Robin McLaurin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014) was an American actor and comedian. Starting as a stand-up comedian in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, he is credited with leading San Francisco's comedy renaissance.
After rising to fame as Mork in the sitcom Mork & Mindy (1978–82), Williams went on to establish a career in both stand-up comedy and feature film acting. He was known for his improvisational skills.
Although Williams was first recognized as a stand-up comedian and television star, he later became known for acting in film roles of substance and serious drama. He was considered a "national treasure" by many in the entertainment industry and by the public.
His on-stage energy and improvisational skill became a model for a new generation of stand-up comedians. Many comedians valued the way he worked highly personal issues into his comedy routines, especially his honesty about drug and alcohol addiction, along with depression. According to media scholar Derek A. Burrill, because of the openness with which Williams spoke about his own life, "probably the most important contribution he made to pop culture, across so many different media, was as Robin Williams the person."
Williams' unusual free-form style of comedy became so identified with him that new comedians imitated him. Jim Carrey impersonated his Mork character early in his own career. Williams's high-spirited style has been credited with paving the way for the growing comedy scene which developed in San Francisco. Young comedians felt more liberated on stage by seeing Williams's spontaneous style: "one moment acting as a bright, mischievous child, then as a wise philosopher or alien from outer space." According to Judd Apatow, Williams's rapid-fire improvisational style was an inspiration as well as an influence for other comedians, however, his talent was unique enough that no one else tried to copy it.
As a film actor, Williams' roles often influenced others, both in and out of the film industry. Director Chris Columbus, who directed Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, says that watching him work "was a magical and special privilege. His performances were unlike anything any of us had ever seen, they came from some spiritual and otherworldly place."
After his film debut in the musical comedy Popeye (1980), he starred or co-starred in widely acclaimed films, including the comedy-drama The World According to Garp (1982), the war comedy Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), the dramas Dead Poets Society (1989) and Awakenings (1990), the comedy-drama The Fisher King (1991), a voice role in the Disney animated musical fantasy Aladdin (1992), the drama Good Will Hunting (1997), and the psychological thriller One Hour Photo (2002), as well as financial successes such as the fantasy adventure film Hook (1991), the comedy Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), the fantasy adventure Jumanji (1995), the comedy The Birdcage (1996), and the fantasy adventure-comedy Night at the Museum (2006).
Williams won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Dr. Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting. He also received two Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and five Grammy Awards throughout his career.
Williams' first film was the 1977 low-budget comedy Can I Do It 'Till I Need Glasses?. His first major performance was as the title character in Popeye (1980); though the film was a commercial flop, the role allowed Williams to showcase the acting skills previously demonstrated in his television work. He also starred as the leading character in The World According to Garp (1982), which Williams considered "may have lacked a certain madness onscreen, but it had a great core". Williams continued with other smaller roles in less successful films, such as The Survivors (1983) and Club Paradise (1986), though he felt these roles did not help advance his film career.
His first major break came from his starring role in director Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), which earned Williams a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. The film takes place in 1965 during the Vietnam War, with Williams playing the role of Adrian Cronauer, a radio "shock jock" who keeps the troops entertained with comedy and sarcasm. Williams was allowed to play the role without a script, improvising most of his lines. Over the microphone, he created voice impressions of people, including Walter Cronkite, Gomer Pyle, Elvis Presley, Mr. Ed and Richard Nixon. "We just let the cameras roll," said producer Mark Johnson, and Williams "managed to create something new for every single take."
Williams married his first wife Valerie Velardi in June 1978, following a live-in relationship with comedian Elayne Boosler. Velardi and Williams met in 1976 while he was working as a bartender at a tavern in San Francisco. Their son Zachary Pym "Zak" Williams was born in 1983. Williams and Velardi divorced in 1988.
On April 30, 1989, he married Marsha Garces, Zachary's nanny, who was pregnant with his child. They had two children, Zelda Rae Williams (born 1989) and Cody Alan Williams (born 1991). In March 2008, Garces filed for divorce from Williams, citing irreconcilable differences. Their divorce was finalized in 2010. Williams married his third wife, graphic designer Susan Schneider, on October 22, 2011, in St. Helena, California.
Williams stated, "My children give me a great sense of wonder. Just to see them develop into these extraordinary human beings."
Many of his later roles were in comedies tinged with pathos. Williams's roles in comedy and dramatic films garnered him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (for his role as a psychologist in Good Will Hunting), as well as two previous Academy Award nominations (for playing an English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989), and for playing a troubled homeless man in The Fisher King (1991)). In 1991, he played an adult Peter Pan in the movie Hook, although he had said that he would have to lose twenty-five pounds.
Other roles Williams had in acclaimed dramatic films include Moscow on the Hudson (1984), Awakenings (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998). In the 2002 film Insomnia, Williams portrayed a writer/killer on the run from a sleep-deprived Los Angeles policeman (played by Al Pacino) in rural Alaska. Also in 2002, in the psychological thriller One Hour Photo, Williams played an emotionally disturbed photo development technician who becomes obsessed with a family for whom he has developed pictures for a long time. The last Williams movie released during his lifetime was The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, a film addressing the value of life. In it, Williams played Henry Altmann, a terminally ill man who reassesses his life and works to redeem himself.
Among the actors who helped him during his acting career, he credited Robert De Niro, from whom he learned the power of silence and economy of dialog when acting, to portray the deep-driven man. From Dustin Hoffman, with whom he co-starred in Hook, he learned to take on totally different character types, and to transform his characters by extreme preparation. Mike Medavoy, producer of Hook, told its director, Steven Spielberg, that he intentionally teamed up Hoffman and Williams for the film because he knew they wanted to work together, and that Williams welcomed the opportunity of working with Spielberg. Williams benefited from working with Woody Allen, who directed he and Billy Crystal in Deconstructing Harry (1997), as Allen had knowledge of the fact that Crystal and Williams had often performed together on stage.
Williams' penetrative acting in the role of a therapist in Good Will Hunting (1997) deeply influenced some real therapists and won him an Academy Award. In Awakenings (1990), Williams played a doctor modeled on Oliver Sacks, who wrote the book on which the film was based. Sacks later said the way Williams's mind worked was a "form of genius." In 1989 Williams played a private school teacher in Dead Poets Society, which included a final, emotional scene which some critics said "inspired a generation" and became a part of pop culture. Looking over most of Williams's films, one writer is "struck by the breadth of Williams' roles," and how radically different most were.
Terry Gilliam, who co-founded Monty Python and directed Williams in two of his films, The Fisher King and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), noted in 1992 that Williams had the ability to "go from manic to mad to tender and vulnerable," adding that to him Williams was "the most unique mind on the planet. There's nobody like him out there."
During his career, he starred as a voice actor in several animated films. His voice role as the Genie in the animated, musical fantasy film, Aladdin (1992) was written specifically for Williams. The film's directors stated that they took a risk by writing the role, and successfully convinced him to take it. Through approximately 30 hours of tape, Williams was able to improvise much of his dialogue and impersonated dozens of celebrity voices, including Ed Sullivan, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Groucho Marx, Rodney Dangerfield, William F. Buckley, Peter Lorre, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arsenio Hall. At first, Williams refused to take the role since it was a Disney movie, and he did not want the studio profiting by selling toys and novelty items based on the movie. He accepted the role with certain conditions: "I'm doing it basically because I want to be part of this animation tradition. I want something for my children. One deal is, I just don't want to sell anything — as in Burger King, as in toys, as in stuff." The film went on to become one of his most recognized and best loved roles, and was the highest grossing film of 1992, winning numerous awards, including a Golden Globe for Williams; Williams's performance as the Genie led the way for other animated films to incorporate actors with more star power for voice acting roles.
Williams continued to provide voices in other animated films, including FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Robots (2005), Happy Feet (2006), and an uncredited vocal performance in Everyone's Hero (2006). He also voiced the holographic Dr. Know character in the live-action film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). He was the voice of The Timekeeper, a former attraction at the Walt Disney World Resort about a time-traveling robot who encounters Jules Verne and brings him to the future.
Williams was a devoted fan of Isaac Asimov, and his interest in Asimov was reflected in his selection of the lead role in the 1999 film Bicentennial Man, the story of a robot that seeks to become human over 200 years, which was based on the 1976 Asimov short story The Bicentennial Man. In 2006, he starred in The Night Listener, a thriller about a radio show host who realizes that a child with whom he has developed a friendship may or may not exist; that year, he starred in five movies, including Man of the Year, was the Surprise Guest at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards and appeared on an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that aired on January 30, 2006.
At the time of his death in 2014, Williams had appeared in four movies not yet released: Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, A Merry Friggin' Christmas, Boulevard and Absolutely Anything.
Williams committed suicide on August 11, 2014 in his home in Paradise Cay, California at the age of 63. In the initial report released on August 12, the Marin County Sheriff's Office deputy coroner stated Williams had hanged himself with a belt and died from asphyxiation. The final autopsy report, released in November 2014, affirmed that Williams had committed suicide as initially described; neither alcohol nor illegal drugs were involved, while any prescription drugs present in Williams' body were at "therapeutic" levels. The report also noted that Williams had been suffering "a recent increase in paranoia." An examination of his brain tissue revealed the presence of "diffuse Lewy body dementia." Williams' doctors reportedly believe that Lewy body dementia "was the critical factor" that led to his suicide. His body was cremated and his ashes were spread in San Francisco Bay on August 21.
