William December Williams Jr. (born April 6, 1937, in New York City) is an American actor and painter. He is best known to the public for his film work, above all for playing Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars saga, but he trained as a visual artist and has kept painting throughout his career. His work has been shown in galleries and collections around the world.
He grew up in Harlem, in a household where the arts were part of daily life; his mother had studied opera. At seven he made his Broadway debut as a page in The Firebrand of Florence (1945), the Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin operetta, a part he later described as boring. He graduated in 1955 from the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan and won a scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design, where he studied the classical principles of painting. In the mid-1950s he received a Hallgarten Prize for painting. The scholarship covered tuition but not materials, so he turned to acting to pay for paints, brushes and canvases. What began as a way to fund his art gradually became a career.
His film debut came in 1959 with The Last Angry Man, opposite Paul Muni, in which he played a delinquent young man. During the 1960s he found few leading roles open to Black actors, and his film career built slowly until the television movie Brian's Song (1971) brought him national attention. He played the football player Gale Sayers in it, earning an Emmy nomination for Best Actor. In the 1970s he starred in films such as Lady Sings the Blues (1972), opposite Diana Ross, and Scott Joplin (1977), in which he played the ragtime composer.
In 1980 he joined The Empire Strikes Back as Lando Calrissian, becoming the first Black actor with a major role in the franchise. He reprised the character in Return of the Jedi (1983) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019). In between he starred opposite Sylvester Stallone in Nighthawks (1981). In Batman (1989) he played district attorney Harvey Dent, a role planned to lead to the villain Two-Face, which did not develop that way in that version. Years later he voiced Two-Face in The Lego Batman Movie (2017).
His legacy joins two paths he never fully separated: the successful screen actor and the painter trained in the classical tradition. His career shows that a Black American artist could build a public career in Hollywood in the second half of the twentieth century without giving up painting, and his place in the Star Wars saga gave him a visibility that remains central to how he is remembered.