The Sunday Mail
He was haunted by the memory of the dark, lonely and frightening attic in his parents’ grand Michigan house where he was banished with his toys to play as a child.
It was there he developed his wild imagination — and there that terrible loneliness first possessed him.
However great his success, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actor and superstar comedian, who is believed to have killed himself aged 63 at his home in California, took with him the unhappiness he had felt as a little boy.
All through his adult life, Williams sought escape. He embraced drugs and alcohol. He became addicted to physical exercise and video games. His obsession for work was so self-destructive that at 58 he required major heart surgery. But the further he tried to flee from depression, the deeper it dragged him down.
His refuge was his manic comedy, which he believed was a divine gift. He called it “a little spark of madness”. To keep the spark from burning out, he resorted to cocaine in the 70s and 80s to fuel his high-energy stand-up comedy and TV shows. The drug steadily stripped him of his capacity for joy and left him feeling like “a vampire on a day pass — paranoid and impotent”.
The truth was that nothing could sustain performances as intense as his. On stage, Williams blazed as if he was on rocket fuel. On screen, those white-hot explosions of humour gave us his roles in Good Morning, Vietnam, Mrs Doubtfire and as the voice of the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin cartoon.
But his anarchic comedy was so all-consuming that it left him drained and exhausted. Rocket fuel doesn’t burn for long.
His closest friend, though, was his pet, a hunting dog called Duke. The boy was so desperate for a companion he spent hours trying to teach Duke to play hide-and-seek.
Most of his free time was occupied in the attic of the house — the only place he was allowed to play with his toys. The attic was badly lit and Robin was afraid of the darker half. It creaked, and he imagined he heard voices and footsteps. Susie told him it was inhabited by ghosts.
His father Robert, a Ford motor executive, scared him, too. Robin was rarely allowed to be with him, except when he was presented to guests at house parties. But it was his mother whose affection he longed to win. Most of all he wanted to make her laugh.
Despite her refinement and beauty — Williams would say proudly that she outshone Ingrid Bergman — Laura had a coarse sense of humour.
Her son watched in awe at one party when she pretended to sneeze and let a coil of rubber band, which she had hidden up one nostril, dangle out over her lip.
The guests were horrified and then convulsed with laughter. Robin was thrilled.
He learned he could make Laura laugh by imitating his grandmother, but these moments were rare. It was not until he went to Claremont McKenna College in California in his late teens that he truly discovered the power of comedy.
His parents expected him to become a diplomat, but he quickly became absorbed in drama classes.
“Improv”, or improvised role-playing, and stand-up were his favourites: the combination of theatre and laughter was intoxicating.
Williams discovered that the vivid imagination he had developed while playing alone in the attic could provoke howls of laughter from an audience. Suddenly he had the attention he had always craved.
“The connection I got when people were laughing hard — this was the drug,” he said.
Williams won a scholarship to Juilliard, the performing arts school in New York, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Christopher Reeve, who would become famous as “Superman”.
A genius for improv won Robin his first significant TV role, aged 27, in the TV sitcom “Happy Days”.
The producers invited him to an audition to play an alien and asked him to take a seat while he waited for his turn. Williams dived face-first into the cushions as if he’d never sat on a chair before.
The producers were delighted and cast him as Mork, an extra-terrestrial sent to Earth to study humans.
“Happy Days” was then America’s top-rated comedy and the episode was so popular it spawned a spin-off show with Williams and 21-year-old Pam Dawber as flatmates Mork and Mindy.
The show ran for four years and Williams was given free rein to invent the script as he went along. The writers left gaps for him to fill with manic monologues and he often improvised whole conversations with himself in a variety of lunatic voices.
America had found its own answer to Peter Sellers — a brilliant actor who was also an irrepressible comic. In Shakespeare’s phrase, here was “a fellow of infinite jest”.
British stand-up comedian Alexei Sayle met Williams at the Comedy Store in London in 1979 when Mork and Mindy was at its height.
Sayle told Radio 4: “What Robin had was cleverer than improv. He had a vast amount of work stored at the back of his head, maybe three or four hours of material, and he would bring different bits forward in different orders.”
But Sayle also saw a darker, more troubling side of the comedian: a “terrible compulsion to perform”. One night, Williams turned up at the club, pleading to be allowed before an audience.
When Sayle told him he could have just 15 minutes, the American went to extraordinary lengths to earn more stage time. First, he claimed David Bowie was in the audience to see him. Then he offered to buy the club.
Finally, he did a quarter of an hour on stage, then cornered Sayle in a corridor, performing the next 45 minutes of his act to an audience of one.
Williams’s frantic energy that night may partly be attributed to cocaine, which he was using heavily around that time. He later teasingly claimed that he was naturally so manic that the drug actually helped him to stay calm.
He was with John Belushi, snorting cocaine at the actor’s bungalow on Sunset Strip, on the night the Blues Brother star died from a drugs overdose in 1982.
“Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you’re making too much money,” Williams would joke onstage. But he later admitted there were occasions when he took so much that his chest pounded so hard he feared he would die.
Every night was a party, fuelled by drugs and tumblers of vodka and lime, starting in clubs and moving on to four or five different houses.
His excesses were such that his marriage to dancer Valerie Velardi, whom he had wed in 1978, began to fall apart.
Williams came to his senses only in 1983, when his son Zak was born. He swore off drink and drugs and threw himself into films.
“The World According To Garp”, a comedy-drama about feminism, presented him in a new light to audiences as a funnyman with intellectual depth.
He won a Golden Globe for his role as a Russian defector in “Moscow on the Hudson” in 1984, and was nominated for an Oscar for “Good Morning, Vietnam” three years later. Two years after that came another Oscar nomination, as an inspirational teacher in “Dead Poets Society”.
A dozen leading roles in Hollywood films followed. They included some of his best-loved movies: as the doctor who coaxes coma patients to life in “Awakenings”; a tramp in Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece “The Fisher King”; a middle-aged Peter Pan in “Hook”; and the voice of the Genie in Disney’s “Aladdin”. That last, exuberant performance, bursting with glee and manic invention, was partly improvised at the microphone and transformed the way film stars saw cartoon voiceover work.
Once, it had been a resort of fading actors in need of cash. Suddenly, to be the voice of a fish, stuffed toy or racing car was Hollywood’s ultimate medal of honour.
The role was less happy for Williams. He had agreed to be the Genie for just US$75 000 and when the film grossed more than US$200 million he was furious that his character was being used to sell merchandise in burger chains and toy stores.
Disney hit back, accusing him of “sour grapes”. The dispute calmed only when the studio sent Williams a Picasso by way of apology.
He later agreed to play the Genie in the sequel “Aladdin and the King of Thieves”.
The hits continued: he dressed up in drag as a Scottish nanny in “Mrs Doubtfire”, got trapped inside an antique board game in “Jumanji” and finally won an Oscar as an inspirational therapist in 1997’s “Good Will Hunting”.
Williams had two basic characters that cinema audiences adored — the sad-eyed professor, surgeon or father who inspires others to achieve their dreams, even if it is too late for him; and the hyperactive oddball whose schemes could change the world if he doesn’t self-destruct first.
But his workaholic schedule was beginning to exhaust Williams — and the studio executives.
A joke did the rounds in Hollywood: “You’ve got to see this movie, it’s incredible, it doesn’t have Robin Williams in it!”
When he wasn’t performing, Williams sought other ways to stave off depression.
He played video games with a passion, and became so addicted to the buzz of completing one level after another that he named his daughter Zelda, after the princess in the “Legend of Zelda” game series.
Obsessive exercise, too, provided a temporary escape.
But when his old friend Christopher Reeve died in 2004, after a decade as a quadriplegic following a riding accident, the star spiralled back into addiction.
Williams tried to seek help, checking himself into rehab in 2006 and joining Alcoholics Anonymous, but his drinking cost him his second marriage.
He had wedded his son’s nanny, Marsha Garces, after the collapse of his marriage to Valerie. He and Marsha, the mother of Zelda as well as his youngest child, Cody, were together for 19 years.
Many thought their relationship could withstand anything, but he admitted his behaviour had become unforgivable and that led to a second divorce. Drink, he said, made him disgusting, and he was grateful for the memory lapses that wiped the worst excesses from his brain. “Alcoholic blackout is like witness protection for the conscience,” he said.
Though he was open about his guilt and wretchedness, the public never wanted to see that side of him. The world expected him to be ready to fizz over like a bottle of pop.
“I was once walking in an airport and a woman came up and said: ‘Be zany!’” he recalled wearily.
In 2008, by then in his mid-50s, he embarked on a 26-city stand-up tour called “Weapons of Self-Destruction”. Laughter was his ultimate drug, he declared.
The Self-Destruction tour was aptly named. Physically shattered, he was rushed to hospital in March 2009 for major heart surgery.
After the operation, Williams married Susan Schneider, a graphic designer.
It looked for the briefest of moments as if he might finally have found some peace.
Despite his success as Teddy Roosevelt in the “Night at the Museum” movies, the starring roles had dried up and the name Robin Williams was no longer a guarantee of a hit.
At the same time, alimony payments had brought him close to bankruptcy, he claimed last year, even though his films had grossed £3 billion worldwide and his personal fortune was once estimated at £80 million.
One of his favourite lines was that “the word ‘divorce’ comes from the Latin term meaning ‘to rip a man’s genitals out through his wallet’.”
But he claimed he had learned “not to be afraid to be unhappy”. Last summer, however, he returned to rehab and, in recent weeks, his depression had become so acute he was unable to leave his home.
Last Monday, Robin Williams took the last escape route open to him.
He has finally banished the unhappiness of the lonely child who played in a spooky attic with just his imagination for company.
The world is a gloomier place without him.
