William Michael Hootkins (July 5, 1948 – October 23, 2005) was an American actor, most famous for playing Red Six (Jek Porkins) in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), the crooked Lt. Max Eckhardt in Batman (1989), and Major Eaton, one of the army intelligence men appearing at the beginning and the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
At the age of 15, Hootkins found himself caught up in the FBI's investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy when he was interviewed about Mrs. Ruth Paine, the woman "harboring" Marina Oswald, the Russian wife of the presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. He had been studying Russian with Paine at his school, St. Mark's in Dallas, where he also developed his taste for theatre, joining the same drama group as Tommy Lee Jones.
Hootkins was born in Dallas, Texas, but had made his home in London, England, from the early 1970s until 2002, when he moved to Los Angeles. Having studied at Princeton University, where he became fluent in Mandarin Chinese and was a mainstay of the Theatre Intime, making a particular impact with his performance in Orson Welles' Moby Dick Rehearsed, he trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
In England, he found work in the theatre as well as in film, and he would have his greatest success on stage portraying Alfred Hitchcock in Terry Johnson's 2003 hit play Hitchcock Blonde, first at the Royal Court Theatre and in London's West End.
He appeared in many cult roles that made him a welcome figure at fan conventions, particularly for Star Wars. He also appeared in significant parts in films as Hardware (1990), Santa Claus in Like Father, Like Santa (1998), and Hear My Song (1991), where he was the Mr. X who was presumed to be the Irish tenor Josef Locke under a false name.
He also appeared in several roles on television, including Colonel Cobb in the remake of The Tomorrow People and as Uncle George in the 2002 remake of The Magnificent Ambersons.
He was also a voice artist, recording dozens of plays for BBC Radio Drama where his roles ranged from J. Edgar Hoover and Orson Welles to Winston Churchill. In audio books, he read works by Jack London, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Carl Hiaasen and performed a complete reading of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick for Naxos Records Audiobooks in some 24 hours and 50 minutes. He also voiced Dingodile in Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, and did the voice acting for Maximillian Roivas in the cult hit Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.
Hootkins died of pancreatic cancer in Santa Monica, California on October 23, 2005 at the age of 57.
