Described variously on his death as a ‘giant’, ‘legend’ and ‘a towering figure in global hepatology’, Roger Williams played a leading part in the development of hepatology worldwide. He led three different liver units/institutes in his long and accomplished medical career, led improvements in care for patients with acute liver failure, was instrumental in the first liver transplant and live donor transplants, wrote over 2,750 medical papers, led several commissions on liver disease and was one of the few UK doctors with a public profile as ‘George Best’s doctor’. Roger Williams was born in Bexleyheath (now Bexley) on 28 August 1931 to an estate agent father, Stanley, and mother Doris (née Clatworthy) who ran the sailmaker JR Williams in Hamble once the family had moved there soon after he was born. This clearly was a major influence as he developed a lifelong love of sailing, particularly racing yachts. Roger was a pupil at St Mary’s College in Southampton, and later studied medicine at the Royal London Hospital, qualifying in 1953. After national service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, he worked at the Postgraduate Medical School, London before taking up a post as lecturer to Professor Sheila Sherlock at the Royal Free Hospital Liver Unit in 1959. He was already familiar with liver disease as his period of national service included caring for soldiers at the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital, and he published papers on the subject. After a short time in Southampton, he was appointed as clinical tutor and consultant physician at King’s College Hospital in August 1966. He established the Liver Unit there, and from small beginnings grew the Unit into the epicentre of multidisciplinary UK research into liver disease over a period of 30 years. This was coupled with a matching model of multidisciplinary care for both adults and children centred around the patient. One of the key medical collaborations of his career was in 1968 with surgeon Professor Roy Calne to instigate a liver transplant programme, undertaking the first liver transplant in Europe that year. The patients receiving transplants were extremely ill as no other treatment was available, and a large percentage of transplants failed in the early years. Nevertheless, they persisted while working on ways of preventing rejection and managing recurrent disease and immunosuppression. Hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide have since benefitted from this major advance. Roger maintained a parallel research interest in artificial liver support until near the end of his career, and although this particular research strand did not mirror the success of the transplant programme, it did lead to other improvements in the care of post-transplant patients. Despite the worldwide success of the unit, when Roger reached 65 in 1996, King’s expected him to retire, but Roger had other ideas and established the Institute of Hepatology at University College London (UCL) using monies from the Foundation for Liver Research, a charity he had founded himself. Although his Institute was no longer directly connected to the transplant programme which was centred at the Royal Free Hospital, another twenty years of successful research ensued including the setting up of the first adult-to-adult living donor liver transplantation programme in the UK. Roger’s career entered an unusual phase for a senior clinician when he began treating the famous footballer and alcoholic George Best in 2000. George had severe liver damage and their therapeutic relationship developed into a firm friendship that saw Roger take the somewhat unusual step of going public and ‘begging every barman in Britain’ as *The Guardian* put it, not to serve George after an episode of binge-drinking in 2000. Following George’s liver transplant, they both appeared at the launch of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hepatology in 2003. Few doctors (the Covid pandemic excepting) have any kind of public profile, but Roger became known to the media and public as ‘George Best’s doctor’ (to the extent that they thought he himself had performed George’s liver transplant) and used this platform to do many media interviews warning of the dangers of alcohol. A seasoned political operator, Roger was a member of the Conservative Medical Society (now Conservative Health) and its chair from 2013. He was invited to chair The Lancet Commission into Liver Disease in the UK in 2014, and as the ideal person to draw together the necessary experts, his indefatigable energy resulted in seven annual reports, the last completed shortly before his death. A lesser-known aspect of his career was his service to the RCP. Having sat on Council and later serving as clinical vice-president, from 2004-8 he was the RCP’s Hans Sloane Fellow/International Director. He served with enthusiasm and insight, supporting the RCP’s efforts in providing education and exams across the world, and urging further investment in international activities. In 2014 a reorganisation of services would have seen his Institute merging with the Royal Free, and yet again Roger was on the move – this time he was delighted to be returning to King’s to build a new Institute in 2016, this time focusing on basic science research. Throughout his career he received many awards, medals and accolades, culminating in his CBE in 1993 and in 2006 he was again honoured in a Royal celebration for people contributing to public service well after the usual retirement age. His life outside medicine was active and varied – he farmed, loved opera, played tennis right up to his death, and raced his series of yachts in Cowes week – the yachts were serially all named ‘Jos of Hamble’ following the first given to him by his mother, honouring the city of Jos in Nigeria where his parents married. Roger was married twice – first to Lindsay Elliott, a fellow medical student, in 1954, with whom he had two sons and three daughters. Following their divorce in 1977, Roger married Stephanie de Laszlo, a former nun who became a lawyer. In a BBC interview, she describes how they were engaged within six weeks of meeting and married within 3 months. He was survived by Stephanie and 7 children, one having died aged 37, and 13 grandchildren. One of his daughters is a consultant physician in HIV and one of his grandchildren works in A&E.