On this day in 2014, the world lost Robin Williams, and film and comedy have never quite felt the same since. Rather than dwell on how that day ended, it feels right to spend it the way he spent most of his life: making people laugh, and occasionally breaking their hearts in the process.
Williams first burst into American living rooms in 1978 as Mork, the alien with the rainbow suspenders on “Mork & Mindy”, a role built almost entirely on his gift for improvisation, which producers reportedly gave up trying to script around within days of meeting him. That manic, free-associating energy became his signature, but what set Williams apart over a four-decade career was how effortlessly he moved between that chaos and genuine stillness. He could out-talk anyone in the room in “Good Morning, Vietnam,” then turn around and deliver one of cinema’s quietest, most devastating lines as therapist Sean Maguire in “Good Will Hunting” — “It’s not your fault,” repeated to Matt Damon’s character until it finally breaks through. That performance won him his only competitive Oscar, after three previous nominations.
He was, by any measure, one of the most versatile actors of his generation. He was a beloved children’s entertainer as the Genie in “Aladdin,” reportedly improvising so much dialogue that Disney animators had to redraw scenes to keep up with him. He was a devoted, disguise-wearing father in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” He was the teacher who stood on his desk and told a room full of students to seize the day in “Dead Poets Society” — a line so enduring it’s still quoted in classrooms today. And in one of his final roles, he returned one last time as Theodore Roosevelt in “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,” a fittingly larger-than-life send-off.
What lingers, though, isn’t just the filmography — one Oscar, six Golden Globes, two Emmys, and a body of work that somehow makes “prolific” feel like an understatement. It’s the sense, shared by nearly everyone who worked with him, that the kindness was as real as the comedy. Fellow actor Harvey Fierstein, his “Mrs. Doubtfire” co-star, put it simply after his passing: “Robin was friend, boss, brother, inspiration. His generosity and intelligence knew no limits.” President Obama, marking the loss, called him someone who “arrived in our lives as an alien — but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit.”
Eleven years on, that’s still the clearest way to describe what Robin Williams gave audiences: not just laughter, though there was plenty of that, but the sense that someone that funny could also see you, and remind you — as he did, again and again, on screen, to pay attention to your one wild and precious life.