William December "Billy Dee" Williams Jr. is an American actor and novelist. He is best known as Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars franchise, first in the early 1980s for The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, and thirty-six years later in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), marking one of the longest intervals between onscreen portrayals of a character by the same actor in American film history.