William Devane

William Devane is an American actor born on September 5, 1939 in Albany, New York. In his long career, which started on stage and continued in cinema and television, he is best remembered for his roles as Greg Sumner in the TV series Knots Landing and James Heller in the TV series 24.

Cinema

He began to stand out in front of the camera in the 1970s. He played President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1974 television movie The Missiles of October. In the same decade, he appeared in productions such as Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot (1976), John Schlesinger's thriller Marathon Man (1976), and Rolling Thunder (1977), in which he played a soldier returning from Vietnam.

In the following years, he starred in Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys (2000) and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Interstellar (2014); in the last two, he took on authority figures such as the government and the NASA administrator.

Television

His longest-running television gig was Knots Landing, which he ran from 1983 to 1993. He played ambitious businessman and politician Greg Sumner on the series for ten years. From 2005 to 2007, he again reached a wide audience with his role as Secretary of Defense James Heller in 24; He continued the same character in 2014's 24: Live Another Day, this time as the US president.

Devane is a character actor with a career spanning nearly six decades, known for her convincing portrayals of both real and fictional politicians.