Robin Williams

The White Noise of Television

Robin Williams improvised at a speed that 1970s cameras could barely capture. In his early days in San Francisco, he wasn't after easy laughs. He was after electric survival through monologues that felt like controlled panic attacks.

He entered Juilliard in 1973. But he left before finishing because John Houseman told him there was nothing more he could teach him. He was an oddball who mixed Shakespeare with cartoon noises, and that unsettled the method purists.

The series Mork & Mindy was his breakout in 1978. Williams didn't stick to the script. The writers ended up leaving blank spaces in the script pages so he could fill the gaps with his torrent of words. That chaos drew audiences of 60 million viewers in its best weeks.

And the gamble paid off.

But success brought an addiction to alcohol and cocaine that dragged on for years. In 1982, the death of his friend John Belushi forced him to come to a screeching halt. Williams used to say that tragedy was simply comedy that had not been given enough time to breathe.

The Mask of Drama

In 1987, he starred in Good Morning, Vietnam. It was the first time Hollywood realized his nervous energy could be channeled into more than quick jokes. Barry Levinson gave him complete freedom behind the radio microphone, and the result was an Oscar nomination.

Throughout the 1990s, he piled up projects that played up his softer, family-friendly side. Mrs. Doubtfire grossed $441 million in 1993. But behind the makeup of an elderly British nanny was an actor who was starting to tire of always being the class clown.

He won the Oscar for Good Will Hunting in 1998. He played Sean Maguire with a restraint nobody expected from a man who used to sweat buckets of adrenaline on stage. He was paid $5 million for that role, far less than his usual fee of $20 million at the time.

Silence was also his tool.

In 2002, he decided to break his kindly-man image with Retratos de una obsesión and Insomnia. On the latter he worked under Christopher Nolan. Williams played a calculating killer who never blinked, and it unsettled audiences who still expected to see him dance as in The Birdcage.

The Technical Fade to Black

His final years were marked by uneven projects and health that was failing in ways nobody could see. In 2011, he returned to Broadway in the play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. Critics praised his performance, but the physical toll was evident backstage.

During the filming of Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb in 2014, he was already suffering the effects of Lewy body dementia. He had serious trouble remembering his lines. So the production team had to adjust the shooting schedule to fit his moments of greatest clarity.

Because Williams's brain was collapsing while he tried to keep up the façade of an infallible genius. Doctors later confirmed he had one of the most aggressive neurodegenerative conditions documented in a living patient up to that point.

His final on-screen appearance was in the comedy Absolutely Anything in 2015, where he voiced a dog. The final autopsy revealed no trace of drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of his death in August 2014. The forensic report detailed that protein deposits in his neurons had destroyed his judgment and motor control.