Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Robin loved women. I wanted him to have that but I also wanted him to come home...
Comedy giant cheated on his 1st wife Valerie
that my father’s presence and spirit was around.” Williams had been misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few months before he died at the age of 63. His rapid-thinking mind had been ambushed by what an autopsy would identify as a severe case of Lewy body dementia. Memory loss, extreme anxiety and difficulty reasoning would have been hard to accept for a man whose lightning wit had earned him worldwide fame. Zak said: “Dad’s pathos was to entertain and please. He felt when he wasn’t doing that, he was not succeeding as a person.
“And that was always hard to see. Because in so many senses he was the most successful person I know. And he didn’t always feel that.”
Valerie and Williams split up after he began a relationship with their son’s nanny, Marsha Garces.
The documentary tells how Williams was brought up in a well-off household in Lake Forest, Illinois.
His father was an area manager for the Ford Motor Company, but he had a solitary childhood. He said: “I was kind of lonely. There were no friends around. I was an only child, raised by a maid for a long time.”
But in fact he was not an only child at all. His family hid a secret that his father Robert had a son, Todd, now 80, from a first marriage, who was being brought up with his ex-wife.
And his mother Laura also had a son, Mclaurin, being raised by his maternal grandparents as their own. Mclaurin, now 71, did not meet Robin until he was eight years old. He said: “Growing up by yourself, you could either go nuts or have a very comedic attitude towards it.
“When you’re at school and you don’t have many friends, that’s a way of circumventing. But there’s a flipside to that – a depressive side of that kind of personality too. There’s a strong element of that in our family.”
Robin Williams: Come Inside my Mind, Sky Atlantic, tomorrow, 9pm.