Heading into central London on the underground this morning was a strange and sobering experience. In every corner of every carriage, from every newspaper cover there was Robin Williams’s face staring back: half-smiling, half serious, often accompanied by the grisly details of his final hours. I asked my girlfriend how she felt about his death and she shook her head. “I could never watch him,” she said. “He was too sad.”
It’s a morbid cliché in the wake of a celebrity suicide to reassess the deceased’s body of work in the light of their final, terminal act—how did we miss the signs? Couldn’t somebody have done something? But in the case of Robin Williams, such a post-mortem is both inevitable and necessary. Here was a man who—despite his massive wealth and global fanbase—was so utterly defeated by his lifelong insecurities that he has already become an object lesson to those who question the medical meaning of the word “depression.” In life he was a divisive figure—an icon of the saccharine mainstream who regularly knocked both audiences and critics flat with his comic insight and dramatic talent. In death he will become, for better or worse, a figurehead.
It’s no secret that Williams’s life was overshadowed by his twin addictions to cocaine and alcohol. But even for a comedian who rose to prominence in the powdered heyday of Fleetwood Mac and Saturday Night Live, his exploits were legendary: his jagged, early stand-up routines are intense and hilarious, but the coke stories are punishingly frank: “You have this dream where you’re doing cocaine in your sleep and you can't fall asleep and doing cocaine in your sleep and can't fall asleep and you wake up… and you’re doing cocaine.” The drugs would be dealt with early on—by the mid-‘80s he was clean—whereas the alcohol problems would plague him throughout his career, particularly following a major relapse in 2003. But it seems to have been the underlying depression which killed him, and which fed most directly into his body of work.
The fact is that every one of Williams’s great roles is spiked with deep veins of melancholy, from the authority-baiting Armed Forces Radio DJ in Good Morning Vietnam who becomes scarred by war, to the prep school teacher in Dead Poets Society who fears he may have driven one of his students to kill himself; from the psychiatrist in Good Will Hunting still mourning his dead wife to perhaps his finest role, as the failed writer in World’s Greatest Dad who turns his teenage son’s suicide into a chance for self promotion.
Even his so-called “lighter” roles are shot through with tragedy: it’s easy to dismiss films like Jack and Patch Adams for their gushing sentimentality, but let’s not overlook the fact that both films centre around children with fatal illnesses. His Peter Pan in Spielberg’s wayward Hook struggles with the loss of childhood innocence, while his character in the sprightly Jumanji is a bruised man-child who has been forced for decades to fight for his life in an unforgiving jungle wilderness. Even Mrs Doubtfire can be oddly troubling: who but a desperate man would dress up as a Scottish nanny in an effort to spend more time with his kids?
Through all these roles—and many others including Awakenings, The Fisher King, What Dreams May Come, Death to Smoochy and his harrowing TV cameo in Homicide: Life on the Street—the same motifs seem endlessly to recur: the loss of a family, the loss of innocence, the death of a child, self-loathing, disillusion and, over and over, suicide. How many other mainstream comedians dealt so regularly with such dark material?
Of course it’s important not to let these issues completely dominate our memories of Williams. Among all the hand-wringing and necessary lesson-learning, we should also take the time to recognise and celebrate his unique talents: his timing, his wit, his ingenuity and—if it can be called a talent rather than a gift—his sheer likeability. Very few celebrities ever gave as much in their interviews as Robin did—before the first question was out he would be off on a wild tangent, switching into crazed voices and spilling all of his most personal details, whether you wanted him to or not.
Interviewing the man in 2010 for the release of World’s Greatest Dad, I found myself battered by his relentless energy—there were times when it was like being verbally harassed by seven people at once—but also charmed to the core by his seemingly boundless reserves of warmth and generosity. As was typical for Williams, he was endlessly self-deprecating, particularly about his less critically successful roles—“I was paying the bills, and they were offering shitloads of cash”—but he also seemed genuinely satisfied with his lot. “I’m just travelling at the speed of life,” he told me with a broad grin, “enjoying the simple things.” Turned out he wasn’t being entirely honest.
