Robin Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  Robin McLaurin Williams was voted "Most Likely Not to Succeed" by his high school classmates in 1969. Within a decade, he was on the cover of Time magazine, and within two, he had won an Academy Award. What made Williams so difficult to categorize, and so impossible to ignore, is the same thing that made him hard to hold on to: an energy so relentless it could fill any room and, eventually, threaten to consume him from within.

  He was born in Chicago on the 21st of July, 1951, and raised in a world of relative privilege, yet he spent his career drawn to outsiders, dreamers, and the lost. He improvised his way through dozens of characters in a single performance. He recorded approximately 30 hours of tape voicing a single animated role. And behind the torrent of voices and impressions, a disease was quietly rewriting his mind.

  This is the story of how a quiet, bullied kid from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, became one of the most recognized comedians of the twentieth century, and what it cost him to get there.

• 2. The Making of a Voice

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  Christopher Reeve remembered Williams arriving at the Juilliard School in 1973 wearing tie-dyed shirts and tracksuit bottoms, talking so fast and moving so relentlessly that Reeve compared him to "an untied balloon that had been inflated and immediately released."

  Williams had arrived on a full scholarship as one of only 20 students accepted into the freshman class. He and Reeve were the only two students that year selected by John Houseman for the school's Advanced Program. Their classmates included William Hurt and Mandy Patinkin. Reeve wrote that their primary acting teacher, Michael Kahn, was "equally baffled by this human dynamo," and that their dialects teacher, Edith Skinner, described by Reeve as one of the world's leading voice and speech teachers, was simply bewildered by Williams's ability to shift instantly between accents.

  Kahn initially dismissed Williams's range as mere stand-up comedy. Williams answered that criticism in a production of Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana, playing an old man so convincingly that Reeve wrote, "He simply was the old man." The performance silenced the skeptics.

  Houseman ultimately told Williams to leave during his junior year in 1976, on the grounds that the school had nothing more to teach him. Gerald Freedman, another of his Juilliard teachers, called Williams a "genius" and said the school's classical approach did not suit him. Before Juilliard, at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California, drama professor James Dunn had cast him as Fagin in Oliver! and called his wife after a late rehearsal to say Williams "was going to be something special." Reeve and Williams remained close friends until Reeve's death in 2004.

• 3. The Comedy Renaissance

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  Williams began performing stand-up in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976, starting at the Holy City Zoo, a comedy club where he had previously worked as a bartender. By the late 1970s, critic Gerald Nachman described him as a leading figure in the city's "comedy renaissance."

  In 1977, television producer George Schlatter saw Williams perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and asked him to appear on a revival of Schlatter's show Laugh-In. That same year, Williams performed a show at the L.A. Improv for Home Box Office. David Letterman, who knew Williams for nearly 40 years, recalled first seeing him at the Comedy Store and described the experience as being "like a hurricane," telling himself, "Holy crap, there goes my chance in show business."

  Williams explained his rapid-fire delivery in plainly practical terms: performing in bars early in his career, where audiences could not be relied upon to stay quiet, forced him to develop "a style that was very much synaptic: quick-firing, moving, so that they never really had a chance to lock on as a target." He also used free association while improvising to sustain momentum, and he felt secure that the constant change in world events would keep him supplied with material.

  His first television credit came through the short-lived Laugh-In revival, but an audition for a Happy Days episode in 1978 proved far more consequential. Asked by producer Garry Marshall to take a seat, Williams sat on his head. He was cast as the alien Mork on the spot, with executives signing him four days later before competing networks could make their own offers.

• 4. Mork and the Superstar

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  At its peak, Mork and Mindy drew a weekly audience of sixty million viewers. The ABC sitcom, which ran from 1978 to 1982 and co-starred Pam Dawber, was deliberately written to accommodate Williams's improvisations; the show was set in Boulder, Colorado, and the scripts were structured around the expectation that he would deviate from them.

  Critic James Poniewozik observed that Williams became, through Mork, "a man and a child, buoyant, rubber-faced, an endless gusher of ideas" for young audiences. The character's popularity spread to merchandise, posters, coloring books, and lunchboxes. Williams appeared on the cover of Time on the 12th of March, 1979, in a photograph taken by Michael Dressler; the cover portrait was later installed in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution after Williams's death. He also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone on the 23rd of August, 1979, photographed by Richard Avedon.

  The show also expanded Williams's reach in stand-up. He began performing HBO comedy specials, including Off The Wall in 1978 and An Evening with Robin Williams in 1983. His recording of a 1979 live show at the Copacabana in New York City, released as Reality... What a Concept, won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.

  Yet Williams's own description of his relationship to San Francisco during those years held an edge: he said he found out about "drugs and happiness" and that he saw "the best brains of my time turned to mud." The cocaine addiction that would shadow his early career was already under way.

• 5. Depth Behind the Voices

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  In a 1986 interview, Williams said he did not want to be Bogart; he wanted to be Peter Lorre. He told critic William Arnold, "Give me a moustache and we'll talk." His instinct for inhabiting secondary and eccentric characters, rather than conventional leads, shaped a filmography unusually wide in its range.

  Director Terry Gilliam, who worked with Williams on The Fisher King in 1991 and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1988, said in 1992 that Williams could "go from manic to mad to tender and vulnerable" and had "the most unique mind on the planet." Williams credited Robert De Niro for teaching him the power of silence in acting, and Dustin Hoffman for showing him how to transform a character through extreme preparation.

  For Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987, director Barry Levinson allowed Williams to improvise almost entirely without a script. Producer Mark Johnson said, "We just let the cameras roll," and Williams "managed to create something new for every single take." Over the film's radio microphone sequences, Williams created voice impressions of Walter Cronkite, Gomer Pyle, Elvis Presley, Mr. Ed, and Richard Nixon, among others. The film earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

  His performance as John Keating in Dead Poets Society in 1989 included a closing scene that critics said "inspired a generation" and entered pop culture. In Good Will Hunting in 1997, his portrayal of a therapist affected even working therapists, and won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Oliver Sacks, whose writing provided the source material for Awakenings in 1990, later said that the way Williams's mind worked was "a form of genius."

• 6. The Genie Dispute

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  When the directors of Aladdin first approached Williams about voicing the Genie, he declined. The film was a Disney production, and Williams did not want the studio using a character he voiced to sell merchandise. He accepted only after Disney agreed to 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."

  Over the course of recording, Williams improvised much of his dialogue and recorded approximately 30 hours of tape. He impersonated dozens of celebrities, among them Ed Sullivan, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Groucho Marx, Rodney Dangerfield, William F. Buckley Jr., Peter Lorre, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arsenio Hall. Aladdin became the highest-grossing film of 1992 and won Williams a Special Golden Globe Award for Vocal Work in a Motion Picture.

  Disney then broke its agreement with Williams by using the Genie character in the film's advertising. Williams refused to voice the character for the direct-to-video sequel The Return of Jafar in 1994, and Dan Castellaneta took over the role. The dispute was resolved when Joe Roth, who replaced Jeffrey Katzenberg as Walt Disney Studios chairman, arranged a public apology to Williams. Williams returned to voice the Genie in Aladdin and the King of Thieves in 1996. Disney named him a Disney Legend in 2009.

  The film's directors noted that Williams's performance in Aladdin changed the industry's approach to animated casting, opening the door for other films to bring in actors with greater star power.

• 7. The Disease That Hid

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  Susan Schneider, Williams's third wife, published an essay in the journal Neurology two years after his death describing what she had witnessed. His early symptoms began in October 2013: a sudden and prolonged spike in fear, anxiety, stress, and insomnia. These worsened into memory loss, paranoia, and delusions. Schneider wrote that "Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it," and that he kept saying, "I just want to reboot my brain."

  Doctors had diagnosed Williams with Parkinson's disease during the months before his death; Schneider confirmed this was the condition he had made public. His autopsy found diffuse Lewy bodies throughout his brain. The Lewy Body Dementia Association clarified afterward that the autopsy finding described diffuse Lewy body disease, the underlying process, distinct from the broader umbrella term Lewy body dementia, which encompasses both Parkinson's disease dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies.

  Dennis Dickson, a spokesperson for the Lewy Body Dementia Association, noted that the autopsy confirmed depression, anxiety, and paranoia, which can occur in either Parkinson's disease or dementia with Lewy bodies. In Parkinson's disease, Lewy bodies are generally limited in distribution; in Williams's case, they were spread widely throughout the brain. Ian G. McKeith, a professor and researcher of Lewy body dementias, said Williams's symptoms and autopsy findings were fully explained by dementia with Lewy bodies.

  Schneider described the pathology as "among the worst" several doctors said they had ever seen. She wrote afterward that the language available to describe what happened was inadequate: "how we as a culture don't have the vocabulary to discuss brain disease in the way we do about depression. His brain was falling apart."

  Williams died at his Paradise Cay, California, home on the 11th of August, 2014. His ashes were scattered over San Francisco Bay on the 21st of August, 2014. A tunnel on Highway 101 north of the Golden Gate Bridge was officially named the Robin Williams Tunnel on the 29th of February, 2016.