A restless mind
Robin Williams was a performer who aspired to move beyond default formula, Mark Lawson writes.
WHEREAS THE oldest generation of Hollywood stars has cheerfully challenged average life expectancy – Kirk Douglas, 97, Angela Lansbury, 88, Clint Eastwood, 84 – the relative juniors of the profession are dismayingly starting to mock actuarial tables in the wrong direction: within two winters, we have lost James Gandolfini at 51, Philip Seymour Hoffman at 46 and now Robin Williams, 63.
The fact that all three actors had suffered serious addictions and depression suggests that fame lessons and psychological counselling should perhaps be added to the curriculum of drama schools.
Possibly the problem is that the theory about great performing talent deriving from some psychic wound is often cruelly true. You didn’t need to be a trained psychologist to diagnose a colloquially ‘‘manic’’ aspect in many of Williams’ performances as a stand-up: switching between different voices and characters as if too restless to settle on one way of being.
These improvisational skills – a rare ability in American showbiz where improv isn’t a standard rehearsal tool – brought him his career break. In 1978, he claimed the part of Mork, an alien in the sitcom Mork and Mindy, not through the usual audition tactic of an inspirational rendition of the script but, when offered a chair, by standing on his head.
Such inventive energy was one of Williams’ two driving qualities as an actor and comedian, the other being – less conventionally – sweetness. Characteristically, his Mork was neither frightening nor frightened – the two default fictional positions for tourists from the universe – but really nice and a little bit silly.
A similar spirit was invested in several stand-out movie roles: as an unconventional but inspirational English teacher in Peter Weir’s Dead Poet’s Society (1989); a sort of holy fool in The Fisher King (1991), directed by Terry Gilliam; and a goodhumoured therapist, for which he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, in Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting (1997).
This desire to play likeable guys incurred the dislike of some critics, who found Williams’ film CV too dependent on these secular saints.
But his underlying pleasantness was key to his stand-up act, which – even when dealing with dark material such as addiction or divorce – relied more on verbal virtuosity than vitriol.
And, if Williams could have a default formula, he consciously tried to go beyond it. In common with Gandolfini and Seymour Hoffman, he set himself huge professional tests in what proved to be his final years, although neither his reputation nor his finances needed boosting. It was notably bold of Williams to make his Broadway acting debut in 2011, after fairly recent major heart surgery. (He had co-starred in a 1988 off-Broadway Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin, a comedian with a similar sentimental-melancholic quality, which often led to confusion between them in the public mind.)
The vehicle for Williams’ debut in major New York theatre was a characteristically quirky part: in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph, he played the title character, who was not merely an animal but a ghost, having died before the action.
Although a few small roles followed – including a neat dramatic cameo as President Eisenhower in the film The Butler – it seems somehow fitting that Williams’ major acting career should have begun with an extraterrestrial on television and ended with a spectral beast of prey in theatre. Such casting suggests a sensibility that was not quite of this world and, tragically, seems to have derived from a personality that was finally unable to be at ease in it.