Let us be honest: we have never got over the heartbreaking passing of comedy genius Robin
Williams in 2014. In the months preceding his death, the actor had faced serious personal
and professional challenges that apparently were too much for Williams. Emotional and
vulnerable, unable to deal with problems piling up one after another, Robin decided to end
it all... without even leaving a note. Some rushed to make simple conclusions about drugs
and depression as the main reasons behind the actor's suicide, but the whole story has
turned out way more way complicated than it initially seemed.
Today we take a look at the events in the life of Hollywood favourite Robin Williams
that led to his suicide.
Robin Williams got famous in his twenties: he started performing stand-up comedy in the
mid-70s and soon rose to fame after garnering his breakout role in the sitcom Mork & Mindy.
Around that time the young actor found relief from the stress he was constantly experiencing,
especially while performing stand-up, in drugs. He told People in 1988:
"Cocaine for me was a place to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down."
In 1982, the drug abuse problem obviously became too real for Williams when his friend,
actor John Belushi died at the age of 33 from an overdose. This happened the morning after
the two had partied together, along with the birth of his own son Zak. These two events
seriously struck the Hollywood star and made him quit drugs and alcohol. According to Robin,
Belushi's death (quote) "sobered the shit out of me."
Williams turned to exercise and cycling to help alleviate his depression, and it worked.
The actor stayed sober for 20 long years. But the addiction never went away. The Good
Morning Vietnam star was always candid about his long-term battle. He said in one of the
interviews:
“It’s addiction — not caused by anything, it’s just there. It waits. It lays in wait
for the time when you think, ‘It’s fine now, I’m OK.’ Then, the next thing you
know, it’s not OK.”
Williams seemed to be doing perfectly well even despite the stress associated with a
bunch of changes in his life. In 1989, he married Marsha Garces following his divorce
from the first wife, the mother of his first child. The marriage with Garces who had previously
been the nanny to Robin's son Zak, lasted for 19 years.
No matter the whirlwind of events and circumstances around him, Williams continued working hard
and earned the recognition of not only a brilliant comedic but also a dramatic actor. It would
be fair to say that for Williams, comedy and drama came side by side.
“[Comedy] comes out of a deeper, darker side. Maybe it comes from anger because I’m
outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself,
where’s it’s hardest to see,” he once said of his work. Being always busy was some
kind of his new drug that gave him endorphins.
In one two-year period he made 8 movies. Williams feared that unless he worked that intensely,
people might forget him. Before the new century kicked in, Robin Williams earned 4 Oscar nominations
with the movie Good Will Hunting having won him the award. While receiving his Oscar,
evidently emotional Williams made a joke the very moment he approached the microphone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Egi5V_jNU 1.40
The actor spoke with gratitude in his voice about his then-wife Marsha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Egi5V_jNU 2.18
By the way, did you know that Williams improvised a lot of his most famous lines from this movie?
He came up with the entire scene in which Sean tells Will about his wife’s farts,
which is why Matt Damon laughs so hard – the laughter was genuine. Even the camera
person is noticeably shaking - and maybe, just maybe it was because the camera guy was
laughing, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvvx-0G7XHc
The incredible success, the peak of his career was followed by a series of commercial and
critical flops. Probably, because of this, his addiction problems resurfaced. Williams
brought it up himself explaining in an interview with The Guardian how he started drinking
again in 2003.
"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: drinking. I just thought, hey, maybe drinking will help. Because
I felt alone and afraid… And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn't."
The death of Williams’ close friend Christopher Reeve followed by the death of his comedy
mentor Richard Pryor just a year later, continued spinning him into a downward spiral.
After his family staged an intervention, Williams checked himself into a rehab facility in 2006.
In recovery, he met his third wife, Susan Schneider, they wed in 2011.
At the time, the actor was definitely confused and exhausted over the sudden change of his
career perspective, with his successful projects from the 90s having been overshadowed by low-budget
productions, cancelled plays, and bad reviews.
Soon Williams started complaining about an array of symptoms, including indigestion,
insomnia, and heartburn. A slight tremor cropped up in his left hand, which was attributed
to a shoulder injury.
Colleagues and co-stars couldn't simply recognize Williams on set. His eyes were dimming and
he seemed like the shadow of himself. Another blow came when the comedy show The Crazy Ones
featuring the actor was axed by CBS in 2014, and Williams moved on to filming Night at
the Museum: Secret of the Tomb.
His makeup artist Cheri Minns described his time filming as a nightmare recalling how
the Hollywood living legend was sobbing in her arms at the end of every day.
“He just cried and said, ‘I can’t Cheri’. I said, ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’
“He said, ‘I don’t know how anymore. I don’t know how to be funny’.”
It was hard for everyone to see the man who has made millions of people cry out of laughter,
dive deeper and deeper into depression.
In May, 2014, Williams was finally given the explanation for his deteriorating health when
he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Turned out, that slight tremor had nothing
to do with the shoulder injury. It is also well known that aside from motor functions,
Parkinson's disease at some point impairs cognition.
According to the biography released after the actor's death, this news came as a horrifying
realisation of one of Robin's biggest fears. His long-time friend, comedian Billy Crystal,
admitted he could see how scared Williams was.
In a 1991 interview with Playboy, Robin discussed that latent fear two decades before it would
touch him personally.
“There’s that fear — if I felt like I was becoming not just dull but a rock, that
I still couldn’t spark, still fire off or talk about things, if I’d start to worry
or got too afraid to say something . . . If I stop trying, I’d get afraid.”
Thus, a fear that turned into reality generated even bigger fear. His widowed wife described
his condition of the last months in an article she wrote for the journal Neurology titled
“The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Brain,”:
“He hated that he could not find the words he wanted in conversations. He would thrash
at night and still had terrible insomnia. At times, he would find himself stuck in a
frozen stance, unable to move, and frustrated when he came out of it. He was beginning to
have trouble with visual and spatial abilities in the way of judging distance and depth.”
Despite the allegations, Schneider also revealed that in the period preceding his death, Williams
had been sober. Moreover, just the night before the tragedy, she felt that her husband was
getting a little better, with the medication he had started taking.
The next morning, knowing about Williams' insomnia, they decided not to bother him till
11 am. Upon entering the room his personal assistant discovered the horrific scene: Robin
had hanged himself with his belt. He didn't even leave a suicide note.
Three months later, the autopsy results came in and showed that Williams didn't have Parkinson's,
it was even graver: he suffered from an incurable brain disease called Lewy body dementia that
begins with memory problems and physical stiffness and graduates to extreme personality changes,
psychiatric symptoms and eventually death. This condition may have also contributed to
his depression.
To understand why 63-year-old Williams did what he did, Billy Crystal described how he
was trying to picture the last days in the life of his close friend:
“I put myself in his place. Think of it this way: The speed at which the comedy came
is the speed at which the terrors came. And all that they described that can happen with
this psychosis, if that’s the right word — the hallucinations, the images, the terror
— coming at the speed his comedy came at, maybe even faster, I can’t imagine living
like that.”
Needless to say that after Williams' death the whole world was crying together with the
actor's family. Even the US President, Barack Obama, took time to pay tribute to one of
the greatest masters of comedy. His statement read in part:
"Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor,
a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between. But he was one of a kind. He arrived in our
lives as an alien - but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit."
No matter how sad it is for all of us to acknowledge that Robin Williams is gone, we should admit
that he has managed to leave behind an impressive body of work appreciated by several generations.
It is true what they say: the artist's soul lives in his works. Williams' soul will forever
remain in his iconic roles, thus he will always remain in our hearts.
This video is in memory of legendary actor, Robin Williams. We remember.