Robin Williams

Onstage, on television, in the movies or in a serious interview, listening to and watching comedian/actor Robin Williams is an extraordinary experience. An improvisational master with a style comparable to Danny Kaye, his words rush forth in a gush of... more

Onstage, on television, in the movies or in a serious interview, listening to and watching comedian/actor Robin Williams is an extraordinary experience. An improvisational master with a style comparable to Danny Kaye, his words rush forth in a gush of manic energy. They punctuate even the most basic story with sudden subject detours that often dissolve into flights of comic fancy, bawdy repartee, and unpredictable celebrity impressions before returning earthward with some pithy comment or dead-on observation. Williams was born on July 21, 1951, in Chicago, the son of a Ford Motor Company executive. His parents were middle-aged when he was born and while both had grown children from previous marriages, Williams was raised as an only child and had much time alone with which to develop his imagination. One way in which he entertained himself was to memorize Jonathan Winters' comedy records. As his father rose amongst the Ford hierarchy, the Williams family moved frequently. Williams was a pudgy child and was often the new kid in the private schools where he received his education. Much of his quick humor developed as a defense mechanism against the teasing he endured. His father retired during Williams' senior year in high school and permanently settled the family in Marin County, CA. Williams finally found a niche at school, and by the time he graduated, he was physically fit, popular, and voted the funniest and most likely to succeed. After high school, Williams studied political science at Claremont Men's College and also got involved in improvisational comedy. Interestingly, despite his lifelong interest in funny business, Williams initially trained as a dramatic actor, first at Marin College in California and then at Juilliard under John Houseman. While at Juilliard, he helped pay his tuition by working as a mime. After leaving the prestigious art school, he returned to California to perform standup on the club circuit. It was during this time that he honed his tendency to move quickly from idea to idea. His first real break came after an appearance in L.A.'s Comedy Store, which in turn led to a regular gig on George Schlatter's short-lived, late '70s reincarnation of Laugh-In. From there, Williams was cast as a crazy space alien on a fanciful episode of Happy Days. William's portrayal of Mork from Ork delighted audiences and generated so great a response that producer Garry Marshall gave Williams his own sitcom, Mork and Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982. The show was a hit and established Williams as one of the most popular comedians (along with Richard Pryor and Billy Crystal) of the '70s and '80s. Though his ceaseless ad-libbing can grate on sensitive nerves, there is something teddy bearish about Williams that makes him tolerable; it certainly made Mork one of television's most popular characters. Williams made his big screen debut in the title role of Robert Altman's elaborate but financially disastrous comic fantasy Popeye (1980). (His starring debut, that is -- three years earlier, Williams had appeared as a supporting player in the grotesque and ugly comic revue Can I Do It...Till I Need Glasses? (1977)). His next several films demonstrated a marked quality that would surface time and again: the actor's overriding need for discipline at the hands of a director. George Roy Hill nearly threw Williams off the set of The World According to Garp (1982) (and purportedly had the actor in tears) when the funnyman insisted on cutting up his scenes with bawdy, ad-libbed shtick; in response, Williams allegedly memorized the entire script in a single night and emerged with one of his most heartfelt (and impressive) performances. The same attitude did not apply to Michael Ritchie's The Survivors, though in that case, Williams's constant buzz of free-association served the role perfectly (Williams plays a character who suddenly cracks twenty minutes into the film). Pauline Kael wrote of that performance: "Williams acts with an emotional purity that I can't begin to understand...[and] he spritzes in character... He may be that rarity: a fearless actor." Paul Mazursky apparently learned from Hill's lesson by following in the elder's footsteps, for he exerted strict control over Williams on the set of Moscow on the Hudson (c. 1983) (a fact Williams would later cite in interviews). The results were unforgettable. As Vladimir Ivanoff, a Russian saxophone player who defects in Manhattan's Bloomingdale's, Williams proved so convincing - and evoked Mazursky's bittersweet, elegiac tone with such delicate force - that he could have been easily mistaken for an actual immigrant. (Kael marveled, "He isn't a coming 'doing' a Russian; he just plays a Russian, as if he'd been born one.") Williams did equally exemplary work on the small screen (for Fielder Cook) as the end-of-his-rope Tommy Wilhelm in PBS's Saul Bellow adaptation Seize the Day (1986). But if the trio of hyper-disciplined roles in Garp, Moscow and Day painted a portrait of Williams as one of the most innately gifted thesps in America, by 1986 he began reverting to roles that saw him increasingly lapse into a childlike improvisatory blitz - for example, Harold Ramis's disappointing Club Paradise (1986) and Roger Spottiswoode's farce The Best of Times. Writer-director Barry Levinson drew from both sides of Williams - the manic shtickmeister and the studied Juliard thesp - for the 1987 Good Morning, Vietnam, in which the comedian-cum-actor portrayed real-life deejay Adrian Cronauer, stationed in Saigon during the late sixties. Levinson shot the film strategically, by encouraging often outrageous, behind-the-mike improvisatory comedy routines for the scenes of Cronauer's broadcasts but evoking more sober dramatizations for Williams's scenes outside of the radio station. Thanks in no small part to this strategy, Williams received a much-deserved Oscar nomination for the role, but lost to Michael Douglas in Wall Street. Williams's subsequent film career had its share of high and low points. He was remarkably restrained as an introverted scientist trying to help a catatonic Robert De Niro in Awakenings (1990) and exuberant as an inspirational English teacher in the comedy/drama Dead Poets Society (1989), a role that earned him his second Oscar nomination even as the Peter Weir-directed, Tom Schulman-scripted motion picture alienated a number of critics (Roger Ebert termed it "a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand," and Kael wrote that it's perception exists within "the black and white of pulp fiction.") Two and a half years later, Williams's tragi-comic portrayal of a mad, homeless man in search of salvation and the Holy Grail in The Fisher King (1991) earned him a third nomination. In 1993, Williams lent his voice to two popular animated movies, Ferngully: The Last Rain Forest and most notably Aladdin, in which he played a rollicking genie and was allowed to go all out with ad-libs, improvs, and scads of celebrity improvisations. In 1993, Williams undertook an ambitious project with Being Human in which a man's troubled relationship with his wife is relived in five vignettes representing wildly different historical errors. The film was more experimental than other Williams efforts and the comedy was largely absent. While this film flopped, his other 1993 film, Mrs. Doubtfire, in which he played a recently divorced father who masquerades as a Scottish nanny to be close to his kids, was one of the year's biggest hits. He had another hit in 1995 playing a rather staid homosexual club owner opposite a hilariously fey Nathan Lane in The Bird Cage. In 1997, Williams turned in one of his best dramatic performances in Good Will Hunting, a performance for which he was rewarded with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Since the success of Good Will Hunting, Williams has kept busy with films that have produced mixed critical and commercial results. Both of his 1998 films, the comedy Patch Adams and What Dreams May Come, a vibrantly colored exploration of the afterlife, received decidedly mixed reviews, although they fared respectably at the box office. Williams portrays himself in the documentary Get Bruce, which features such fellow notables as Bette Midler, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, and his partner from The Bird Cage, Nathan Lane. He next had starring roles in both Bicentennial Man and Jakob the Liar, playing a robot-turned-human in the former and a prisoner of the Warsaw ghetto in the latter. Unfortunately, neither one of these films was particularly well received, with many critics and Williams fans wondering when the actor would forsake the maudlin sentimentality of his current roles for the excoriating humor he had exhibited to such great and enduring effect in his earlier films. Though it was obvious to all that Williams' waning film career needed an invigorating breath of fresh air, many may not have expected the dark 180-degree turn he attempted in 2002 with roles in Death to Smoochy, Insomnia and One Hour Photo. Catching audiences off-guard with his portrayal of three deeply disturbed and tortured souls, the roles pointed to a new stage in Williams' career in which he would substitute the sap for more sinister motivations. Absent from the big-screen in 2003, Williams continued his vacation from comedy in 2004, starring in the little-seen thriller The Final Cut and in the David Duchovny-directed melodrama The House of D. After appearing in the comic documentary The Aristocrats and lending his voice to a character in the animated adventure Robots in 2005, he finally returned full-time in 2006 with roles in the vacation laugher RV and the crime comedy Man of the Year. Just as estatic fans celebrated Williams' apparent return to funny buisness after a steady string of fairly grim dramas and hrillers, the ever-unpredictable talent threw in an unexpected curve-ball by taking the lead in the director Patrick Stettner's big screen adaptation of Armistead Maupin's controversial novel The Night Listener. A tense and erosive tale of literary trickery fueled by such serious issues as child abuse and AIDS, The Night Listener found Williams' balance between comic features and more serious films becoming ever more delicate. Williams returned to voice-over work for that same year's Happy Feet, George Miller's live action tale - in the mold of his previous hit, Babe -- about a talking penguin (voiced by Elijah Wood) who finds true love. (Additional voices in the cast include Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, and Brittany Murphy). Meanwhile, the thesp's activity skyrocketed: the trades reported his involvement with no less than four films through the end of 2007. In Man of the Year, which reteams Williams and Barry Levinson for the first time since Good Morning, Vietnam, the actor plays a late night talk show host who accidentally wins a presidential election through a computer glitch. Williams also joins Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Liv Tyler for August Rush, a Manhattan-set fantasy about the New York Philharmonic; portrays a minister in the omantic comedy License to Wed, insistent that a bride-to-be (played by pop diva Mandy Moore) and her intended take a pre-nup class; and joins Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney in Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum, a fantasy with Ben Stiller as a security guard in a museum where the displays suddenly spring to life. In addition to his considerable accomplishments on the big screen, Williams has recorded three comedy albums, appeared in a multitude of television comedy specials, and since the 1980s has emceed Comic Relief, an annual televised benefit for the homeless. During the '80s, Williams overcame a serious drug addiction, divorced his first wife, and married his son's nanny, who has since become his manager and the mother of his daughter and second son. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide less