Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (10 page)

Jack wants to redeem himself for inadvertently having caused the killings. He introduces Parry to Lydia (Amanda Plummer), an accountant who Parry has a crush on, and they fall in love. But Parry sees the Red Knight and flees, only to run into the same thugs who had gone after Jack. They beat him and he returns to a catatonic state. To help him, Jack breaks into the house of a famous architect and takes possession of a simple trophy that Parry believes to be the Grail: in so doing, he prevents the suicide of the architect by tripping the alarm. He takes the trophy to Parry, who
regains consciousness and is reunited with Lydia. Finally, Jack tells Anne he loves her and they embrace.

This was not one of Williams’ major box-office successes, although it performed perfectly respectably, but the critics loved it. ‘
The Fisher King
has two actors at the top of their form, and a compelling, well-directed and well-produced story,’ said
Variety.
‘Visually impressive, frequently pretentious, and extremely fluid as narrative (the 137 minutes sail by effortlessly), this mythic comedy-drama presents Gilliam as half seer, half snake-oil salesman and defies you to sort out which is which,’ wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in the
Chicago Reader.
‘Although there are moments when the mixture of comedy, fantasy and drama don’t come off, this is still an original, touching movie that is well worth the price of a ticket,’ opined Jo Berry in
Empire Magazine.

‘Working within the constraints of a big studio film has brought out Gilliam’s best: he’s become a true storyteller and a wonderful director of actors. This time he delights not only the eye but the soul,’ said David Ansen in
Newsweek
. ‘A touching and funny one-of-a-kind gem about two lost souls who help each other find redemption. Bridges once again proves what an underappreciated actor he is, while Williams is at his manic best,’ said Chuck O’Leary of
FulvueDrive-In.com
. ‘
The Fisher King
emphasizes the purpose of fairy tales in our lives, and the way a fantasy can help us see reality more clearly,’ said Jeffrey Overstreet.

The film resulted in another Oscar nomination for
Williams (who, by now, must have been feeling always the bridesmaid, never the bride), while his co-star Mercedes Ruehl, who played Anne, won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, as well as a number of other awards. There was a score of further Oscar nominations for the movie and the usual international suspects, with Williams getting a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor on the back of his performance. Terry Gilliam, meanwhile, won the People’s Choice Award from the Toronto International Film Festival for what had been a stunningly original take on what was actually Arthurian legend. It was another triumph all round.

The hits and misses continued. Next up was
Toys
(1992), another fantasy film with a fine cast, including Michael Gambon, Joan Cusack, Robin Wright and Jamie Foxx in his film debut, all about a childlike man who owns a toy factory. ‘
Toys
is a very whimsical, strange feast, almost a nonmusical musical,’ Williams told
The New York Times.
‘I hope people enjoy the ride.’ But they didn’t – the film was regarded as a failure, both critically and commercially, with the director Barry Levinson seen as partly to blame. Given that he had also directed
Good Morning, Vietnam
(and
Rain Man
in 1988), it was unclear why the project had gone so badly wrong.

‘[What made the film] that much sadder a failure is that everyone involved must have sincerely felt they were doing the Lord’s work, care and concern going hand in hand with an almost total miscalculation of mood,’ said Kenneth
Turan in the
Los Angeles Times.
‘Even Robin Williams, so lively a voice in
Aladdin
, is on beatific automatic pilot here, preferring to be warm and cuddly when a little of his energy (paradoxically on splendid display in the film’s teaser trailer) is desperately called for. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas seems to have stripped the life from this film as well, leaving a pretty shell, expensive but hollow, in its place.’

‘To cut
Toys
a minor break, it is ambitious,’ wrote Peter Travers in
Rolling Stone.
‘It is also a gimmicky, obvious and pious bore, not to mention overproduced and overlong.’

But for every miss there was a hit. Williams had, indeed, starred in the aforementioned
Aladdin
(1992), or at least voiced his part: the role of Genie/Merchant had been written specifically with him in mind – a risk, as he took a lot of persuading before he would accept. He didn’t want to work for Disney, he said, with the result that two of the writers, Ron Clements and John Musker, who were also the producers and directors, created a reel of animation of the Genie, which they allied to Robin’s real life stand-up. When they showed it to him, he thought it was so funny that he agreed to do the film. He also improvised a great deal of his part, contributing up to thirty hours on tape that had to be cut down to fit the movie, impersonating numerous others in the process, including Jack Nicholson, Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert De Niro (‘Are you talkin’ to me?’) and Pinocchio. ‘I was improvising, and the animators came in and laughed,
and it just grew,’ he told
New York Magazine.
‘In times like this, when there’s so much crap running around, it’s great to laugh and be free. I felt wonderful; that’s why I did it. And it was such a pleasure when it came out and people said, “I loved it as much as my kid did.” But then some things happened later on.’

A veritable tour de force, it was estimated that, in total, Williams improvised about fifty-two different voices. In the event,
Aladdin
was the most successful film of 1992.

Unusually for Robin, who was on the whole considered to be an easy person to work with, the movie generated some bad feeling on the part of all those involved because of the events that happened later on. For various reasons, related to the fact that
Toys
was coming out around the same time, Williams demanded that his name and image would not be used for marketing and would not take more than 25 per cent of marketing space. The studio did not stick to the letter of the deal, using his voice to sell merchandise of the products, leading to a very public and bitter row between the two of them, with Robin, who had taken a much smaller fee than usual (this was normal for a voiceover), refusing to do any promotion. What this essentially boiled down to was that he said he’d do the film if they didn’t present it as a Robin Williams’ vehicle, which they then did.

It ended in Disney publicly apologising to Robin (and giving him a Picasso then valued at $1 million and no doubt worth considerably more now) but it was an
unhappy episode that left an unpleasant taste in the mouth. ‘It wasn’t as if we hadn’t set it out,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to sell stuff. It’s the one thing I don’t do. In
Mork & Mindy
, they did Mork dolls – I didn’t mind the dolls; the image is theirs. But the voice, that’s me; I gave them my self. When it happened, I said, “You know I don’t do that.” And they apologized; they said it was done by other people.’

In his spare time, Robin was still doing stand-up, an act that he pretty much imported onto his numerous chat-show appearances, which were fast becoming known as being quite as enjoyable as watching his act. In 1992 he appeared on
The Arsenio Hall Show
and spoke of it in much the same way as he did his actual act: ‘Going on stage is part catharsis for me, but it’s almost trying to work out my own fears,’ he told
The New York Times
shortly after he returned from a trip to the UK.

The interview was also an explanation as to quite how much current affairs informed his act. ‘Tonight I was jet-lagged, but I just wanted to explode with all this information,’ he said of his appearance on the show. ‘You want to talk about the marines in Somalia hitting the beach and meeting the press. “All right, Colonel, I want you to take out that camera position. Get away, son! He’s got a flashbulb!” And, like, the royal family. I was in England and Windsor Castle was burning down and, like, it’s not insured. Oh, damn, I’m sorry! Let the people pay 8 billion crowns. And there’s no sprinkler system. Oh rot!’

Entertaining stuff but there was also a truly manic
quality to it – this was a newspaper interview, after all. But it seemed as if Robin just couldn’t turn off the tap: something inside was relentless, pushing him to be funny even when he didn’t have to be. It was the mark of a comic genius, all right – but it wasn’t healthy and didn’t give the impression of a man at peace with himself.

Then again, there were certainly some things he could be pretty serious about and, at that stage, Marsha was one of them. The relationship was very strong then, with Robin crediting her with pulling him through a very difficult time and he fiercely resented the picture that had been painted of him running off with the nanny. Indeed, he blamed it on a piece in
People Magazine.

‘It was an ambush by them,’ he told
The New York Times
in 1992. ‘It’s very destructive. It still is. There are still nanny jokes. You want to go out and yell.

‘There was an article about men who leave their wives when they become famous. And I wanted to write to this man and say, “Listen, you may have your ridiculous theories, but the truth is my wife left me.” My marriage had been in a shambles for some time. Marsha just basically started to talk to me and said: “Listen jerk, what are you having these ridiculous affairs for? What are you yelling and screaming about? Wake up!” Slowly I began realizing I’m a decent person, and everything wonderful that has happened to my life is because of her. It’s hideous that she takes the rap as a home wrecker, which is a lie. It’s the exact opposite. She has taken me from zero to the sky.’

It was an unusually impassioned outburst and, for Robin to complain about anyone making jokes, when he so often mercilessly harpooned the pompous himself, showed that this had left some real scars. For him, it was yet another sign that fame had its downside: people took an interest in your private life and made remarks. Still, he was now top of the Hollywood A-list, enjoying the fruits of his success and a seriously rich man. He was about to enjoy some further career highlights in the forthcoming years – but also experience a terrible tragedy that struck one of his closest friends.

For much of the 1990s, Williams’ film career continued to soar. In 1993 there was another seminal role, this time in
Mrs. Doubtfire
, based on Anne Fine’s novel
Alias Madame
Doubtfire
and co-starring Sally Field. Strangely enough, when first released the film received decidedly mixed reviews but it is now considered to be one of the great classics, ranking 67th in the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Laughs: America’s Funniest Movies and 40th on Bravo’s 100 Funniest Movies of All Time.

The film, which also starred Pierce Brosnan in his pre-Bond days, told the tale of Daniel and Miranda Hillard,
divorced parents of three. Daniel, as luck would have it, is a voice actor (this gave Robin a great many opportunities to clown around) and so, after the divorce goes through and he gets extremely limited custody, he dresses up as a Scottish nanny and works his way back into his children’s lives. In the end, all is revealed and he is forgiven with the message (by this time a great many of Williams’ films had messages) that not only had he learned to become a better father but family triumphed above all else.

(In a rather touching example of the fact that this is actually true, a totally unknown actor called Dr. Toad had a bit part as a bartender in the movie. In actual fact, Dr. Toad was none other than R. Todd Williams, now an acclaimed wine maker and co-founder of Toad Hollow Vineyards and Robin’s oldest half-brother. He had, indeed, been a bartender in his time.)

And Williams certainly managed to pull it off: his performance was absolutely central to the movie. ‘In the film, if Robin’s character doesn’t fool the woman he’d been married to for fourteen years, she won’t hire him – and there’d be no movie,’ director Chris Columbus told
New York Magazine
in 1993. But it was far more personal than many people realised: Robin himself had recently been through a divorce and was well aware of all the problems caused when parents and children don’t see enough of each other. In some ways, this was as raw as the stand-up material he had once done about taking drugs.

Mrs. Doubtfire
was much compared to
Tootsie
(1982), the
Dustin Hoffman vehicle in which he, too, dragged up in order to get work in a soap opera but, while that film was deservedly and immediately recognised as a comic classic,
Mrs. Doubtfire
was not. It was compared, on the whole unfavourably, with another of the cross-dressing greats,
Some Like It Hot
(1959) and, even the (sort of) complimentary reviews were a little sharp.

‘I’ve rarely laughed so much at a movie I generally disliked,’ said David Ansen in
Newsweek
. ‘The dress, the mask and Mrs. Doubtfire’s gentility are inherently limiting, but nothing holds Mr. Williams back when he’s on a roll,’ wrote Janet Maslin in
The New York Times.
‘Although overly sappy in places and probably twenty minutes too long, this Robin Williams-in-drag vehicle provides the comic a slick surface for doing his shtick, within a story possessing broad family appeal,’ opined Brian Lowry in
Variety
.

‘Sit-com stuff, then, with laboured farcical interludes, and a mushy post-feminist sensibility. Funny notwithstanding,’ came from Derek Adams in
Time Out
. ‘Williams has to break out of a second-rate
Tootsie
imitation, ankles clamped in pathos and face covered in latex. He pulls it off in the end, but it’s not pretty,’ said Desson Thomson in the
Washington Post
. And, much more positively and also from the
Washington Post
, ‘You will laugh till your ribs ache – not because director Chris Columbus of the
Home Alone
movies has a gift for farce, which he does, but because Williams is to funny what the Energizer Bunny is to batteries. He keeps going and going and going,’ said Rita Kempley.

But the people who really knew about these things – namely the film industry – immediately recognised its quality. Williams won the Global Globe Award for Best Actor for his performance and the movie got Best Film. It also won an Oscar, although admittedly for Best Make-up. Robin was certainly taking it seriously.

‘Here’s a guy who lives in a very random way and, through a painful process, finds there’s more than him,’ he told
New York Magazine.
‘And the wife, she does the same thing. We had an early go with the studio; they wanted the couple to get back together. Well, that’s the one fantasy most psychiatrists will tell you is perpetuated by children of divorce who are in therapy – and it’s the one thing that professionals don’t want to perpetuate. They’ll ask kids, “Ever have a memory of your mom and dad together?” The kids say no, but it’s the grand concept: “They’re together. Sold to you by Norman Rockwell. The family, at the table … even though they’re all armed.” This movie is about real family values. After a divorce, how many fathers just give up? The tendency is to say, “I love my son,” and then pull away. If you’re lucky, the father becomes an uncle. But the weird thing is, he needs his kids as much as they need him.’

Mrs. Doubtfire
was to become one of his major successes, so much so that there was talk of a sequel (Robin actually disliked sequels) right up to the end of his life. Various plot ideas were mentioned, including disguising himself as a woman to look for his daughter when she went to college, but nothing ever seemed quite right. Then in later
years, when Williams’ career was, perhaps, not quite so stratospheric as it had once been, there was even talk that another
Mrs. Doubtfire
might rescue it. But it was not to be.

Even as late as May 2013, however, the director Chris Columbus was still talking about the possibility. ‘[Robin Williams and I are] talking about a sequel to
Mrs. Doubtfire,
’ he said in an interview with the
Huffington Post
. ‘We’ve talked about it, and the studio is interested in it. The thing that fascinates me about a sequel to
Mrs. Doubtfire
is with most actors who create an iconic character like Mrs. Doubtfire, when you come back and do that character, well, you’re twenty years older so you’re not going to look the same. The cool thing with Mrs. Doubtfire is there’s a character, there’s a woman, who is actually going to look exactly as she did in 1993. So I look forward to seeing that trailer. I love that concept and there’s no CGI. So we just need to make absolutely certain that the story is a good emotionally strong story, that there’s a reason for telling it, it’s not like
Big Momma’s House
or something. It has to be as emotional and as funny.’

Back in 1993 Robin was finding a way of living with his now massive fame. That summer he took his family off to a villa in Italy for a while and completely cut himself off from the business. They were also about to move to a huge 12,000-foot estate overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Still very much enmeshed as a family, Marsha was, by now, playing a pivotal role in Williams’ career: understanding his vulnerability, she acted as a kind of ‘gatekeeper’ to
him, protecting him from as much of the pressures of the industry as she could.

And she did a great deal more than that: before
Good
Morning, Vietnam
, she encouraged Robin to study the history of the era. She was on the set of most of his films, providing back-up and support. Sometimes she sounded as much like his agent as anything else: ‘Money’s never been the reason for me to recommend anything,’ she told
New York Magazine.
‘Unless the entire country collapses, we have as much as we’ll ever need. I’m more interested in looking at what Robin hasn’t done and seeing what’s next. I’m prejudiced, but I’ve never seen anyone with his range.’

While some people sniped that she was becoming a pushy Hollywood wife, it was actually ideal for Robin. The two of them set up the Blue Wolf production company to vet scripts and find suitable projects for him and it was Marsha who came across
Mrs. Doubtfire.
She was actually the producer on the film, again raising eyebrows but, given everything she did was designed to boost the status and happiness of her husband, not for the first time the doubters got it wrong. She would go on to produce further films for him too.

But while all was happy enough at that stage on the home front, one of Robin’s closest friends was to shortly experience a major tragedy. Christopher Reeve, his old mucker from the Juilliard days, was now just as famous, although in a totally different way, having made his name in the
Superman
films. An intensely athletic and energetic
man, one of his hobbies was riding but, in June 1995, he was thrown from his horse and landed on his head. He broke his neck and, from that moment until the end of his life, nine years later, he was paralysed from the neck down.

It was, of course, an utterly devastating event for everyone involved, above all Reeve and his wife Dana. He later confessed to feeling suicidal (and who could blame him?) but, with the encouragement of his wife, resolved to carry on as best he could. In later years, he remembered nothing of the accident and was initially delirious; he was then subjected to an operation to reattach his skull to his spine, for which there was only a 50 per cent chance of survival. Even a man as unquestionably brave as Reeve would have been beside himself: in the run-up to the operation, a ‘squat fellow’ burst in wearing scrubs and glasses and talking in a Russian accent. He was going to give Reeve a rectal examination, he said. It was, of course, Williams, replaying a minor role he’d had in the Hugh Grant 1995 vehicle
Nine Months
and Christopher burst out laughing, the first time he’d done so since the accident. ‘My old friend had helped me know that somehow I was going to be ok,’ he later wrote in his autobiography
Still Me.

‘Christopher Reeve and I went to Julliard together. When I learned of his accident I was as devastated as everyone else,’ Robin later told the
Calgary Sun.
‘People were so solemn. I knew it was not good for Chris, so I dressed up in hospital scrubs and pretended to be his proctologist. The smile on his face almost broke my heart. He has told me since that it
was at that moment when he was able to laugh again that he wanted to live.’

But Robin did far more than just make Christopher laugh. It has never been made public to what extent this happened but it was widely rumoured that he had contributed to the cost of Reeve’s medical care. Certainly he became involved in the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. Dana described the two of them as being ‘closer than brothers’ and, as the years went by, Robin was often seen at his old friend’s side. Reeve’s tragic physical transformation spoke volumes of the life he had left behind.

In fact, behind the scenes Robin did a huge amount for charity. He supported, among others, Comic Relief (for the homeless and Hurricane Katrina victims), Médecins Sans Frontières, Operation Smile, the Pediatric AIDS Association, Challenged Athletes Foundation, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the Make-a-Wish Foundation (some of the children were in
Patch Adams
, 1998), Project Open Hand, Glide, The Gorilla Foundation, Seacology, River of Words, God’s Love We Deliver, Women at Ground Zero, Bread and Roses, Meridian Gallery, Mercury House, Kidsclub, Season of Sharing, SMMoA, Ant Farm, Fresno County Public Library, Muir Fest, USO, Best Friends, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and San Francisco General Hospital Pediatrics.

He was also a frequent visitor to children’s wards in San Francisco hospitals. ‘I usually go at Christmas,’ he told the
Calgary Sun
. ‘I ride a bike hooked up to an IV. I used to be
a real hit when I did Mork but now they love it most when I break into Mrs. Doubtfire.’

His motivation was completely different from so many celebrities who do good works mainly to feed in to their own PR. Williams had come from a wealthy background anyway and now he was stratospherically wealthy (it was estimated that in the course of just two years in the early 1990s he earned $29 million, which was worth even more then than it is today). And he went far beyond what so many others do. He made benefit appearances to support literacy and women’s rights and performed a great deal on the United Service Organizations (USO), which looked after the entertainment of American troops abroad. In total, he was to visit 13 countries for the USO, including Iraq and Afghanistan, entertaining 100,000 troops. (In this he was like one of the other great American comedy actors, Bob Hope, also a regular with the United States Army.)

Along with Marsha, he founded the Windfall Foundation for many charities and he continued with this activity for the rest of his life. In December 1999 he sang in French on the BBC-inspired music video of international celebrities doing a cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It)’ for the charity Children’s Promise. After the 2010 Canterbury earthquake, Williams donated all proceeds of his
Weapons of Self Destruction
Christchurch performance to help rebuild the New Zealand city (half the proceeds were donated to the Red Cross and half to the mayoral building fund). He was also a supporter of St.
Jude Children’s Research Hospital. After he died, many of the people and charities to whom he had given support came forward to praise him: even his worst detractors had to concede that he was an exceptionally generous man.

And the films kept rolling on out. Some sank without a trace but others became part of the cultural landscape:
Jumanji
, for example, a 1995 offering that had twelve-year-old Alan Parrish (Williams) trapped in a strange board game called Jumanji in 1969 and only being released twenty-six years later as an adult when two more children start playing the game. But when he gets out, so too do all the monsters and the terror that were hiding in there with him. Interestingly, given Robin’s sometimes fraught relationship with his own father, the actor who portrays his father in the film and later the crazed hunter out to get him are one and the same man: something no one comments on at any stage. Williams would surely have seen the irony in that.