Williams was born to Robert F. Williams, a chemist at Eastman Kodak, and Audrey Stauber Williams (1921–2008) on May 28, 1949 in Webster, New York. She studied clarinet at the Community Music School program of the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, and later was a clarinetist in her high school’s concert band. At the age of six, she appeared tap-dancing on the Howdy Doody show as a member of the “Peanut Gallery.”

In 1976, Williams arrived in New York City, where she saw an ad in the Show Business magazine that lay open on the Port Authority Bus Terminal station floor. It was a casting call for radical artist and Yale University graduate Rod Swenson’s experimental “Captain Kink’s Theatre.” She replied to the ad and began performing in live sex shows. She later appeared in Gail Palmer’s adult film, Candy Goes to Hollywood (1979), credited as Wendy Williams. She was featured as a performer on a parody of The Gong Show shooting ping pong balls across the set from her vagina.

When transitioning into early adulthood, after running away from her family at the age of 16 and leaving the US to explore the world for several years, for a time Wendy became interested in Far Eastern spirituality, religions, and gurus as well as experimenting with mind-altering substances like LSD and mescaline. She continued to try different jobs and lifestyles in order to discover somewhere where she felt she belonged, until eventually finding the show-business magazine ad for Rod Swenson’s Sex Fantasy Theater in 1976 – he would go on to form and manage their band, the Plasmatics; the two remained lifelong romantic partners until her suicide in 1998. Williams was strictly against sexism in the rock scene. Throughout her musical careers, her songs frequently featured anti-consumerist and anti-establishment messages. Swenson claims that Wendy and he agreed together that they “didn’t want to do things that sold, [they] wanted to do things that were interesting, new territory”.

By 1977, Swenson became Williams’ manager and recruited her to join his newly formed punk rock band, Plasmatics. They made their debut in July 1978 at the Manhattan music club CBGB. The Plasmatics toured the world, although a concert in London was cancelled by the promoters due to safety reasons, causing the press to dub the band “anarchists.” During the shooting of an appearance on SCTV in 1981, studio heads decided they would not air Williams’ performance unless she changed out of a costume that revealed her nipples. Williams refused. The show’s make-up artists found a compromise and painted her breasts black.

Her teachers and other sources described Wendy Williams as a shy and soft-spoken child who was an average student that learned to play the clarinet very well in the junior high band – though she herself has numerous times stated that she felt like an outcast and was misunderstood by her strict parents, whom she referred to as “cocktail zombies”. Swenson recalled in an interview how Wendy told him there were attempts to have her institutionalised after she became a rebellious teenager. She was said to have “experimented with drugs and furious sex” in her teenage years (though years later as an adult woman in 1979 and the early 1980s she would go on to become a “teetotaler”, in the words of her partner).

In January 1981, Milwaukee, Wisconsin police arrested Williams for simulating masturbation on stage, and charged with battery to an officer and obscene conduct. She was cleared of all charges. Later that year in Cleveland, Ohio, Williams was acquitted of an obscenity charge for simulating sex on stage wearing only shaving cream; she subsequently covered her nipples with electrical tape to avoid arrest. In November, an Illinois judge sentenced her to one year supervision and fined her $35 for attacking a freelance photographer who tried to take her picture as she jogged along the Chicago lakefront.

Williams recorded a duet of the country hit “Stand by Your Man” with Lemmy of Motörhead in 1982. In 1984, she released the W.O.W. album, produced by Gene Simmons of Kiss. Kiss members Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, Eric Carr, and Vinnie Vincent also perform on the album. Gene Simmons plays bass but is credited as Reginald Van Helsing. In 1985 Williams starred in The Rocky Horror Show at the Westport Playhouse in St. Louis. The show played for over six months, but a nationwide tour fell through.

In 1986, she starred in Tom DeSimone’s indie-film Reform School Girls. Neither she nor manager Rod Swenson liked the film when it came out, but at this point the producers had heard Kommander of Kaos (her second solo album) and wanted to include three tracks from the album in the movie score. They approached Rod about producing the title track for the film and having Wendy sing it. The band reluctantly agreed to do it. Uncle Brian from the Broc joined Rod as co-producer and also played sax. He also appeared in the video that the film company had asked Rod to produce and direct, playing the sax and wearing a tutu.

In 1987, Williams starred as the part-time friend/enemy in the underground spy world to the title character on Fox’s The New Adventures of Beans Baxter. The Plasmatics’ last tour was in late 1988. Williams appeared in Pucker Up and Bark Like a Dog, directed by Paul S. Parco, in 1990.

In 1988, Wendy put out another solo album, this time a “thrash rap” album called Deffest! and Baddest! under the name “Ultrafly and the Hometown Girls.”

In 1991, Williams moved to Storrs, Connecticut, where she lived with her long-time companion and former manager, Rod Swenson, and worked as an animal rehabilitator and at a food co-op in Willimantic. She explained her move by saying that she “was pretty fed up dealing with people.”

A committed vegetarian since 1966 until her death, Williams believed in leading a healthy lifestyle and aiming for self-improvement. She was once featured on the cover of the Vegetarian Times. In her later years, she gave up smoking (which she felt very strongly about and would not allow anyone to smoke in her changing rooms) as well as eventually stopping drinking entirely and never using any other drugs; she also became strongly opposed to the high sugar content in easily available processed foods. Swenson recalls that: “[Wendy] was a consummate professional, always working on her craft, working on the show. She would work out hours every day, she would run six miles a day. She was a total vegetarian, totally into health food. When we were on the road, she always made sure the band was well fed. No processed meats, no white bread”. She was known for refusing to wear makeup products manufactured by companies that used animals for laboratory experimentation and she was completely against needless poaching. After leaving the music scene, Swenson and Williams moved to Storrs, Connecticut, in 1991 to live in the geodesic dome house that they built for each other. Wendy worked at a food co-op and became a wildlife rehabilitator to help animals, which she loved since her childhood as she was known for taking in and helping wounded wild animals as a child.

Williams first attempted suicide in 1993 by hammering a knife into her chest where it lodged in her sternum. However, she changed her mind and called Rod Swenson to take her to the hospital. She attempted suicide again in 1997 with an overdose of ephedrine.

Williams died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 6, 1998, when she was 48. Swenson, her partner for more than 20 years, returned to their home in the area where they had lived since moving to Connecticut from New York City. He found a package she left for him that contained some noodles he liked, a packet of seeds for growing garden greens, some Oriental massage balm, and sealed letters from her.

Joey Ramone and many others issued statements at the time of her death. On Motörhead’s 1999 live album Everything Louder Than Everyone Else, before the song “No Class,” Motörhead vocalist Lemmy said that he wanted to dedicate the song to her.