The Full Biography
Robin Williams. Comedian. Actor. The Chicago boy who made improvisation into a national weather, then spent the last years working through an illness no one in the room could yet name.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is an alien in rainbow suspenders, or a disc jockey in Saigon talking faster than the war, or a nanny in a cardigan the children do not recognize as their father. The years are 1978, 1987, 1993. What the still cannot show is Robin McLaurin Williams of Chicago, Lake Forest, and a forty-room farmhouse in Bloomfield Hills, a Juilliard classmate of Christopher Reeve, a man who left the conservatory because John Houseman said the school had nothing left to teach him, and a death in Paradise Cay on August 11, 2014, that the widow would have to explain to a country that wanted a joke and received, instead, a disease.
He was born on July 21, 1951, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, to Robert Fitzgerald Williams, a senior executive in Ford’s Lincoln-Mercury division, and Laurie McLaurin, a former model from Jackson, Mississippi, whose great-grandfather had been a Mississippi governor. Two older half-brothers, Todd and McLaurin, were already in the house. The mother practiced Christian Science. The boy was raised in his father’s Episcopal church. He tried to make her laugh to be seen. Public school in Lake Forest, then, after a 1963 transfer to Detroit, the private Detroit Country Day School. He was class president and a wrestler. He was also bullied for his weight and spent hours playing alone. The family’s maid was a main companion. When he was sixteen his father took early retirement and moved them to Tiburon, California. Redwood High in Larkspur voted him Funniest and Most Likely Not to Succeed. Claremont Men’s College lasted until acting won. Three years at the College of Marin, including a Fagin in Oliver! that made the drama professor call his wife and say the boy was going to be something special. In 1973 Juilliard took him — Group 6, one of twenty, advanced program with Reeve under John Houseman. William Hurt and Mandy Patinkin were in the building. Edith Skinner, who taught dialects, could not map him. Michael Kahn told him the antics were stand-up. Then he played the old man in The Night of the Iguana and the building went quiet. He left in 1976. Houseman had already said the school was finished with him.
The door was a San Francisco bar and a headstand in an audition.
He tended bar at the Holy City Zoo and then performed there. Los Angeles, the Comedy Store, a Laugh-In revival that failed and still put him on television. David Letterman, already working, saw him and thought his own chance had just left the room. Garry Marshall needed an alien for a 1978 Happy Days episode, “My Favorite Orkan.” Williams sat on his head when asked to take a seat. Four days after the taping, the network signed him before anyone else could. Mork & Mindy, with Pam Dawber, ran from 1978 to 1982. At its peak some sixty million people watched in a week. Time put him on the cover in March 1979. Richard Avedon shot him for Rolling Stone. The suspenders became a costume-shop object. The improvisation became the show’s method: the scripts left room because the instrument would not fit a closed page. HBO specials — Off the Wall, An Evening with Robin Williams, A Night at the Met — took the club act to people who had only seen the alien. The album Reality … What a Concept won a Grammy.
Popeye (1980) was the first lead. The picture disappointed; the performance did not take the blame. The World According to Garp (1982) and Moscow on the Hudson (1984) showed he could disappear. The smaller comedies — The Survivors, The Best of Times, Club Paradise — did not advance him. He said he wanted to be Peter Lorre, not Bogart: a character actor, not the total star. Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) ended that argument with the public. As Adrian Cronauer he improvised the radio show; the cameras rolled; he made new weather on every take. A first Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In 1988 he played Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin at Lincoln Center. Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) made John Keating a teacher a generation quoted, another nomination. Penny Marshall’s Awakenings (1990), from Oliver Sacks, put him opposite Robert De Niro as a doctor who wakes patients and cannot keep them awake. Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) earned a third Best Actor nomination. Spielberg’s Hook (1991) made him an adult Peter Pan. Then the voice that redefined what a cartoon could hire.
Disney’s Aladdin (1992) wrote the Genie for him. He recorded about thirty hours, impersonating a roomful of famous men, on the condition that the studio not sell the character as burger-and-toy weather. The studio broke the spirit of that deal. He sat out The Return of Jafar. Joe Roth apologized. He came back for Aladdin and the King of Thieves. The 1992 film was the year’s highest grosser. A special Golden Globe recognized the vocal work. FernGully: The Last Rainforest the same year used the voice for a bat. Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) made a divorced father in a costume into a family classic and a custody argument people still have in living rooms. Jumanji (1995) put him inside a board game that would not let a man go home. Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage (1996) with Nathan Lane made a Miami club owner into a father who would play straight for one night. Jack (1996). The Secret Agent. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), a small Osric. Flubber (1997). Good Will Hunting (1997), as the therapist Sean Maguire opposite Matt Damon, won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He had been nominated four times. The statue arrived for stillness, not speed. Patch Adams (1998), What Dreams May Come (1998), Bicentennial Man (1999) kept the earnest register that some critics mocked and audiences used. He also walked onto Friends with Billy Crystal for an unscripted minute, because the instrument never liked to stay off.
You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.Robin Williams
He married Valerie Velardi in 1978; Zak was born in 1983; the marriage ended in 1988. He married Marsha Garces, Zak’s nanny, in 1989; Zelda was born in 1989, Cody in 1991; that marriage ended in 2010. He married Susan Schneider in 2011. The private life had cocaine in the Mork years, sobriety, a relapse after Reeve’s death and his own heart surgery, and a public tenderness toward troops on USO tours that was not a photo opportunity he invented for a single week. He and Reeve had been brothers from another mother, Zak said. When Reeve was injured, Williams arrived in the hospital as a Russian doctor and made the room possible again. That is in the file. It is not a bit.
The turn is the decision, after the statue, to keep taking parts that scared the brand: a murderer in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002), a photo-lab technician in One Hour Photo (2002), the Broadway one-man show the same year, then, when the body and the mind began to fail, the work anyway.
Six things most people never knew
- Juilliard let him go because it was finished, not because he failed. Houseman said the school had nothing more to teach. He left in his junior year.
- He sat on his head to get Mork. Marshall’s audition asked him to sit. The headstand became the part, and the part became a series that drew some sixty million people a week.
- He tried to keep the Genie off the lunchbox. The Aladdin deal forbade merchandising the character as a sales tool. Disney used the voice anyway. He walked away from the first sequel.
- The Oscar was for quiet. Four nominations. The win, in 1998, was Supporting Actor for Good Will Hunting, a therapist who listens.
- Christopher Reeve was a Juilliard brother. They entered the advanced program together. The friendship lasted until Reeve’s death in 2004.
- The autopsy named a disease the living man never received as a diagnosis. Diffuse Lewy body disease. In life the file said Parkinson’s. The widow had to learn the real name after he was gone.
He left the grind of being only the fastest man in the room. The last years asked him to work while the instrument betrayed him.
The later years
Home, in the last marriage, was in Marin and then Tiburon and Paradise Cay — northern California water, the same coast the teenage boy had been moved to when Ford let the father retire. He hosted a talk experiment for Audible. He returned to stand-up with the 2009 tour Weapons of Self-Destruction and an HBO special. He played Teddy Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum pictures (2006, 2009, 2014). He voiced characters in Robots and Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two. He took a CBS sitcom, The Crazy Ones (2013–14), with Sarah Michelle Gellar, a last weekly job that looked, from the outside, like a man coming home to television. Inside the production, colleagues saw a man who was frightened of his own mind. The dark pictures of 2002 had been choices. The last years were a body making choices for him.
In 2009 he had heart surgery — an aortic valve replacement. He had talked about depression for years, honestly, without making it a punch line he expected applause for. In 2014 doctors told him he had Parkinson’s disease. Susan Schneider Williams has said he was also living with anxiety, a rising paranoia, and a feeling of being chased by something he could not see. He told her he wanted to reboot his brain. They went from specialist to specialist. No one in the living file gave the couple the name that would have explained the hallucinations, the panic, and the sense that the self was being edited by an invisible hand. He kept working. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb was already shot. Boulevard and Absolutely Anything were in the can. The sitcom had been canceled. The house in Paradise Cay was the last room.
On August 11, 2014, he died by suicide at home. He was sixty-three. The first public story was depression. The autopsy, which Susan sat down to hear, said diffuse Lewy body disease — the second most common degenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s, a condition that attacks movement, mood, sleep, and reality at once. She has spent the years since as an advocate, writing and speaking so that other families might receive the name while the person is still alive. The country that had wanted Mork and the Genie had to learn a medical vocabulary it had not asked for. She has said he was a larger-than-life spirit inside the body of a normal man with a human brain. That is the accurate sentence. It is not a joke, and it is not a sermon.
Zak, Zelda, and Cody survived him. So did Susan. The USO footage remains. The Smithsonian installed the 1979 Time portrait so people could stand in front of it. Comedy Central had already ranked him among the great stand-ups. The ranking was incomplete. The complete file is a shy child in a large house, a Juilliard bolt of energy, an alien, a disc jockey, a teacher, a nanny, a therapist, a dark technician, and a husband who asked for a reboot he could not have.
After he was gone
The pictures did not stop. Children still find the Genie before they find the obituaries. Film students still take Good Morning, Vietnam apart to see where the page ends and the man begins. Dead Poets Society still plays in classrooms that assign the last scene as if it were a poem. Susan’s advocacy put Lewy body disease into living rooms that had only known the word Parkinson’s. The children have guarded the name without turning it into a costume. He did not have the longest old age. He had one of the widest instruments American popular art has hired, and a last chapter that requires the reader to hold two facts at once: the speed was real, and the ending was a disease. If you only remember the suspenders, you have the still. If you remember the autopsy and the widow’s work, you have the life.
Comedy is acting out optimism.Robin Williams
The still of Mork will last. It should. But the life behind it was a maid for a companion, a conservatory that could not hold him, a sitcom that taught the country improvisation, a statue for listening, and a brain that failed in a way the living doctors could not yet say. He came out of a quiet house, found the one kind of talking the camera would take, and then, when the talking became a terror, he left a record that is still faster than grief. That is the arc. That is the story.
Portrait: Eva Rinaldi · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons