Williams had money woes and health problems
Robin Williams had bills to pay, he was battling severe depression, and though he had been working frenetically on six new films, half of them lacked an American distributor. The television show that he had hoped would prove a steady job and a reliable source of income had been cancelled in May and in July he had spent a stint in a rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota to help him to stay sober.
As tributes to Williams rolled in from around the world yesterday, a picture emerged of his troubled final months before he was found dead in his home on a peninsula that juts into the San Francisco Bay.
He had amassed vast wealth through film roles and comedy tours, but two costly divorces and a lawsuit with a mistress who accused him of infecting her with herpes had shrunk his bank balance. ‘‘My life has downsized,’’ he said in an interview last year. ‘‘I’m selling the ranch in Napa. I can’t afford it any more.’’ He was last seen alive at 10pm on Sunday. The next morning he was found dead by a personal assistant in the home he shared with his third wife, Susan Schneider.
Neighbours recalled a quiet, shy man who was good with children. Williams himself had spoken of devoting hours to computer games, getting his ‘‘arse kicked by a 10-year-old’’ and saying that the thrill was ‘‘cheaper than doing cocaine’’, though he joked that he would soon need to check himself in to ‘‘the cyber wing at Betty Ford’’ – a reference to the rehabilitation clinic.
Williams had stopped using cocaine after the death of his friend, the comedian John Belushi, in 1982, and with the birth of the first of his three children, but he had a longer struggle with alcoholism. ‘‘I felt so good about the first AA meeting I attended that I went out and drank the next day,’’ he said last year.
He stayed sober for two decades but relapsed in 2003 while shooting a film in Alaska. ‘‘I was in a small town where it’s not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there, and then I thought . . . hey, maybe drinking will help,’’ he said in an interview in 2010. ‘‘Because I felt alone and afraid. It was that thing of
‘‘I felt so good about the first AA meeting I attended that I went out and drank the next day.’’ Robin Williams
working so much, and going f**k, maybe that will help. And it was the worst thing in the world.’’ He recalled a Thanksgiving celebration ‘‘when I was so drunk they had to carry me upstairs’’. His family issued an ultimatum: he returned to rehab in 2006 and said he had remained sober since.
He was divorced from his second wife in 2008. Had he lost all of his money in his two divorces, a reporter for Parade magazine asked him last year. ‘‘Not all, lost enough,’’ he replied.
He had remarried in 2011 and returned to television last year, appearing in a comedy, The Crazy Ones. ‘‘The idea of having a steady job is appealing,’’ he said. The alternative was stand-up tours or performing in small independent films. ‘‘A lot of times they don’t even have distribution,’’ he said.
Williams had joked that the ranch in Napa, which he was forced to sell was, in any case, an odd property for a recovering alcoholic. ‘‘I grow grapes, which is a little bit like Gandhi having a delicatessen,’’ he said, in the summer of 2010.
A spokeswoman at the Minnesota rehabilitation clinic said he was staying ‘‘to fine tune and focus on his continued commitment’’ to remain sober, after working on ‘‘back-to-back projects’’.
Williams himself had said the busy work schedule was born of necessity. ‘‘There are bills to pay,’’ he said last year.
Some have suggested that Williams had made himself poorer by paying the medical bills for Christopher Reeve, after the Superman actor was paralysed in a horse riding accident. The two had been friends since their student days at Juilliard School in New York.
Williams denied paying his medical expenses.
‘‘It’s not true, and a good lie does not make it better than a bad lie,’’ he said in a television interview.
The actor’s final post on his Twitter page was to his beloved daughter, Zelda Rae Williams. ‘‘Quarter of a century old today but always my baby girl,’’ he wrote, posting a picture of his daughter as a baby and himself in happier times.