C-3PO
robot character from the Star Wars universe

C-3PO () or See-Threepio is a humanoid robot character in the Star Wars franchise. He is a protocol droid designed to assist in etiquette and translation, and is fluent in over six million forms of communication. He first appeared in the 1976 novelization of the original Star Wars film (1977), and he appears in all nine films of the Skywalker Saga, which includes the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy. Anthony Daniels portrays C-3PO in all the Skywalker Saga films and the standalone film Rogue One, and he voices the droid in the animated series The Clone Wars. In addition to films, C-3PO appears in television series, novels, comics, and video games.
Creation and portrayal
Ralph McQuarrie, a concept artist for Star Wars, based the initial design for C-3PO on the female robot from the Fritz Lang film Metropolis (1927). When Anthony Daniels saw one of McQuarrie's paintings of C-3PO, he was struck by the vulnerability in the droid's face, and he wanted the role. George Lucas, who created the Star Wars franchise and directed Star Wars, selected Daniels for the physical performance. He was planning to hire another actor for the droid's voice, because he was hesitant to give the character Daniels's British accent. According to Daniels, Lucas wanted C-3PO to have a "sleazy New York second-hand car dealer" type of voice.
“C-3PO” enters the record as robot character from the Star Wars universe. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what C-3PO, robot and character can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q51787. VIAF identifies the subject as 108145541820996600095. The Library of Congress control number is no2015165310. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1977 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “C-3PO” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.