I was coming out of a fairly decent game of basketball when I was told, and was stunned. He seemed over everything. All I could think of at first was it is always those that bring us joy who are gone too quick, and then wondered why those with blood all over their hands and who should noose themselves (like Netanyahu or a succession of US presidents) never do; those suicides, and of others like bankers and people with secrets inside the power structure, are nothing of the sort and are for reasons of sealing lips shut.
"Robin Williams, at 63; manic comic with dramatic bona fides" by Haven Daley and Hillel Italie | Associated Press August 12, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — Robin Williams, the Academy Award winner and comic supernova whose explosions of pop culture riffs and impressions dazzled audiences for decades and made him a gleamy-eyed laureate for the Information Age, died Monday in an apparent suicide. He was 63.
Mr. Williams was pronounced dead at his San Francisco Bay Area home, according to the sheriff’s office in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The sheriff’s office said the preliminary investigation shows the cause of death to be a suicide due to asphyxia.
The Marin County coroner’s office said Mr. Williams was last been seen alive at home at about 10 p.m. Sunday. An emergency call from his house in Tiburon was placed to the Sheriff’s Department shortly before noon Monday.
‘‘This morning, I lost my husband and my best friend, while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings. I am utterly heartbroken,’’ said Mr. Williams’s wife, Susan Schneider. ‘‘On behalf of Robin’s family, we are asking for privacy during our time of profound grief. As he is remembered, it is our hope the focus will not be on Robin’s death, but on the countless moments of joy and laughter he gave to millions.’’
Will do.
Mr. Williams had been battling severe depression recently, said Mara Buxbaum, his press representative. Just last month, he announced he was returning to a 12-step treatment program he said he needed after 18 months of nonstop work. He had sought treatment in 2006 after a relapse following 20 years of sobriety.
Raises the question of suicide-causing antidepressants if he was prescribe any.
From his breakthrough in the late 1970s as the alien in the hit TV show ‘‘Mork & Mindy,’’ through his standup act and such films as ‘‘Good Morning, Vietnam,’’ the short, barrel-chested Mr. Williams ranted and shouted as if just sprung from solitary confinement. Loud, fast, and manic, he parodied everyone from John Wayne to Keith Richards, impersonating a Russian immigrant as easily as a pack of Nazi attack dogs.
He was a riot in drag in ‘‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’’ or as a cartoon genie in ‘‘Aladdin.’’ He won his Academy Award in a rare but equally intense dramatic role, as an empathetic therapist in the 1997 film ‘‘Good Will Hunting.’’
He was no less on fire in interviews. During a 1989 chat, he could barely stay seated in his hotel room, or even mention the film he was supposed to promote, as he free-associated about comedy and the cosmos.
‘‘There’s an Ice Age coming,’’ he said. ‘‘But the good news is there’ll be daiquiris for everyone and the Ice Capades will be everywhere. The lobster will keep for at least 100 years, that’s the good news. The Swanson dinners will last a whole millennium. The bad news is the house will basically be in Arkansas.’’
Following Mr. Williams on stage, Billy Crystal once observed, was like trying to top the Civil War. In a 1993 interview, Mr. Williams recalled an appearance early in his career on ‘‘The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.’’ Bob Hope was also there.
‘‘It was interesting,’’ Mr. Williams said. ‘‘He was supposed to go on before me and I was supposed to follow him, and I had to go on before him because he was late. I don’t think that made him happy. I don’t think he was angry, but I don’t think he was pleased.
‘‘I had been on the road and I came out, you know, gassed, and I killed and had a great time. Hope comes out and Johnny leans over and says, ‘Robin Williams, isn’t he funny?’ Hope says, ‘Yeah, he’s wild. But you know, Johnny, it’s great to be back here with you.’’’
In 1992, Carson chose Mr. Williams and Bette Midler as his final guests.
Like so many funnymen, Mr. Williams had dramatic ambitions. He played for tears in ‘‘Awakenings,’’ “Dead Poets Society,’’ and ‘‘What Dreams May Come,’’ which led New York Times critic Stephen Holden to write that he dreaded seeing the actor’s ‘‘Humpty Dumpty grin and crinkly moist eyes.’’
But other critics approved, and Mr. Williams won three Golden Globes, for ‘‘Good Morning, Vietnam,’’ “Mrs. Doubtfire,’’ and ‘‘The Fisher King.’’
His other film credits included Robert Altman’s ‘‘Popeye’’ (a box office bomb), Paul Mazursky’s ‘‘Moscow on the Hudson,’’ Steven Spielberg’s ‘‘Hook,’’ and Woody Allen’s ‘‘Deconstructing Harry.’’ On stage, Mr. Williams joined fellow comedian Steve Martin in a 1988 Broadway revival of ‘‘Waiting for Godot.’’
More recently, he appeared in the ‘‘Night at the Museum’’ movies, playing President Theodore Roosevelt in the comedies in which Ben Stiller’s security guard has to contend with figures that come alive and wreak havoc after a museum closes. The third film in the series is in post-production, according to the Internet Movie Database.
In April, Fox 2000 said it was developing a sequel to ‘‘Mrs. Doubtfire’’ and Mr. Williams was in talks to join the production.
Mr. Williams also made a short-lived return to TV last fall in CBS’ ‘‘The Crazy Ones,’’ a sitcom about a father-daughter ad agency team that co-starred Sarah Michelle Gellar. It was canceled after one season.
‘‘I dread the word ‘art,’ ’’ Mr. Williams said in 1989 when discussing his craft. ‘‘That’s what we used to do every night before we’d go on with ‘Waiting for Godot.’ We’d go, ‘No art. Art dies tonight.’ We’d try to give it a life, instead of making ‘Godot’ so serious. It’s cosmic vaudeville staged by the Marquis de Sade.’’
His personal life was often short on laughter. He had acknowledged drug and alcohol problems in the 1970s and ’80s and was among the last to see John Belushi before the ‘‘Saturday Night Live’’ star died of a drug overdose in 1982.
Mr. Williams announced in 2006 that he was drinking again but rebounded well enough to joke about it during his recent tour. ‘‘I went to rehab in wine country,’’ he said, ‘‘to keep my options open.’’ The following year, he told the AP that people were surprised he was no longer clean.
‘‘I fell off the wagon after 20 years and people are like, ‘Really?’ Well, yeah. It only kicks in when you really want to change,’’ he said.
Born in Chicago in 1951, Mr. Williams would remember himself as a shy kid who got some early laughs from his mother — by mimicking his grandmother. He opened up more in high school when he joined the drama club, and he was accepted into the Juilliard Academy, where he had several classes in which he and Christopher Reeve were the only students and John Houseman was the teacher.
Encouraged by Houseman to pursue comedy, Mr. Williams identified with the wildest and angriest of performers: Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin. Their acts were not warm and lovable. They were just being themselves.
‘‘You look at the world and see how scary it can be sometimes and still try to deal with the fear,’’ he said in 1989. ‘‘Comedy can deal with the fear and still not paralyze you or tell you that it’s going away. You say, OK, you got certain choices here, you can laugh at them and then once you’ve laughed at them and you have expunged the demon, now you can deal with them. That’s what I do when I do my act.’’
He unveiled Mork, the alien from the planet Ork, in an appearance on ‘‘Happy Days’’ and was granted his own series, which ran from 1978 to 1982 and co-starred Pam Dawber as a woman who takes in the interplanetary visitor.
‘‘I am completely and totally devastated,’’ Dawber said in a statement. ‘‘What more can be said?’’
I guess I'm just getting a bit nostalgic for I now see as better times in so many ways. That era is so often knocked by the TPTB maybe they were. It seemed like a time of endless possibilities and the chance at a decent world.
Following his success in films, Mr. Williams often returned to television — for appearances on ‘‘Saturday Night Live,’’ for ‘‘Friends,’’ for comedy specials, for ‘‘American Idol,’’ where in 2008 he pretended to be a ‘‘Russian idol’’ who belts out a tuneless, indecipherable ‘‘My Way.’’
Mr. Williams could handle a script, when he felt like it, and also think on his feet. He ad-libbed in many of his films and was just as quick in person. During a media tour for ‘‘Awakenings,’’ when director Penny Marshall mistakenly described the film as being set in a ‘‘menstrual hospital,’’ instead of ‘‘mental hospital,’’ Mr. Williams quickly stepped in and joked, ‘‘It’s a period piece.’’
Winner of a Grammy in 2003 for best spoken comedy album, ‘‘Robin Williams — Live 2002,’’ he once likened his act to the daily jogs he took across the Golden Gate Bridge. There were times he would look over the edge, one side of him pulling back in fear, the other insisting he could fly.
‘‘You have an internal critic, an internal drive that says, ‘OK, you can do more.’ Maybe that’s what keeps you going,’’ Mr. Williams said. ‘‘Maybe that’s a demon. . . . Some people say, ‘It’s a muse.’ No, it’s not a muse! It’s a demon! DO IT YOU BASTARD!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! THE LITTLE DEMON!!’’
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"Robin Williams entertained us, but pain inside was unmistakable" by Ty Burr | Globe staff August 12, 2014
How much do we require of the people who entertain us and what does it take from them? How much do they pull from themselves and what are the costs? The news that Robin Williams died of an apparent suicide at the age of 63 Monday has come as a shock and a sadness, but not — and maybe this is the tragedy of it — a terrible surprise. Williams could make a live audience laugh so hard it was as if he were handing out comedy dopamine; the whole joint felt high, himself included. And yet the moment the laughter stopped, the pain behind his eyes was unmistakable.
Williams had his demons; this we all knew. His great friendship with Jonathan Winters, a comedy pioneer of a previous generation whose career was both fueled and foiled by bipolar disorder, seemed an acknowledgement of the darkness both men courted to make us merry. Williams came clean on stage and in interviews about his cocaine addiction and abuse of alcohol, which he famously quit in the 1980s. He fell back into drinking after the 2004 death of his friend Christopher Reeve, joined AA, worked at staying sober. Earlier this summer he quietly entered rehab again. This is not proof of anything other than private struggle, but when Williams was truly on — in his live stand-up specials or on the TV show “Mork & Mindy” that brought him to fame in the 1970s, he had a comic energy that could be frightening. Voices, impressions, observations erupted from him at top speed, and part of the thrill lay in sensing that the comedian himself was barely in control of his gift.
As promised, let's stick with the laughs.
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The dramatic movies, and the performances in them — some of them are quite beautiful, especially the early ones. Williams made an unexpectedly fine Garp — life-sized, befuddled, real — in his second feature film, 1982’s “The World According to Garp,” and his Russian immigrant saxophone player in Paul Mazursky’s “Moscow on the Hudson” (1984) is touched with grace and humor. “The Best of Times” (1986) is a very good movie no one remembers, about two middle-aged men (Kurt Russell’s the other one) replaying the high school football game that obsesses them; Williams makes his small-town loser so painfully, wonderfully awkward you cringe watching him walk into a room.
Then came hits, deserved ones like “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987), which allowed Williams to channel his motor-mouth rebellion into the role of an army DJ, and “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), which put him in drag for a family-friendly “Tootsie.” There were movies that catered to the actor’s maudlin streak, like “Toys” (1992), “Jack” (1996), and “Patch Adams” (1998), the latter loathed by critics and welcomed by those who don’t bother to read critics. Like so many gifted comedians, from Chaplin on down, Williams wouldn’t rest until everyone took him seriously.
Oh, can I play for a minute (as the tears well up a bit; that was Williams' epic against militarism and such a prophetic film -- and the Globe calls it "maudlin." I suppose I just proved their point, because the endless war mindset even in the arts is the downfall of the civilization)?
Aww, forget it. I don't want to play now.
Yet that ambitious streak also led him into movies like Terry Gilliam’s “The Fisher King” (1991), probably his most extreme fusion of comic mania and serious acting, as well as the two teacher roles in which a lot of people loved him best. The first was “Dead Poets Society” (1989) where he’s a rebel Mr. Chips who leads his prep school boys to a greater engagement with literature and life. The second, of course, was 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” in which Williams mangled a Boston accent (most of us forgave him), reenacted Carlton Fisk waving the ball fair in the 1975 World Series, and won an Oscar for helping Matt Damon’s title character discover his inner prodigy. In accepting the award, he thanked the people of South Boston: “You’re a can of corn, you’re the best.” Whatever that means, we’ll take it.
In recent years, Williams started taking off-kilter character parts and riskier leads: The psycho Fotomat employee in “One Hour Photo” (2002), the grieving father of an accidental suicide in the pitch-black comedy “World’s Greatest Dad” (2010). The latter is not a movie that will give solace to anyone in the wake of Williams’s own passing, but it shows his daring increasing with the years.
Speaking personally, I met the man only once, years ago and not in a journalistic setting, just in passing, the sort of random street encounter one gets used to in New York. I came out of my apartment for a morning run and started stretching my legs next to another jogger. It was a strange metamoment: We acknowledged each other with a good-morning smile, then I realized he was Robin Williams, then he realized I realized he was Robin Williams, and his face went dead, as though a steel gate had rolled down over his celebrity.
I didn’t take it to heart; when you’re so famous that people stop you 100 times a day, this is how you handle it. Yet I also felt I’d glimpsed something of the blue-eyed bleakness that could leak through the actor’s performances, no matter the genre. The sense that his comic genius and dramatic angst were the tip of an iceberg of sizable psychic pain, one he negotiated on a daily basis, until, perhaps, he couldn’t. There is something horribly modern to be read in his death, even as we’ll probably never know (nor should we) what drove him to suicide. Robin Williams acted out the farce and the tragedy of the man who cannot stop being aware of himself. He may someday look like a Kafka hero stranded in Hollywood.
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Maybe I should give the Globe the Kevorkian treatment.
R.IP., Mork.
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
We are now being told he exhibited all the signs of bipolar disorder so the prescription pharmaceutical angle does come into play and will likely be hushed up among all the tributes.
Also see: Lauren Bacall, at 89; sultry, simmering star
And heavy smoker.
