List of Famous people named William

William J. Barber II is an American Protestant minister and political activist. He is the President and Senior Lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He also serves as a member of the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the chair of its Legislative Political Action Committee. From 2006 to 2017, Barber served as president of the NAACP's North Carolina state chapter, the largest in the Southern United States and the second-largest in the country. He has pastored Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina since 1993.

William Ezechukwu Onyeabor was a Nigerian funk musician and businessman. His music was widely heard in Nigeria in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but he remained an enigmatic figure, private and reclusive.

William G. Kaelin Jr. is an American Nobel Laureate physician-scientist. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His laboratory studies tumor suppressor proteins. In 2016, Kaelin received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the AACR Princess Takamatsu Award. He also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019 along with Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza.

William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, also called William the Marshal, was an Anglo-Norman soldier and statesman. He served five English kings – Henry II, his sons the "Young King" Henry, Richard I, John, and John's son Henry III.

William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor, was an American army surgeon, psychiatric hospital patient and lexicographical researcher. After serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War, he moved to England. Affected by paranoid delusions, he was committed to a London psychiatric hospital from 1872 to 1910 after he shot a man whom he believed to have broken into his room.

William P. "Bill" Foley II is an American businessman and former attorney, specializing in financial services. He is chairman of Fidelity National Financial and Black Knight Financial Services, and vice chairman of Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS). Foley is the lead investor in Black Knight Sports & Entertainment, a consortium that was awarded an expansion ice hockey franchise named the Vegas Golden Knights for Las Vegas, Nevada that began play in the National Hockey League in 2017.

William John Harper was a politician, general contractor and Royal Air Force fighter pilot who served as a Cabinet minister in Rhodesia from 1962 to 1968, and signed that country's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain in 1965. Born into a prominent Anglo-Indian merchant family in Calcutta, Harper was educated in India and England and joined the RAF in 1937. He served as an officer throughout the Second World War and saw action as one of "The Few" in the Battle of Britain, during which he was wounded in action. Appalled by Britain's granting of independence to India in 1947, he emigrated to Rhodesia on retiring from the Air Force two years later.

William Adams, known in Japanese as Miura Anjin , was an English navigator who, in 1600, was the first Englishman to reach Japan leading a five-ship expedition for a private Dutch fleet. Of the few survivors of the only ship that reached Japan, Adams and his second mate Jan Joosten were not allowed to leave the country while Jacob Quaeckernaeck and Melchior van Santvoort were permitted to go back to the Dutch Republic to invite them to trade.

William Stewart Halsted, M.D. was an American surgeon who emphasized strict aseptic technique during surgical procedures, was an early champion of newly discovered anaesthetics, and introduced several new operations, including the radical mastectomy for breast cancer. Along with William Osler, Howard Atwood Kelly and William H. Welch, Halsted was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. His operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital is in Ward G, and was described as a small room where medical discoveries and miracles took place. According to an intern who once worked in Halsted's operating room, Halsted had unique techniques, operated on the patients with great confidence and often had perfect results which astonished the interns. He was later called the Father of Modern Surgery.

William David Daniels is an American actor, known for his roles as Dr. Mark Craig in the NBC drama St. Elsewhere, for which he won two Emmy Awards, and as George Feeny in the ABC sitcom Boy Meets World. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1999 to 2001.