Mark Hamill was born in Oakland, California in 1951 and by the late sixties he was a drama major who studied in Los Angeles. His professional acting career began on television in the 1970s when he frequently appeared as a guest star in such popular shows as The Partridge Family, Cannon, Night Gallery, The Streets of San Francisco and One Day at a Time, but he also had a recurring role in the soap opera General Hospital for a couple of years and was actually one of the main stars of a short-lived sitcom called The Texas Wheelers, which ran for 8 episodes on ABC from 1974 to 1975.

American Graffiti director George Lucas, who was looking for an actor to play the lead role in Star Wars (1977), sought young and less-experienced actors to play Luke Skywalker. Robby Benson, Will Seltzer and Kurt Russell were among those who auditioned for the role, and Lucas almost gave the part to William Katt (later known for Carrie and The Greatest American Hero), until he saw Mark Hamill’s audition. Hamill, like most of the actors who read the script for Star Wars, did not understand much of the dialogue for Lucas’s oddball space fantasy, but he read his lines with such sincerity that it felt like he truly believed every word he was uttering. I have always felt that Hamill’s superb performance in that film was one of the most important and underrated keys to the success of Star Wars, and Lucas no doubt knew how important the casting process was when you’re trying to make an entire fictional galaxy feel real, so Hamill was chosen to play Luke and the rest is history.

Hamill would reprise the role several times, including in the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), Disney’s trilogy of sequels from the 2010s, starting with his memorable no-dialogue appearance at the end of The Force Awakens, and the Disney+ series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett in which he was digitally de-aged to appear closer to how he looked in the original films (still shocked and amazed by how well they pulled that off).

His role in Star Wars was followed by another box office success, Corvette Summer (1978), in which Hamill played a California teenager who goes to Las Vegas to track down his stolen car. Although the critical response on that one was more mixed. Samuel Fuller’s 1980 war epic The Big Red One was the opposite: a critically adored Cannes Film Festival selection that made little impact commercially.

He didn’t act in a lot of successful films in the ’80s or ’90s but he continued to make guest appearances on popular television shows like The Muppet Show, Amazing Stories, The Flash (where he portrayed DC supervillain the Trickster), seaQuest DSV, The Outer Limits, Space Cases, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Just Shoot Me! and Saturday Night Live. Plus Hamill performed on stage, making his official debut with Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man in 1981 followed by a national tour playing Mozart in Amadeus from ’82 to ’83.

While Mark Hamill only had a few voice acting roles in the 1970s, including high school student Corey Anders in Hanna-Barbera’s Jeannie and Sean the mountain fairy in Ralph Bakshi’s apocalyptic 1977 fantasy Wizards (a role that predates Luke Skywalker as Hamill’s feature film debut), Hamill’s voice acting career had a huge resurgence when he was cast as the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, a role originally intended for Tim Curry before Curry developed bronchitis. Mark Hamill, who was a huge Batman fan and a comic book nerd in general, impressed everyone with his deranged but cheerful take on the villain, and that series was so popular that Hamill’s Joker is seen by many as the definitive Joker in the same way many people associate Kevin Conroy with Batman. Hamill would reprise the role many times, including in the TV shows Superman: The Animated Series, Static Shock, Justice League, Justice League Action and Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, the films Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker and Batman: The Killing Joke, and the video games Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Batman: Arkham Knight and Lego DC Super-Villians.

Mark Hamill would still make occasional live-action appearances after the 2000s, such as in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) as well as popular TV shows like Chuck, Criminal Minds, The Flash (in which Hamill reprised his role as the Trickster), The Big Bang Theory and What We Do in the Shadows (he even made live-action appearances in video games when he was cast as Colonel Christopher Blair in the full-motion video cutscenes for the Wing Commander series), but after Joker, Hamill became a prominent voice actor.

As with many voice actors there are too many roles to name, but some of the many TV shows Hamill lent his voice to include The Little Mermaid, Biker Mice from Mars, SWAT Kats, Garfield and Friends, Fantastic Four, Freakazoid!, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, The Tick, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, Bruno the Kid, The Incredible Hulk, The Simpsons, Pepper Ann, The New Woody Woodpecker Show, Samurai Jack, Time Squad, Dexter’s Laboratory, Codename: Kids Next Door, Harvey Birdman, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Robot Chicken, Metalocalypse, SpongeBob SquarePants, My Friends Tigger & Pooh, The Boondocks, Adventure Time, Regular Show, DreamWorks Dragons, Gravity Falls, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (voicing Darth Bane, not Luke), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), Trollhunters, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Invincible and The Sandman. And that was just a small sample!

For a while because of the enormous popularity of Star Wars it seemed like Mark Hamill would forever be seen by audiences as Luke Skywalker (it’s the reason why Tom Hulce was chosen to play Mozart in the film adaptation of Amadeus), but the fact that voice acting let him hide his face may have been one of his best assets. He is now one of the most prominent and most talented voice actors in Hollywood, but I would love to see him get a good live-action role as well, because he is a brilliant actor and I think an underrated actor.