Mr. Williams is a fictional character from the 2022 British drama film Living, directed by Oliver Hermanus and written by Kazuo Ishiguro. He is played by Bill Nighy, who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance.
Mr. Williams is a senior bureaucrat in the London County Council in 1953, who works in the Public Works department. He is a widower with a son and a daughter-in-law, who are only interested in his money. He is known as "Mr. Zombie" by his colleagues, because he is bored and uninterested in his job, which involves shuffling papers and ignoring the needs of the public. He is diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer and decides to end his life with sleeping pills, but changes his mind after meeting a writer named Mr. Sutherland, who takes him on a night out in the town.
Mr. Williams then becomes determined to do something meaningful with his remaining time. He befriends a young former employee, Miss Margaret Harris, who works as a waitress at a Lyon's Corner House. He also decides to help a group of women who have been petitioning the council to build a children's playground on a bomb site. He uses his influence and persistence to overcome the bureaucratic obstacles and get the project approved. He dies peacefully on a park bench, looking at the completed playground and smiling.
Mr. Williams is a complex and sympathetic character, who undergoes a transformation from a passive and dull man to an active and passionate one. He represents the themes of the film, such as the meaning of life, the value of human connection, and the power of compassion. He is inspired by the protagonist of the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, which was partly based on the 1886 Russian novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy.