Wellesnet
April 13, 2026
Sad to learn tonight that Tony Williams, a longtime Wellesnet supporter and contributor, has passed away after a brief illness. He was 80.
News of his passing was shared by friends on social media, one of whom described him as “outspoken and brilliant in a way few are—an academic who wasn’t concerned with the etiquette or appearance that so many of his peers were.”
Tony was a professor of English and Area Head of Film Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
He was among the first members of the Wellesnet community when the website was launched in March 2001 and contributed more than 1,000 posts to the Message Board. He was unfailingly loyal to the site and penned several articles. In recent years, he wrote an analysis of The Trial and a review of Dany Wu’s documentary American: An Odyssey to 1947.
Educated at Manchester and Warwick Universities, Tony authored and/or co-authored Italian Western: The Opera of Violence (1975); Jack London: The Movies (1992); Vietnam War Films (1994/2011); Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (1996); Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an American Filmmaker (1997); Jack London’s The Sea Wolf: A Screenplay by Robert Rossen (1998); The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (2003); Body and Soul: The Cinematic Vision of Robert Aldrich (2004); John Woo’s Bullet in the Head (2009); and James Jones: The Limits of Eternity (2016).).
His articles also appeared in Asian Cinema, cineACTION, Cinema Journal, Excavatio, Film Criticism, Film History, Journal of Chinese Cinemas,Movie, Postscript, Vietnam Generatio.
Tony is survived by his wife and a daughter.
WILLIAMS, Tony (Anthony J. Williams)
Born: 1/11/1946, Swansea, Wales, U.K.
Died: 4/14/2026, Carbondale, Illinois, U.S.A.
Tony Williams westerns – author:
Italian Western: The Opera of Violence (1975
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