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Billy Dee Williams
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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
This dashingly handsome, extremely likable actor's career once held far more promise than his recent Hollywood status would indicate. A child performer with considerable stage experience, he made his screen debut as a street tough in The Last Angry Man (1959), and started working in movies regularly throughout the 1970s in films like The Out-of-Towners (1970), Hit! (1973), and The Take (1974). During that decade, he stood out as the screen's leading black romantic lead, particularly in a pair of films starring pop icon Diana Ross, Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Mahogany (1975). He was both funny and stirring in The Bingo Long Traveling AllStars & Motor Kings (1976), a period saga of the Negro Baseball League, and played the title role in the biopic Scott Joplin (1977), originally made for TV but later released theatrically. Williams brought color to outer space in the trailblazing part of intergalactic con man and soldier of fortune Lando Calrissian, in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back sequel to the megahit Star Wars he reprised the role in 1983's Return of the Jedi but his lack of energy and pizzazz in those plum parts may have kept him from achieving real movie stardom. (Sometimes luck plays a part, too; he was teamed with Sylvester Stallone in the first-rate crime thriller Nighthawks in 1981, but the picture flopped.) Tough-cop roles in the lowbudgeters Fear City (1984) and Number One With a Bullet (1987) followed, as well as a starring stint in Deadly Illusion (also 1987), a private-eye thriller adapted for Williams from an unfilmed Mike Hammer script. Taking a smaller part in a bigger picture, he played District Attorney Harvey Dent in Batman (1989). Recent credits include the TV movies The Jacksons: An American Dream (1992, as Berry Gordy) and Deadly Ice (1994). |  |
