you can never get away from it. But, my agency, William Morris, really wanted me to do The Green Hornet, so that is what I did.”

Williams and Lee also appeared on Batman in a “window” cameo and in a much-hyped two-part crossover episode during that show’s second season. However, viewers’ once-ravenous appetite for such comic-book fare faded quickly: The Green Hornet lasted just 26 episodes, leaving the air in March 1967, while Batman was done in March 1968 after its third season.

Williams pretty much retired from acting in 1982. He spent years as a reserve deputy with the Malibu station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and worked for its search and rescue team.

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Van Zandt Williams grew up on a ranch. He attended Texas Christian University and later had a job as a skin-diving instructor in Hawaii when he met producer Michael Todd — the husband of Elizabeth Taylor and the Oscar-winning producer of Around the World in 80 Days — who convinced him he should try acting.

The dark-haired, blue-eyed Williams came to Los Angeles and was signed by Warner Bros., and he made his onscreen debut on a 1958 installment of General Electric Theater that also featured Ronald Reagan.

After appearing on episodes of Lawman and Colt .45, Williams was hired to play the young bachelor Madison — one of the private investigators who worked out of an office above a restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter — in Bourbon Street Beat. His character was the boyfriend of the secretary portrayed by former Miss USA Arlene Howell.

That show lasted one season (1959-60), but Warner Bros. brought Williams and his Madison character to Surfside 6, a series about another P.I. firm, this one working out of a houseboat in Miami. That show lasted two seasons.

In 1964-65, Williams played the assistant (and pilot) of an eccentric millionaire industrialist (Walter Brennan) on the ABC series The Tycoon.

After the swift demise of The Green Hornet, Williams starred in Westwind, a 1975-76 NBC Saturday morning kids show, as an underwater photographer who sailed around the Pacific with his wife, a marine biologist, and their two kids.

Williams acted rarely after that, appearing on such shows The Streets of San Francisco, Barnaby Jones, The Rockford Files and Mrs. Columbo. He appeared as the man directing the first episode of The Green Hornet in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), toplined by Jason Scott Lee.

“I didn’t really care that much for the acting business,” Williams said in the Barnum interview. “I didn’t like the people in it, the way they operated and all the phoniness and back-stabbing. It was not a very pleasant education for a guy from Texas whose handshake was his word. Plus, I’d gone into acting looking at it as a business, not wanting necessarily to be a celebrity.”

Contrary to some reports, he did not have a cameo in the 2011 Green Hornet movie that starred Seth Rogen. “He wanted nothing to do with that movie,” his wife said.

Survivors also include his daughters Nina, Tia and Britt.

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Main article: Britt Reid (Radio)

Britt Reid is the son of Dan Reid Jr. and the grandnephew of John Reid, a.k.a. the Lone Ranger. He is the publisher of the Daily Sentinel by day and the masked "criminal"/secretly superhero the Green Hornet by night. He, and his Filipino/Japanese valet Kato, fought the criminal underworld from 1936 to 1952.

This version of Britt Reid was played by four different actors during the show's run: Al Hodge (1936-43,45), Donovan Faust (1943), Bob Hall (1945-47), and Jack McCarthy (1947-52).

Film Serials (1940-41)[]

This version of Britt Reid is almost exactly the same as that of his radio counterpart, except his partner, Kato, is of Korean desent, owing to Japan having been an American enemy in World War II, when the serials were produced. Britt, as the Green Hornet, faced off against the Leader, who organized a crime wave across the city, and crime lord Boss Crogan and his crime rackets.

Gordon Jones acted out the role of Britt Reid in the first serial, The Green Hornet, but Al Hodge, who was providing the voice of the radio Hornet at the time, dubbed in the voice whenever Britt became the Green Hornet.

Warren Hull appeared as Britt Reid in the second serial, The Green Hornet Strikes Again!

TV Series (1966-67)[]

Britt Reid is the owner and publisher of The Daily Sentinel and the Green Hornet. He became the Hornet when his father was wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and had later died in prison. His identity is known to Lenore Case, District Attorney Frank P. Scanlon and Kato, who aids him in his fight against the criminal underworld. He once traveled to Gotham City to stop Colonel Gumm from running a counterfeit stamp ring, but was interrupted by Batman and Robin, who mistook them for criminals. Britt and Kato went to back to Gotham to once again fight Gumm, now calling himself General Gumm and had teamed up with the Joker to stop Batman and Robin. The Green Hornet and Kato teamed up with the Dynamic Duo and stopped Gumm and the Joker.

This version was played by Van Williams during the show's one-season run.

This Britt Reid is part of the DC Comics "1966" universe, having teamed up with the 1966 Adam West Batman twice, once on television and once in a six-issue miniseries.

2011 Film[]

Britt Reid is the young publishing heir who uses the secret identity of the Green Hornet. When his widowed father James Reid dies, he is left in charge of the city's biggest newspaper company, whose "flag-paper" is called the Daily Sentinel. Lenore Case, his secretary, has already entered into an interpersonal relationship with him at the time of his father's death. Britt subsequently recruits a young man named Kato, whom he has befriended, as his partner in fighting crime. The car they use, called the Black Beauty, is armed with a veritable arsenal of technology. Though this Kato is a rather poor hand-to-band combatant, unlike the other men previously acting out Kato, all of whom (not least Bruce Lee) were themselves formidable fighters, he does show Britt how to put someone to sleep with his eye pupil; Britt also uses this when he breaks the fourth wall and talks to viewers directly after he has found out the truth about his father’s death. Britt then makes the viewer look at the pupil of his eye.

This incarnation of Britt Reid was specific to the 2011 film, in which Seth Rogen acted out the role.

Animated series[]

Britt Reid will appear as the Green Hornet in an upcoming animated series in The Green Hornet franchise. He, however, will not be the main character, this role instead falling to his son.[1]

References[]