Billy Dee Williams in conversation with Sam Rubin at Live Talks Los Angeles discussing his memoir,
"What Have We Here?: Portraits of a Life." The conversation took place on Feb 26, 2024.
Billy Dee Williams recalls his remarkable life of nearly eight decades-a heralded actor who’s played the roles he wanted, from Brian’s Song to Lando in the Star Wars universe-unchecked by the racism and typecasting so rife in the mostly all-white industry in which he triumphed.
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Billy Dee Williams was born and raised in Harlem in 1937. He studied painting, first at the High School of Music and Art with fellow student Diahann Carroll, and then at the National Academy of Fine Art, before setting out to pursue acting with Herbert Berghof, Stella Adler, and Sidney Poitier. He has starred in forty movies, seven Broadway plays, and has made more than forty television shows and TV movies combined.
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In What Have We Here: Portraits of a Life, Williams writes of landing the career-making role of a lifetime in 1971, co-starring alongside James Caan in Brian’s Song, the made-for-television movie that was watched by an audience of more than fifty million people. Williams calls it “the kind of interracial love story America needed.”
And when, as the first Black character in the Star Wars universe, he became a true pop culture icon, playing Lando Calrissian in George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back (“What I presented on the screen people didn’t expect to see”). It was a role he reprised in the final film of the original trilogy, The Return of the Jedi, and in the recent sequel The Rise of Skywalker.
This heralded actor tells, in his own words, all that has sustained and carried him through a lifetime of dreams and adventure.
Sam Rubin is the entertainment anchor for the KTLA Morning News. He is a multiple-Emmy winner; has received the Golden Mike Award for best entertainment reporter; has received a lifetime achievement award from the Southern California Broadcasters Association; and has been named best entertainment reporter by the Los Angeles Press Club.