Today’s review is about WHAT HAVE WE HERE? by Billy Dee Williams. WHAT HAVE WE HERE? is a memoir of Williams’s youth as well has his decades spent in an acting career. There is a lot to learn about Williams, far more than the role he played as Lando Calrissian in Star Wars!

Author: Billy Dee Williams
Series: None
Age Category: Adult
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Publish Date: February 13, 2024
Print Length: 288

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What Have We Here Synopsis

A film legend 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.

Billy Dee Williams was born in Harlem in 1937 and grew up in a household of love and sophistication. As a young boy, he made his stage debut working with Lotte Lenya in an Ira Gershwin/Kurt Weill production where Williams ended up feeding Lenya her lines. 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 Berghoff, Stella Adler, and Sidney Poitier.

His first film role was in The Last Angry Man, the great Paul Muni’s final film. It was Muni who gave Billy the advice that sent him soaring as an actor, “You can play any character you want to play no matter who you are, no matter the way you look or the color of your skin.” And Williams writes, “I wanted to be anyone I wanted to be.”

He writes of landing the role of a lifetime: 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 says it was “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.

A legendary actor, in his own words, on all that has sustained and carried him through a lifetime of dreams and adventure.

What Have We Here Review

WHAT HAVE WE HERE? is Billy Dee Williams’s autobiography, a memoir, if you will. As such it starts from his childhood and goes right up to nearly present day. Like any Star Wars fan might, I picked this up because Williams plays the swashbuckling Lando Calrissian. Of course, only a small section regales the reader with that part in time, but I enjoyed his memories of it nonetheless.

Most of his memoir naturally focuses on where and how he grew up and the influences on his life. I absolutely loved Williams’s energy in his memoir. He not only seems to remember things so vividly, but his enthusiasm for life and experiences is very evident. Even though I wasn’t familiar with the various plays and movies he mentions, his spirit kept me interested.

It’s clear that living in New York City was a huge positive in Williams’s life. There was so much to see and do, which was incredibly important for his very active and seeking mind. I had no idea that he has a background in theatre and is also an artist. In fact, he went to a high school specifically for the arts and focused on painting. But he ended up following his gut and chose acting, which served him well, though not without a few lulls. After an extended time away from painting, he eventually found his way back to it. He included some of these pieces as color photographs within the book.

I also had no idea that Williams has a mixed heritage of Native American, Irish, and, yes, Black. Of course, it doesn’t concern me personally, but it seems like his background and natural desire to seek out new things steered him away from typecasting. He didn’t want to be boxed in to one category. Though he admits he encountered racism in the acting industry, he doesn’t spend a lot of time on it. I think this is partly because he’s an inherently positive person, which he says in so many words. He also comes across as quite confident, which some may interpret as cocky. But I see it as someone who knows what he wants and has an internal compass directing him onward.

Finally, I was, frankly, amazed at the number of classic movie stars he encountered, especially during his younger years. For instance, if I’m remembering correctly, he met James Earl Jones way before he did Star Wars. Many of these encounters were through his work in theatre.

Overall, WHAT HAVE WE HERE? is a fascinating look into Williams’s life. He packs 86 years of life into 259 pages, plus an index. Readers who know more about theatre or what society then called “Black film” decades ago will undoubtedly have a rich experience reading this. But even those who want to read WHAT HAVE WE HERE? purely to learn more about Williams will appreciate this memoir.

Rating: 4
Content warnings: drug use, infidelity
Reading format: Library hardback

If you liked this book, you may also enjoy MAKING IT SO by Patrick Stewart.