William "Bill" Archibald Paxton (born May 17, 1955) is an American actor and film director. He gained in popularity after his starring roles in the movies Apollo 13, Twister, and True Lies. Paxton is currently working on the fourth season of the HBO series Big Love which is set to premiere in 2010.

Bill Paxton was born in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Mary Lou Gray and John Lane Paxton, who was a businessman, a lumber wholesaler, a museum executive, and occasionally an actor. Paxton was raised in his mother's Catholic religion. Paxton attended Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo, California, and then Texas State University (then called Southwest Texas State Univ.) in San Marcos, Texas, and then moved to Los Angeles, California, and began working for the movie director Roger Corman as a set designer on his movies. Exposure to movies and actors at that age influenced Paxton's decision to pursue acting, which lead him to relocate to New York City, where he studied under Stella Adler.

Bill Paxton has played many distinctive and memorable characters including the sneering older brother Chet in John Hughes' Weird Science; the loud-mouthed Colonial Marine Private William Hudson in James Cameron's Aliens; astronaut Fred Haise in Ron Howard's Apollo 13; the sadistic vampire Severen in Kathryn Bigelow's film Near Dark; tornado researcher Bill Harding opposite Helen Hunt in the blockbuster Twister; the treasure hunter to whom Rose's story is told in Titanic and the sleazy car salesman in True Lies. Notable is the performance Paxton delivered in Carl Franklin's critically acclaimed One False Move. Paxton has the unique distinction of being the only actor who has played characters killed by an Alien (as Private Hudson in Aliens), a Predator (as Jerry Lambert in Predator 2), and a Terminator (as the punk leader in The Terminator. He also had a cameo role in Terminator 2 as a resistance soldier but was not killed in this one) in the respective science fiction film franchises.