William December Williams Jr. (born April 6, 1937) is an American actor, novelist and painter. He has appeared in over 100 films and television roles over six decades. He is best known for portraying Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars franchise and has also appeared in critically acclaimed and popular titles such as Mahogany (1975), Scott Joplin (1977), and Nighthawks (1981), as Harvey Dent in Batman (1989) and The Lego Batman Movie (2017), The Last Angry Man (1959), Carter's Army (1969), The Out-of-Towners (1970), The Final Comedown and Lady Sings the Blues (both 1972), Hit! (1973), Fear City and Terror in the Aisles (both 1984), Alien Intruder (1993) and The Visit (2000).
Raised in Harlem, Williams made his Broadway theatre debut at age seven in The Firebrand of Florence (1945). He later graduated from The High School of Music & Art, then won a painting scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design, where he won a Hallgarten Prize for painting in the mid-1950s. He returned to acting to fund his art supplies, including stage, films, and television. He continued painting; his work has since been shown in galleries and collections worldwide. Williams’ film debut was in The Last Angry Man (1959), but he came to national attention in the television movie Brian's Song (1971), which earned him an Emmy nomination for Best Actor. In the 1980s, he was cast as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), becoming the first black actor with a major role in the Star Wars franchise. He reprised his role in subsequent Star Wars films and media. Williams's television work includes over 70 credits starting in 1966 including recurring roles over the decades in Gideon's Crossing, Dynasty, General Hospital: Night Shift, and General Hospital. Numerous cameos and supporting roles included being paired with Marla Gibbs on The Jeffersons, 227, and The Hughleys. Later work included voice acting in the series Titan Maximum (2009), and appearing on the reality show Dancing with the Stars (2014).
His work has earned him numerous awards and honors including three NAACP Image Awards, and the NAACP Lifetime Achievement award. He was inducted into the Black Filmmaker's Hall of Fame in 1984, and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1985.
William December Williams Jr. was born on April 6, 1937, in New York City. He is the son of Loretta Anne (1915–2016), an elevator operator at the Lyceum Theatre and aspiring performer from Montserrat, and William December Williams Sr. (1909–1973), an African-American caretaker, with some Native American ancestry from Texas. He grew up in Harlem on 110th Street, between Lenox and 5th, adjacent to the Central Park North–110th Street station. He used to go to Central Park to see the Negro league players and the Cuban baseball league, "They were fantastic, and I wound up working with a lot of those guys," (in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)). He has a twin sister, Loretta, and they were raised by their maternal grandmother while their parents worked several jobs. His mom had studied opera for years, becoming an accomplished opera star who wanted to break into movies; the family was richly cultured, exposing the children early on to drawing, painting, theatre and similar creative experiences; Billy Dee would remain a fan of the arts including opera. In March 1945, he made his Broadway debut at age seven portraying a page in The Firebrand of Florence, Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s operetta starring Lotte Lenya. His mom, who worked at the theatre, volunteered him for the part which he found boring.
Williams attended Booker T. Washington Junior High School where he had dreams of being a painter. He graduated in 1955 from the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, where he majored in arts with a focus on visual arts. There he was classmates with Peter Yarrow. The school would later be the subject for Fame (1980), and its derivative television series. While there he got a two-year scholarship for the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design in New York—which later changed its name to National Academy of Design—to study with a focus on "classical principles of painting". He was nominated at eighteen or nineteen years old for a Guggenheim Fellowship grant—for "creative ability in the arts," and won a Hallgarten Prize in the mid-1950s. Although he had scholarships to pay for school tuition, he turned to acting to pay for his paints, supplies, and canvasses. His first Broadway theatre "big break" was a play, A Taste of Honey. He continued to struggle as an actor for ten years working as an extra, doing small and large theatre, and "slowly breaking into television and film". During art school he gained interest in the Stanislavsky Method—experiencing a role in contrast to representing it, to mobilize an actor's conscious thought and will to activate emotional response and subconscious behavior—and began studying at the Harlem Actors Workshop. It was run by blacklisted actor Paul Mann who embraced actors of all races; Williams also studied there under Sidney Poitier. Though he first viewed his acting as a way to pay for his art supplies, by the early 1960s he began to "devote all of his energy to performance." In succession, he got an actor agent through a friend, started getting major Off-Broadway roles, then work on Broadway.
1959–1970: Broadway debut and early roles
Williams returned to Broadway as an adult in 1960 in the adaptation of The Cool World. He appeared in A Taste of Honey in 1960. Williams made his film debut in 1959 in The Last Angry Man, opposite Paul Muni, in which he portrayed a delinquent young man. He was frustrated in the 1960s with the "paucity of parts for leading black men," the majority of roles he wanted went to Sidney Poitier. He enjoyed doing theater and television, but "his slow-building film career ate at him." He found LSD, a popular hallucinogenic drug with the era's hippie movement to be a cure, "LSD saved my life ... I wasn't doing it to get high. It let me get inside of myself." Otherwise he is anti-drug.
1971–1989: Film stardom and acclaim
He rose to stardom after starring in the critically acclaimed television film Brian's Song (1971), in which he played Chicago Bears star football player Gale Sayers, who stood by his friend Brian Piccolo (James Caan), during Piccolo's struggle with terminal cancer. Both Williams and Caan were nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards for best actor for their performances. Williams said the role was the one of which he was most proud "It was a love story, really. Between two guys. Without sex. ... It ended up being a kind of breakthrough in terms of racial division." Williams' success with Brian's Song earned him a seven-year contract with Motown's Berry Gordy. He became one of America's most well-known black film actors of the 1970s, after starring in a string of critically acclaimed and popular movies, many of them in the "blaxploitation" genre.
In 1972, he starred as Billie Holiday's husband Louis McKay in Motown Productions' Academy Award-nominated Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues acting opposite Diana Ross as the titular character. Through his portrayal he became "a full-fledged sex symbol, and was dubbed by The New York Times as the black Clark Gable.'" Williams later stated, "I wanted to be known as one of the best actors of my generation, period, but the opportunities weren’t the same for me as they were for Gable, and I was frustrated." Motown paired the two of them again three years later in the successful follow-up project Mahogany. Williams returned to Broadway in the 1976 production, I Have a Dream, which was directed by Robert Greenwald. Williams portrayed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. In 1977, he played the eponymous lead role in Scott Joplin, biopic of musician's life, featuring many of his ragtime pieces in the soundtrack, including an epic piano duel in the early opening scenes. Williams was cast as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), becoming the first African-American actor with a role in the Star Wars series. He would reprise the role in Return of the Jedi (1983). Williams voiced the character in the audio drama adaption of The Empire Strikes Back (1983).