Ben Williams, 56; was half of famed circus elephant act

Anna May, the 7,880-pound elephant with whom Mr. Williams performed for a half-century, died at 57 in December 2004 after a seven-month retirement. (Human and elephant years are pretty much equivalent.)

The cause of Mr. Williams’s death was gastrointestinal cancer, said his stepfather, Bill “Buckles’’ Woodcock, himself a famed elephant presenter.

Mr. Williams’s mother, Barbara Woodcock, was a member of the fourth generation of her family to perform with animals in circuses. His father, Rex Williams, was an elephant trainer known for slipping camels and horses into the act.

After Barbara and Rex divorced, she married Woodcock, whose father was a legendary elephant showman, with family roots going back to the Orton’s Badger Circus, which started in Wisconsin in 1854.

Ben Williams took to elephants the way most children warm up to cocker spaniels. At age 6, he was a precious part of the family act.

“He could climb around the elephants almost like he was a chimpanzee,’’ Woodcock said in an interview on Oct. 6. And Mr. Williams - with his tiger-skin loincloth, million-watt smile, and streaming blond mane - rivaled Anna May in popularity, if not poundage, appearing with his family and the elephant on Ed Sullivan’s television show when he was 10 or 11.

Mr. Williams would dart around Anna May and other pachyderms, not to mention a leopard walk-on. He would lie motionless as Anna May came within inches of crushing him. He would grin as the elephant grabbed his leg in her mouth and spun him round and round. He did a handstand on Anna’s head.

Mr. Williams selflessly gave credit to his costar, a native of Burma that his stepfather’s father bought from another circus at the age of 5 in 1951. She was named after Anna May Wong, the silent movie star.

“She makes me look good,’’ Mr. Williams said in an interview with New York magazine in 1985. “She’s forgotten more tricks than I know.’’

Ben Harold Williams was born in Fort Worth, and first rode an elephant at 4 months. As a toddler, he made a jungle gym out of the species, intrepidly leaping from back to back. He was soon cutting the elephants’ very large toenails, among other grooming chores.

When not on the road, he went to school in Ruskin, Fla., where he was president of the National Honor Society. He turned down a scholarship to the University of South Florida to stay with the elephants.

Mr. Williams, his mother, stepfather, and two siblings performed in a small circus started by his mother’s parents. They worked with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1970s and the Big Apple Circus in the 1980s and 1990s.

Anna May, a stunningly intelligent beast, liked most people but fell hard for young Ben. She liked to hoist him high in the air with her trunk. By the 1970s, they were a hit act.

“She raised him, really,’’ Mr. Williams’s mother said in an interview Wednesday.

Mr. Williams returned the love, as was dramatically evident in 1982, when a 30-year-old woman in Wisconsin sneaked into a trailer where Anna May was sleeping. The startled elephant swatted the woman with her trunk, killing her.

Mr. Williams panicked and fled with Anna May. He was worried, Barbara Woodcock said, that the authorities would destroy the elephant, as often happens to animals that kill people, however inadvertently. After initially being charged with murder, Mr. Williams was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident. He spent two weeks in jail.

Around 2000, the Big Apple Circus stopped including elephant acts, partly in response to animal-rights groups’ protests. Mr. Williams’s family gave Anna May and their other pachyderms to a refuge in Arkansas. She is buried beneath rocks meant to represent a heart-shaped circus ring. Mr. Williams liked to visit.

In addition to his mother and stepfather, Mr. Williams, who lived in Ruskin, leaves his wife, Darlene; his daughters Stormy and Skye; his sister, Delilah; and his brother, Shannon.

Mr. Williams was offered opportunities to pursue other lines of work, New York magazine reported. He always refused.

“I just went back to running around in the loincloth and jumping around with the elephant,’’ he said. “It’s what I do best.’’