Hayden Panettiere co-star, 75, was an 80s superhero who almost played Luke Skywalker... who is he?

The leading man of a cult favorite 1980s superhero show was spotted this week aged 75 making a coffee run in sweltering Los Angeles.

Born to two TV stars from the 1950s, the 'nepo baby' forged his own career in the 1970s, landing a pivotal role in Brian De Palma's horror classic Carrie.

During the latter decade, he also auditioned for the role of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and narrowly lost the part to Mark Hamill.

Fans of the late Hayden Panettiere may recognize him from his guest role as a meddlesome journalist on a 2008 episode of her show Heroes.

He cut a casual figure as he stepped out for refreshments this week, wearing a t-shirt and shorts with a set of open-toed slippers and a pair of sunglasses.

Can you guess who he is?

He is none other than William Katt, whom fans of 1980s television will recognize as Ralph Hinkley, aka Hanley, on The Greatest American Hero.

The series was a sci-fi comedy in which Ralph, a special education teacher, acquires superpowers from a unitard bequeathed to him by space aliens.

Connie Sellecca, later of Hotel fame, featured as his attorney sidekick while Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice star Robert Culp played an FBI agent, rounding out the crime-fighting trio in which the bumbling Ralph learns to use his new abilities.

Katt has confessed he and Culp 'truly did not like each other when we first met. I mean, there was some real friction there,' via Pioneers of Television. 

Luckily, their tension 'worked' for them onscreen in the sense that it echoed the animosity between the characters they were playing, Katt observed.

However, they mended fences during a 'come to Jesus meeting' three weeks into the shoot, reasoning that 'we're going to be working together for a long time and we should have some sort of a detente and rapprochement so that we could work together and be in the same space at the same time without getting into a fight.'

The cordiality they achieved eventually blossomed into a genuine friendship they maintained until Culp died in 2010 at the age of 79, having sustained a mortal head injury when he fell down as a result of a heart attack. 

Although The Greatest American Hero was canceled after three seasons, the theme song Believe It Or Not soared to number two on the Billboard Hot 100.

Katt confessed later that he 'wasn't really too interested in doing television' when the show was brought to him, as he was acting off-Broadway with Dianne Wiest, but the script for The Greatest American Hero 'made me laugh a lot,' via Sidewalks TV. 

He rewatched the show more than two decades later when it became available on DVD and 'thought it was very funny,' he shared. 'I don't know that I really appreciated it at the time, but I have in the subsequent years.'

William Theodore Katt was born two days after Valentine's Day 1951 to two parents who both became beloved TV stars during that decade.

His father Herman Katt, under the screen name Bill Williams, became a household name as the title character on the Western series The Adventures of Kit Carson.

Meanwhile, his mother Barbara Hale won an Emmy for her turn as Della, the secretary of Raymond Burr's title character on the smash hit legal drama Perry Mason.

Katt recalled he was 'a little bit of a rascal' and a 'free spirit' as a child, saying he had 'no rules' while growing up in the 'rural' San Fernando Valley in the Los Angeles suburbs, other than that he had to be 'home by dark,' via What's Under the Bed?.

As he embarked on his own career in the early 1970s, he jobbed around on TV shows like M*A*S*H, Emergency., Gunsmoke, Kojak and Ironside.

Katt was dealt a brutal professional blow during that decade when he lost out on the lead role in George Lucas's smash hit 1977 picture Star Wars.

He has recalled auditioning for the film alongside Kurt Russell, the pair of them switching back and forth between the roles of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.

Katt gamely quipped that 'I think I blew it for' Russell, who 'could've been a great Han Solo' if not for the fact that 'my hair was too long then. It's too long now. And we didn't get the part. But I thought that we did a pretty good job in looking back at it.' 

However, Lucas happened to be holding Star Wars auditions jointly with Brian De Palma, who was trying out actors for his 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.

Katt's 'booby prize' for failing to win the part in Star Wars is that he was cast in the De Palma picture as the popular athlete Tommy Ross.

As a favor to his girlfriend, Tommy agrees to take Sissy Spacek's telekinetic title character on a pity date to prom, where they both get deluged with pig blood in a public humiliation that prompts Carrie to extract grisly vengeance.

'Well, it was great,' Katt recalled of the shoot. 'I mean, we were all in our early 20s at the time. I think I was 23, 24. We were all just young guys and girls and we were getting paid to go and just have fun. And obviously do the work.'

He spared particularly warm words for his 'very gracious and lovely' co-star John Travolta, sharing that years before Grease 'I remember him trying to teach a bunch of us a soft shoe dance one day,' in an interview with Cemetery Dance.

The Greatest American Hero enhanced his notoriety even further in the 1980s, becoming perhaps the best-remembered role in his resume. 

Later that decade, he co-starred with his mother in a string of nine TV movies spun-off from Perry Mason, with Hale stepping back into the shoes of Della Street.

Katt meanwhile played Paul Drake Jr, a private investigator following in the professional footsteps of his father Paul Drake, a character played on the original series by Hedda Hopper's son William Hopper.

It was Burr, whom Katt had known since childhood as Uncle Raymond, who called him while he was on tour in Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance and asked him if he was interested in joining the revival of Perry Mason.

'So I did and I spent the next five years doing those shows, and that was just wonderful, working with my mom,' he told the Missouri radio station KIX 105-7.

As the 1980s rolled into the 1990s, he bounced around guesting on shows like Cybill; Animaniacs; Batman: The Animated Series; Burke's Law and Walker, Texas Ranger.

Avid viewers of Heroes may recall his turn on the season three episode The Butterfly Effect, in which he played reporter Jim McCann.

Katt is still acting, having appeared this year in the independent dramedy When We Get There in a cast that includes Alfred Molina.