William Allen Young
William Allen Young is an actor, born 1954.
Over three decades and more than a hundred television, stage and film projects, Young built a career out of usefulness rather than stardom. Two of the films are Academy Award nominees: A Soldier's Story (1984), where he plays Private Henson, and District 9 (2009), where he is the executive Dirk Michaels. He was also in The Day After (1983), the nuclear-war television film that briefly became a national event.
The pattern of the work is authority. Agents, officers, doctors, lawyers, judges: Greg Arnold in Jagged Edge, Agent Williamson in Wisdom, Braden in Lock Up, Agent Lawrence in Fear X, Lt. Dietrich in Murder 101. He is good at the institutional calm a scene needs in order for somebody else to lose their temper, and he supplies it without going stiff.
The better roles have been domestic. Les in The Waterdance (1992) and Eugene in The Women of Brewster Place (1989) ask for something rawer, and Frank Mitchell on Moesha, from 1996, made him a sitcom father to an audience with very few of them on network television. He directed episodes of that series as well. Dr. Rollie Guthrie on Code Black (2015) is the late-career equivalent, the senior man in a loud ensemble.
The part of the biography that never appears on screen may matter most. As a former co-chair of the Directors Guild of America's African-American Steering Committee, he helped broker the 2000 TV Network Agreement, the deal credited with widening the pipeline for writers, directors, actors and producers of color in American television.
Movies (12)
TV (5)
Where to start with William Allen Young
Begin with A Soldier's Story, both because it is the best film here and because Private Henson sits inside an ensemble of actors who nearly all went on to larger careers. Watch what he does with very little screen time.
Moesha is the role most people know him from, and Frank Mitchell is a properly written sitcom father rather than a punchline delivery system.
The Day After is the historical artifact, still upsetting, and worth an evening for what American television was once willing to broadcast. District 9 gives him a brief, chilly corporate turn. The Waterdance is the underseen one, a hospital drama with no sentiment in it at all, and Code Black is the recent series work if you want volume.