Robin Williams, an actor and comedian, died on August 11th, aged 63
By N.B.
ROBIN WILLIAMS, an actor and comedian, died on August 11th, aged 63. The flood of grief-stricken commentary that followed news of his death has not simply been a response to his many achievements as a corruscating comedian and award-winning actor. It has also been a sign that audiences felt they knew him as a friend. In his stand-up specials and chat-show appearances, he never seemed to be holding anything back. Dripping with sweat, pouring out words in torrents, he seemed to have no filters between his buzzing brain and the outside world. He could be endearingly open and honest about his own problems (for years he was addicted to alcohol and cocaine), even while improvising delirious flights of fancy and flitting from character to character. Viewers loved him for it.
Mr Williams had a versatility that few comedy superstars have matched. Soon after he finished his studies at the Juilliard Shool, a conservatory in New York, he guest-starred as a goofy extra-terrestrial called Mork in an episode of “Happy Days”, and made such a deep impression that he was immediately given a sitcom of his own, “Mork And Mindy”. He was also given licence to improvise, a decision that broke new ground in the world of sitcoms and introduced mainstream audiences to Mr Williams's freewheeling ad libs. Suddenly he was a star, but when he made his first films, Robert Altman’s “Popeye” (1980) and George Roy Hill’s “The World According to Garp” (1982), he did not transfer Mork to a new setting. Instead of playing a childlike alien, he played adult humans. He was subdued and vulnerable—even when, in “Popeye”, he was a cartoon sailor with rugby-ball forearms.
The first film to capitalise on his motormouthed chat-show persona was “Good Morning Vietnam” (1987), in which Mr Williams played the rebellious host of an armed-forces radio show. The hit soundtrack album interspersed golden oldies with Mr Williams’s DJ chatter five years before “Reservoir Dogs” used the same gimmick. Disney’s “Aladdin” (1992) also made considerable use of Mr Williams’s whirlwind improvisation, and again it was groundbreaking. As the blue-skinned genie, Mr Williams riffed manically, forcing the animators to make the character change shape incessantly to follow Mr Williams's hurtling trains of thought. No previous cartoon had adapted a character so radically to suit the comic stylings of a particular actor.
Mr Williams was nominated for Academy Awards three times, first for "Good Morning, Vietnam", and later for touching roles in “Dead Poets Society” (1989) and Terry Gilliam’s “The Fisher King” (1991). But it was his warm yet rough-edged turn as a widowed psychology professor in “Good Will Hunting” (1997) that finally secured him the award for Best Supporting Actor.
It was around this time, though, that he also starred in his most mawkish films: “Jack” (1996), “Patch Adams” (1998), “Jakob The Liar” (1999) and “Bicentennial Man” (1999). Reviewers complained that the more angelic Mr Williams tried to be, the more creepy he seemed. Perhaps he took the criticisms to heart: in 2002 he played a diabolical serial killer in Christopher Nolan’s “Insomnia” and a pathetic stalker in “One Hour Photo”. He was chillingly credible in both.
As revelatory as the switch from saccharine to sour films was, it was typical of Mr Williams, who could never be written off, who would never settle into a rut, who never gave a half-hearted performance, and who could jump between genres as energetically as he could jump between characters in his stand-up routines. Decades into his Hollywood career, he was still showing us new sides to his talent. Given the opportunity, he would doubtless have shown many more.
