List of Famous people named William

William Mason was an American composer and pianist and a member of a musical family. His father was composer Lowell Mason, a leading figure in American church music, and his younger brother, Henry Mason, was a co-founder of the piano manufacturers Mason and Hamlin.

William Arms Fisher was an American composer, music historian and writer.

William Terry was a nineteenth-century politician, lawyer, teacher, slaveowner, and Confederate soldier from Virginia. The last commander of the famed Stonewall Brigade during the American Civil War also twice won election to the U.S. House of Representatives after the conflict.

William Hoyt was an American track and field athlete. He competed at the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens. He was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

William Law was a Church of England priest who lost his position at Emmanuel College, Cambridge when his conscience would not allow him to take the required oath of allegiance to the first Hanoverian monarch, King George I. Previously William Law had given his allegiance to the House of Stuart and is sometimes considered a second-generation non-juror. Thereafter, Law first continued as a simple priest (curate) and when that too became impossible without the required oath, Law taught privately, as well as wrote extensively. His personal integrity, as well as his mystic and theological writing greatly influenced the evangelical movement of his day as well as Enlightenment thinkers such as the writer Dr Samuel Johnson and the historian Edward Gibbon. In 1784 William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the politician, philanthropist and leader of the movement to stop the slave trade, was deeply touched by reading William Law's book A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729). Law's spiritual writings remain in print today.

William of Tyre was a medieval prelate and chronicler. As archbishop of Tyre, he is sometimes known as William II to distinguish him from his predecessor, William I, the Englishman, a former Prior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, who was Archbishop of Tyre from 1127 to 1135. He grew up in Jerusalem at the height of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been established in 1099 after the First Crusade, and he spent twenty years studying the liberal arts and canon law in the universities of Europe.

William Sydney Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim, was an Anglo-Irish nobleman and landlord notorious in Irish history for his mistreatment of his tenants. He was assassinated in the north of County Donegal in Ireland in April 1878.

William Anthony McGuire was an American playwright, theatre director, and producer and screenwriter, including The Kid From Spain (1932) starring Eddie Cantor. McGuire earned an Oscar nomination for the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld, the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1936.

William M. Scholl was a pioneer of foot care and the founder of Dr. Scholl's, a brand of foot care products.

William Wadsworth Hodkinson, known more commonly as W. W. Hodkinson, was born in Independence, Kansas. Known as The Man Who Invented Hollywood, he opened one of the first movie theaters in Ogden, Utah in 1907 and within just a few years changed the way movies were produced, distributed, and exhibited. He became a leading West Coast film distributor in the early days of motion pictures and in 1912 he founded and became president of the first nationwide film distributor, Paramount Pictures Corporation. Hodkinson was also responsible for doodling the mountain that became the Paramount logo in 1914. After being driven out of Paramount, he established his own independent distribution company, the W. W. Hodkinson Corporation, in 1917, before selling it off in 1924. He left the motion picture business in 1929 to form Hodkinson Aviation Corporation, and later formed the Central American Aviation Corporation and Companía Nacional de Aviación in Guatemala.