Bail Organa is a human male, Senator and Viceroy of Alderaan, adoptive father of Leia, and one of the founders of the Rebel Alliance. The StarWars.com Databank credits him with "his honesty and his commitment to justice" and records his work with Padmé Amidala against Chancellor Palpatine's consolidation of power. He was introduced in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones (2002), played by Jimmy Smits.
The adoption
"My wife and I will take the girl. We've always talked of adopting a baby girl." It is a plain, almost administrative line, delivered at the end of the darkest sequence in the saga, and it is the hinge on which the entire original trilogy swings. He takes the daughter; Obi-Wan takes the son to Tatooine; the Empire begins.
Raising Leia on purpose
Claudia Gray's Leia, Princess of Alderaan (2017) is the essential text here: a novel about a sixteen-year-old realising her parents are running a rebellion and being furious that they tried to keep her out of it. It reframes Bail from kindly senator into someone making a series of calculated, dangerous decisions about a child he loves — including the decision to lie to her.
Politics before insurgency
He is the Republic loyalist who runs out of Republic. The Delegation of Two Thousand, the petition, the quiet meetings with Mon Mothma — his radicalisation is slower and more reluctant than hers, and it is conducted almost entirely through institutions until the institutions stop working.
He never meets his own ending
Alderaan is destroyed in A New Hope with him on it, off screen, in a scene that belongs to Tarkin. The saga's most consequential parent gets no death scene at all. That absence is doing real work in Leia's character: the grief she carries through three films has no image attached to it.
The rebel network
Canon has him coordinating with Mon Mothma, Ahsoka Tano and scattered cells years before the Alliance formally exists — Rebels and Andor both use him as the connective tissue between separate resistance efforts. His Alderaanian cover, a pacifist monarchy with no fleet, is precisely what makes him useful.
Continuity
Canon and Legends both, largely compatible. Legends gave him a longer pre-Imperial career and a different set of relatives; canon has concentrated on the parenting and the conspiracy, which has served him much better.
