Emmys will honor the late actors Treat Williams and Ron Cephas Jones with nominations

Matthew Stewart
·3 min read
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One year after Ray Liotta received a posthumous Best TV Movie/Limited Series Supporting Actor Emmy notice for “Black Bird,” recently deceased actors Treat Williams and Ron Cephas Jones are eligible to compete for that same prize. If both are nominated for their respective fact-based turns on the anthology series “Feud” and “Genius,” they will make history as the first pair of departed performers to ever directly face off in any Primetime Emmy category.

Williams, who died last June at age 71, made his final screen appearance as CBS executive William S. Paley on the eight-part second iteration of FX’s “Feud,” subtitled “Capote vs. The Swans.” Jones, who passed away last August at 66, finished his career by portraying religious leader Elijah Muhammad on “Genius: MLK/X,” the eight-episode fourth season of the National Geographic series.

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Technically, no deceased actor has ever won the specific award Williams and Jones are seeking, but David Burns was posthumously named 1971’s Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his work in the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” special “The Price.” Six years later, he was joined on the general list of post-death champions by featured telefilm actress Diana Hyland (“The Boy in the Plastic Bubble”).

The only other performers who have posthumously won Emmys for non-continuing programs are TV movie stars Ingrid Bergman (“A Woman Called Golda,” 1982) and Raul Julia (“The Burning Season,” 1995). Bergman was still alive at the time of her nomination but died three weeks before the ceremony.

Aside from Liotta, Williams and Jones will have been preceded on their category’s roster of posthumous nominees by Jack Hawkins (“QB VII,” 1975), Walter McGinn (“Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years,” 1977), Jack Albertson (“My Body, My Child,” 1982), Richard Burton (“Ellis Island,” 1985), and J.T. Walsh (“Hope,” 1998). Liotta and Hawkins both lost to their own cast mates (Paul Walter Hauser and Anthony Quayle), while the remaining four were respectively beaten by Burgess Meredith (“Tail Gunner Joe”), Laurence Olivier (“Brideshead Revisited”), Karl Malden (“Fatal Vision”), and George C. Scott (“12 Angry Men”).

The closest any two deceased actors ever came to competing against each other at the Emmys was when non-continuing program leads Stanley Baker (“How Green Was My Valley”) and Peter Finch (“Raid on Entebbe”) landed 1977 bids in different categories. Although they would be included in the same lineup today, they were separated because “How Green Was My Valley” is a series and “Raid on Entebbe” is a one-off special. The victors in those cases were Christopher Plummer (“The Moneychangers”) and Ed Flanders (“Harry S. Truman: Plain Speaking”).

Both Williams and Jones are Emmy veterans, with the former having earned a mention in this same category for “The Late Shift” in 1996. He ultimately lost to Tom Hulce (“The Heidi Chronicles”). Jones’s resume consists of one supporting (2017) and three guest (2018-2020) notices for the drama series “This Is Us,” with wins resulting from his second and fourth bids.

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