Robin Williams by Dougan Andy

Author:Dougan, Andy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: filmskuespillere, amerikanske film, film, 1970-1979, 1980-1989, 1990-1999, biografier
Publisher: New York : Thunder's Mouth Press
Published: 1998-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

ROBIN WILLIAMS

career, and when I gave him that gift it was something very special for both of us.

The news of his father's death was broken to Robin Williams in a telephone call from his mother. She simply called him and told him without fuss or histrionics that his father was dead. Some months later, after Good Morning Vietnam had been a certified hit, Williams spoke frankly and movingly to Rolling Stone magazine about his father.

I got to know another side [of him] in the last few years [he told writer Bill Zehme]. I saw that he was funkier, that he had a dark side that made the other side work. He was much older than me; he died at 81. Up until four or five years ago I kept distance out of respect. Then we made a connection ... He'd had operations and chemotherapy. It's weird. Everyone thinks of their dad as invincible, and in the end here's this little tiny creature almost all bone. You have to say goodbye to him as this very frail being.

At least he was at home and died very peacefully in his sleep. My mother thought he was still asleep. She came downstairs and kept trying to shake him. She called me that morning and said, 'Robin, your father's dead.' She was a little in shock but she sounded happy in a certain way, if only because he went without pain.

You could argue that Robin Williams' life has been dominated by women. Whether it was Valerie Velardi, Marsha Garces, Tish Carter or his own mother, women have been the dominant and defining force in his life. But the relationship between a man and his father transcends those definitions.

*When I started to talk to my father,' he recalled, 'it was like The Wizard o/Oz where you look behind the curtain and see the man for what he is. There was this little man behind the curtain going, "Take care of your mother and I love you and I've been worried about certain things. And I'm afraid but I'm not afraid." It's an amazing combination of exhilaration and sadness at the same time because the god turns into a man.'

Williams was speaking here as a father himself and, more importantly, a father who was facing the possibility of losing his son. With his marriage to Valerie on the rocks, the question of custody of Zach, who was now five, would loom large in his future. When he spoke of his hopes and fears for his son, there is an obvious echo of what he felt he had learned from his childhood relationship with his own father.

'I've learned to have the security not to worry that he will love me,' said Williams, as long as I keep the connection strong enough. I've learned

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