List of Famous people named William

William Hing Cheung Hung is a Hong Kong-born American motivational speaker and former singer who gained fame in early 2004 as a result of his unsuccessful audition performance of Ricky Martin's hit song "She Bangs" on the third season of the television series American Idol.

William Jefferson Hague, Baron Hague of Richmond, is a British Conservative politician and life peer. He represented Richmond, Yorkshire, as its Member of Parliament (MP) from 1989 until 2015 and was the Leader of the Opposition from 1997 to 2001. He was Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2010 to 2014 and was the Leader of the House of Commons from 2014 to 2015.

William Thomas Sadler is an American stage, film and television actor. His television and motion picture roles have included Chesty Puller in The Pacific, Luther Sloan in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sheriff Jim Valenti in Roswell, convict Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption, Senator Vernon Trent in Hard to Kill, and the Grim Reaper in Assaulted Nuts, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Tales from the Crypt and Bill & Ted Face the Music, and his role as Colonel Stuart in Die Hard 2. He played Matthew Ellis in Iron Man 3, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and WHIH Newsfront. He also recurs as John McGarrett in the 2010 remake of the 1968 television series Hawaii Five-O, and the Boston boxing promoter and suspected drug dealer Gino Fish in the Jesse Stone television film series, opposite Tom Selleck, as a small-town police chief.

William Theodore Katt is an American film and television actor, voice artist and musician best known as the star of the television series The Greatest American Hero. He first became known for playing Tommy Ross, the ill-fated prom date of Carrie White in the original film version of Carrie (1976) and subsequently starred in films such as First Love (1977), Big Wednesday (1978) and Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979). Between 1985 and 1988, he starred in nine Perry Mason television films alongside his mother Barbara Hale, who reprised her role as Della Street from the television series Perry Mason.

William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".

William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author whose influence affected popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians and made many appearances in films. He was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee. Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual artworks, including his celebrated 'Gunshot Paintings'.

William McGirt is an American professional golfer who plays on the PGA Tour.

William Lassell was an English merchant and astronomer. He is remembered for his improvements to the reflecting telescope and his ensuing discoveries of four planetary satellites.

William Henry Seward was United States Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869, and earlier served as governor of New York and as a United States Senator. A determined opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War, he was a prominent figure in the Republican Party in its formative years, and was praised for his work on behalf of the Union as Secretary of State during the Civil War.

William Lamport (1611–1659) was an Irish Catholic adventurer, known in Mexico as Don Guillén de Lampart y Guzmán. He was tried by the Mexican Inquisition for sedition and executed in 1659. He claimed to be a bastard son of King Philip III of Spain and therefore the half-brother of King Philip IV.