Robin Williams

Robin Williams: The Fastest Mind in the Room

John Houseman ran the most selective acting programme in America. In 1973 he admitted a young Californian to Juilliard's advanced group — a class that also contained Christopher Reeve — watched him work, and then advised him to leave and go do stand-up comedy instead. It was the correct diagnosis. What Robin Williams had was not something a conservatory could refine; it was a speed of association that needed a live audience and no script.

A Shy Boy in Bloomfield Hills

He was born on 21 July 1951 in Chicago and raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a comfortable Detroit suburb. By his own account he was a shy child, and the standard cure applied: he found the school drama department, and the shyness dissolved into performance. He went on to Claremont Men's College in California before the acting took over completely and carried him to New York and Juilliard.

The San Francisco Rooms

Following Houseman's advice, he returned to California and worked the comedy clubs of San Francisco and Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, at the height of a stand-up boom that prized invention over material. Williams's act was not a set of jokes but an improvisational fugue: characters, accents, non sequiturs and cultural references arriving faster than an audience could fully process. Comedy Central would later rank him the thirteenth greatest stand-up of all time, and he kept returning to the form for the rest of his life, taping HBO specials in 1982 and 1986.

Mork

In February 1978 he appeared on an episode of *Happy Days* as Mork, an alien from the planet Ork. The guest spot became a series. *Mork and Mindy* ran from 1978 to 1982 and made him, in the phrase that gets used and for once is accurate, an overnight sensation. It also gave American English "nanu nanu" and a handful of other catchphrases, and it established the terms of his fame: a performer whose scripted lines were the least interesting thing about him, on a show that increasingly just let him go.

The Serious Turn

Film did not come easily. *Popeye* (1980) was a critical and commercial disappointment, and *The World According to Garp* (1982) and *Moscow on the Hudson* (1984) established him as an interesting actor without making him a movie star. That arrived with *Good Morning, Vietnam* (1987), which harnessed the improvisational engine to a dramatic structure — a radio DJ talking without pause while a war goes on outside — and brought his first Academy Award nomination.

Two more followed quickly: *Dead Poets Society* (1989), in which he played an English teacher against almost all of his own instincts, holding still and speaking quietly; and *The Fisher King* (1991), as a homeless man broken by grief. In 1992 he voiced the Genie in *Aladdin* and altered animated film permanently, recording so much improvised material that the character became a shape-shifting vehicle for pure comic invention. *Mrs. Doubtfire* (1993) was the enormous commercial hit.

The Oscar came in 1998, for Best Supporting Actor in *Good Will Hunting* — a performance built almost entirely from stillness, in which the comedian sat on a park bench and let another actor be funny.

The Later Work

He alternated afterwards between sentiment and menace. *Patch Adams* (1998) and *Bicentennial Man* (1999) leaned into the warmth; *One Hour Photo* (2002) went the other way entirely, casting him as a lonely photo-lab technician whose blankness is genuinely frightening. *Night at the Museum* (2006) returned him to family comedy.

Away from the camera he did a great deal of unglamorous work. With Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal he mounted the Comic Relief specials on HBO, raising money for homeless Americans, and he was a tireless performer for United Service Organizations shows for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He had three children — Zak, with Valerie Velardi; Zelda and Cody, with Marsha Garces — and at the end of his life was married to Susan Schneider.

Why Robin Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Williams for one specific faculty, and it is worth describing exactly. He had an unusually large and fast associative memory and could retrieve from it under pressure, in rhythm, in character, in front of people. Watch him improvise and what you are seeing is not simply invention but selection at speed — thousands of possible connections generated and the funniest one chosen inside a beat. Very few performers in the history of stand-up have operated at that clock rate, and it is a cognitive gift as much as a comic one, closer to the mental agility of a simultaneous interpreter than to joke-writing. Houseman recognised it in 1973 and, to his credit, told the student to go where the gift belonged.

The counter-case is not a small one, and admirers should own it. The speed that made him extraordinary could also be a wall: it could flatten scene partners, smother a script, and turn a performance into a solo. His film choices were frequently sentimental, and several of his most successful pictures ask an audience to be moved on very cheap terms. And the acclaim for his dramatic work — the Oscar included — partly reflects surprise that a comedian could hold still, which is a lower bar than it sounds. The honest formulation is that Williams's genius was a performance gift rather than an authorial one; he did not write or direct the things that made him famous, and his best film work happened when a strong director gave the improvisation a cage to push against. Inside that cage, nobody was quicker.

Legacy

Williams died on 11 August 2014 at his home in Tiburon, California. He was sixty-three. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and in his final year he and his wife consulted a succession of specialists without arriving at an explanation for the confusion, memory loss, anxiety and hallucinations he was experiencing. An autopsy found advanced Lewy body dementia — a condition the Lewy Body Dementia Association estimates affects some 1.4 million Americans — which had gone undiagnosed throughout his illness. Susan Schneider Williams subsequently became a public advocate for research into the disease, describing her husband as "a larger-than-life spirit who was inside the body of a normal man with a human brain."

The work stands independently of the ending. The Genie changed what voice acting could be; *Good Morning, Vietnam* and *The Fisher King* showed that improvisational comedy could carry dramatic weight; and several generations of comedians learned from him that a stand-up set could be a sustained act of invention rather than a delivery of prepared lines. The fastest mind in the room turned out to be, in the quiet performances, one of the most attentive as well.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — 1998
• Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy — 1994
• Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role — 1998
• Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album — 1988
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy — 1988
• Worked as stand-up comedian, television actor and film actor