SLCL’s Black History Celebration Presents Hollywood Legend Billy Dee Williams

St. Louis County Library’s Black History Celebration presents an evening with acclaimed actor and pop-culture icon Billy Dee Williams. Williams will discuss his memoir, “What Have We Here? Portraits of a Life.”

The event will take place on Tuesday, February 20 at 7:00 p.m. at the Skip Viragh Center for the Arts at Chaminade, 425 S. Lindbergh Blvd., 63131.

Billy Dee Williams will be in conversation with KSDK TV anchor Rene Knott.

Tickets go on sale at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, January 12 and can be purchased through Eventbrite. 

INDIVIDUAL TICKET $37 (Admits ONE and includes one pre-signed copy of “What Have We Here?”)

PACKAGE TICKET $45 (Admits TWO and includes one pre-signed copy of “What Have We Here?”)    

All books will be pre-signed. Due to time constraints, there will not be a book/memorabilia signing or photo opportunity.

Film legend Billy Dee Williams reflects on all that has sustained and carried him through a lifetime of dreams and adventures. 

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 50 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.” 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.”

Told with his signature elegance and cool, Williams’s highly-anticipated memoir illuminates his heralded career playing the roles he wanted from “Brian’s Song” to Lando–unchecked by the racism and typecasting so rife in the mostly all-white industry in which he triumphed.

The theme for SLCL's 2024 Black History Celebration is “African American Arts: Inspiring, Impacting, and Influencing Every Generation.” A full schedule of events is available at www.slcl.org/black-history-celebration. 

Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.