Best Known As: The manic comic who won a dramatic Oscar for Good Will Hunting
A manic prankster and lovable loose cannon, Robin Williams became a star in the 1970s TV series Mork and Mindy. He played Mork from Ork, a sweetly nutty space alien learning about life on Earth. Williams moved quickly into films, often playing wise comic oddballs in heartfelt dramas. He was Oscar-nominated for Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989) and The Fisher King (1991) before finally winning an Academy Award as the sympathetic psychologist who befriends Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting (1997). In a more comic vein he played a wacky genie in the Disney animated feature Aladdin, the strong-armed title sailor in 1980's Popeye (with Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl), a cross-dressing dad in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993, with Sally Field) and a grown-up Peter Pan in the 1991 Steven Spielberg movie Hook. His other films include Insomnia (2002, with Al Pacino), One Hour Photo (2002), Robots (2005, voice) and David Duchovny's House of D (2004).
Williams has maintained a stand-up comedy career, and joined Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg as co-host for many Comic Relief benefit shows... Williams is unrelated to folk music stars Robin and Linda Williams... The character of Mork from Ork originated as a guest star on the Ron Howard TV series Happy Days... Some sources list his birth year as 1951 rather than 1952. Who2 accepts 1952 based in part on the 1998 biography Robin Williams by Andy Dougan.
Representative Albums: "A Night at the Met," "Live 2002," "Reality...What a Concept"
Biography
The multipurpose standup comic/actor first rose to fame as the delightful Mork from Ork on the TV show Mork and Mindy, and he rode that show to fame on cable TV specials and several films, including The World According to Garp, Good Morning, Vietnam, Hook and Mrs. Doubtfire. Using a wide assemblage of voices and movements, Williams is one of the most popular and visible comics around, and his releases highlight him. ~ Larry Lapka, All Music Guide
Career Highlights: Good Will Hunting, Aladdin, The Fisher King
First Major Screen Credit: Mork & Mindy: Season 01 (1978)
Biography
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 thrillers, 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 romantic 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
Williams has described himself as a quiet child whose first imitation was of his grandmother to his mom. He did not overcome his shyness until he became involved with his high school drama department.[6]
Career
In 1973, Williams was one of only 20 students accepted into the freshman class at Juilliard. Williams, along with Christopher Reeve, were the only students accepted by John Houseman into the Advanced Program at the school that year.[7] Reeve and Williams had several classes together in which they were the only two students. In their dialects class, Williams had no trouble mastering all dialects quickly, whereas Reeve was more meticulous about it. Williams and Reeve developed a close friendship, and they remained good friends for the rest of Reeve's life. Williams visited Reeve after the horseback riding accident that paralyzed him from the neck down and cheered him up by pretending to be an eccentric Russian doctor (similar to his role in Nine Months). Williams claimed that he was there to perform a colonoscopy. Reeve stated that he laughed for the first time since the accident and knew that life was going to be okay.[7]
As Mork, Williams improvised much of his dialogue and devised plenty of rapid-fire verbal and physical comedy, speaking in a high, nasal voice. Mork's appearance was so popular with viewers that it led to a spin-off hit television sitcom, Mork and Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982. Although playing the same character as in his appearance in Happy Days, the show was set in the present day, in Boulder, Colorado instead of late '50s in Milwaukee. Mork was an extremely popular character, featured on posters, coloring books, lunchboxes, and other merchandise.
Starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Williams began to reach a wider audience with his standup comedy, including three HBO comedy specials, Off The Wall (1978), An Evening with Robin Williams (1982), and Robin Williams: Live at the Met (1986). Also in 1986, Williams reached an even wider audience to exhibit his style at the 58th Academy Awards show; noting the Hollywood writers strike that year he commented that the Hollywood writer... "is the only man in the world that can blow smoke up his own a--." As a result, Williams has never hosted the AA's again.
His standup work has been a consistent thread through his career, as is seen by the success of his one-man show (and subsequent DVD) Robin Williams Live on Broadway (2002). He was voted 13th on Comedy Central's list "100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time" in 2004.[9]
Williams also appeared on an episode of the American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (Season 3, Episode 9: November 16, 2000). During a game of "Scenes from a Hat", the scene "What Robin Williams is thinking right now" was drawn, and Williams stated "I have a career. What the hell am I doing here?"[11]
His role as the Genie in the animated filmAladdin was instrumental in establishing the importance of star power in voice actor casting. Later, Williams once again used his voice talents in Fern Gully, as the holographic Dr. Know in the 2001 feature Artificial Intelligence: A.I., the 2005 animated feature Robots, the 2006 Academy Award winning Happy Feet, and an uncredited vocal performance in 2006's Everyone's Hero. Furthermore, he was the voice of The Timekeeper, a former attraction at the Walt Disney World Resort about a time-traveling robot who encounters Jules Verne and brings him to the future.
Williams has also starred in dramatic films, which got him two subsequent Academy Award nominations: First for playing an English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989), and later for playing a troubled homeless man in The Fisher King (1991);[12] that same year, he played an adult Peter Pan in the movie Hook. Other acclaimed dramatic films include Awakenings (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998). In the 2002 dramatic thriller Insomnia, Williams portrays a writer/killer on the run from a sleep-deprived Los Angeles policeman (played by Al Pacino) in rural Alaska. And also in 2002, in the psychological thriller One Hour Photo, Williams played an emotionally disturbed photo development technician who becomes obsessed with a family for whom he has developed pictures for a long time.
In 1998, he won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his role as a psychologist in Good Will Hunting.[12] However, by the early 2000s, he was thought by some to be typecast in films such as Patch Adams (1998) and Bicentennial Man (1999) that critics complained were excessively maudlin. In 2006 Williams starred in The Night Listener, a thriller about a radio show host who realizes he has developed a friendship with a child who may or may not exist.
He is known for his improvisational skills and impersonations. His performances frequently involve impromptu humor designed and delivered in rapid-fire succession while on stage. According to the Aladdin DVD commentary, most of his dialogue as the Genie was improvised and conversely to all previous animation features, the animation had to be post-produced to synch with Williams' pre-recorded voice-over.
He was portrayed by Chris Diamantopoulos in the made-for-TVbiopicBehind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy (2005), documenting the actor's arrival in Hollywood as a struggling comedian.
Disputes with Disney
In gratitude for his success with the Disney/Touchstone film Good Morning, Vietnam, Robin Williams voiced the Genie for SAG scale pay ($75,000), on condition that his name or image not be used for marketing, and his (supporting) character not take more than 25% of space on advertising artwork, since Toys was scheduled for release one month after Aladdin's debut. The studio went back on the deal on both counts, especially in poster art by having the Genie in 25% of the image, but having other major and supporting characters portrayed considerably smaller. Disney's Hyperion book, Aladdin: The Making Of An Animated Film, listed both of Williams' characters "The Peddler" and "The Genie" ahead of main characters, but was forced to refer to him only as "the actor signed to play the Genie".[14]
Williams and Disney had a bitter falling-out, and as a result Dan Castellaneta voiced the Genie in The Return of Jafar, the Aladdin animated television series, and had recorded his voice for Aladdin and the King of Thieves. When Jeffrey Katzenberg was fired from Disney and replaced by former 20th Century Fox production head Joe Roth (whose last act for Fox was greenlighting Williams' film Mrs. Doubtfire), Roth arranged for a public apology to Williams by Disney. Williams agreed to perform in Hollywood Pictures' Jack, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and even agreed to voice the Genie again for the King Of Thieves sequel (for considerably more than scale), replacing all of Castellaneta's dialogue.[15]
When Williams re-teamed with Doubtfire director Chris Columbus for 1999's Bicentennial Man, Disney asked that the budget be cut by approximately $20 million, and when the film was released on Christmas Day, it flopped at the box office. Williams blamed Disney's marketing and the loss of content the film had suffered due to the budget cuts. As a result, Williams was again on bad terms with Disney, and Castellaneta was once again recruited to replace him as Genie in the Kingdom Hearts video game series and the House of Mouse TV series. The DVD release for Aladdin has no involvement whatsoever from Williams in the bonus materials, although some of his original recording sessions can be seen.
Stand-Up career
Robin Williams has done a number of stand-up comedy tours since the early 1970s. Some of his most notable tours include An Evening With Robin Williams (1982), Robin Williams: At The Met (1986) and Robin Williams LIVE on Broadway (2002). The latter broke many long held records for a comedy show. In some cases, tickets were sold out within thirty minutes of going on sale.
In August 2008, Williams announced a brand new 26-city tour titled "Weapons of Self Destruction". After a six year break from his record breaking tour, Robin decided the time was right to perform again due to the material that could be generated by a presidental election. He was quoted as saying that this was his last chance to make cracks at the expense of the current Bush Administration.[16]
Personal life
Robin Williams' first marriage was to Valerie Velardi on June 4, 1978, with whom he has one child, Zachary Pym (Zak) (born April 11, 1983). During Williams' first marriage, he was involved in an extramarital relationship with Michelle Tish Carter, a cocktail waitress whom he met in 1984. She sued him in 1986, claiming he gave her herpes without notifying her. The case was settled out of court.[17]
On April 30, 1989, he married Marsha Garces, his son's nanny who was already several months pregnant with his child. They have two children, Zelda Rae (born July 31, 1989) and Cody Alan (born November 25, 1991). However, in March 2008, Garces filed for divorce from Williams, citing irreconcilable differences.[18]
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Williams had an addiction to cocaine; he has since quit. Williams was a close friend and frequent partier alongside John Belushi. He says the death of his friend and the birth of his son prompted him to quit drugs: "Was it a wake-up call? Oh yeah, on a huge level. The grand jury helped too."[12]
On August 9, 2006, Williams checked himself into a substance abuse rehabilitation center, later admitting that he was an alcoholic.[19] His publicist delivered the announcement:
"After 20 years of sobriety, Robin Williams found himself drinking again and has decided to take proactive measures to deal with this for his own well-being and the well-being of his family. He asks that you respect his and his family's privacy during this time. He looks forward to returning to work this fall to support his upcoming film releases."[20]
On August 20, 2007, Williams' elder brother, Robert Todd Williams, died of complications from heart surgery performed a month earlier.[21]
Williams is a member of the Episcopal Church. He has described his denomination as "Catholic Lite—same rituals, half the guilt."[22]
Health
Williams was hospitalized in March 2009 due to heart problems. Williams postponed his one-man tour in order to undergo surgery to replace his aortic valve.[23][24] The surgery was successfully completed on March 13, 2009 at the Cleveland Clinic.[25][26]
Robin Williams has gone on record as a fan of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, and incorporated a scene referencing it in One Hour Photo where he purchases a model kit from it as a gift.
A fan of professional road cycling, he was a regular on the US Postal and Discovery Channel Pro Cycling team bus and hotels during the years Lance Armstrong dominated the Tour de France.[31]
Williams is a supporter of eco-friendly vehicles. He currently drives a Toyota Prius,[33] but is on the waiting list to be an early adopter of the Aptera 2-series electric vehicle.[34]
Charity work
Williams and his former wife, Marsha, founded the Windfall Foundation, a philanthropic organization to raise money for many different charities. Williams devotes much of his energy doing work for charities, including the Comic Relief fund-raising efforts. In December 1999, he sang in French on the BBC-inspired music video of international celebrities doing a cover of the Rolling Stones's "It's Only Rock & Roll" for the charity Children's Promise.[35]
Williams has performed for four years with the USO for U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.[citation needed][more information requested]
You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.
