What Have We Right here?: Portraits of a Life is launched in February 2024. 

When the Star Wars legend Billy Dee Williams teased “one thing actually magnificent” just lately, varied commentators (us included) jumped to a conclusion.

That’s as a result of his tease got here intently after information broke concerning the long-gestating Star Wars Lando Calrissian tv sequence: Donald Glover and his screenwriter brother Stephen are hooked up to put in writing the present for Disney+.

Whereas the 2 items of stories now seem unrelated, you may see how we received there (and fingers stay crossed!) Regardless, the information of Billy Dee Williams telling the story of his outstanding profession is definitely one thing to be celebrated.

Right here’s the blurb for What Have We Right here?: Portraits of a Life

A movie legend recollects his outstanding lifetime of practically eight a long time—a heralded actor who’s performed the roles he needed, from Brian’s Tune to Lando within the Star Wars universe—unchecked by the racism and typecasting so rife within the largely all-white trade wherein he triumphed.

Billy Dee Williams was born in Harlem in 1937 and grew up in a family of affection and class. As a younger boy, he made his stage debut working with Lotte Lenya in an Ira Gershwin/Kurt Weill manufacturing the place Williams ended up feeding Lenya her strains. He studied portray, first on the Excessive Faculty of Music and Artwork, with fellow scholar Diahann Carroll, after which on the Nationwide Academy of Effective Artwork, earlier than getting down to pursue performing with Herbert Berghoff, Stella Adler, and Sidney Poitier.

His first movie function was in The Final Offended Man, the nice Paul Muni’s ultimate movie. It was Muni who gave Billy the recommendation that despatched him hovering as an actor, “You may play any character you need to play regardless of who you might be, regardless of the way in which you look or the colour of your pores and skin.” And Williams writes, “I needed to be anybody I needed to be.”

He writes of touchdown the function of a lifetime: co-starring alongside James Caan in Brian’s Tune, the made-for-television film that was watched by an viewers of greater than fifty million folks. Williams says it was “the sort of interracial love story America wanted.”

And when, as the primary Black character within the Star Wars universe, he turned a real popular culture icon, taking part in Lando Calrissian in George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Again (“What I introduced on the display screen folks didn’t count on to see”). It was a task he reprised within the ultimate movie of the unique trilogy, The Return of the Jedi, and within the latest sequel The Rise of Skywalker.

A legendary actor, in his personal phrases, on all that has sustained and carried him via a lifetime of goals and journey.

What Have We Right here?: Portraits of a Life is revealed by Penguin Random Home. It’s launched on thirteenth February 2024 and obtainable to pre order now.