Robin Williams, the comedian who evolved into the surprisingly nuanced, Academy Award-winning actor, imbuing his performances with wild inventiveness and a kind of manic energy, died on Monday at his home in Tiburon, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 63.
The Marin County sheriff’s office said in a statement that it “suspects the death to be a suicide due to asphyxia.” An investigation was underway.
The statement said that the office received a 911 call at 11:55 a.m. Pacific time, saying that a man had been found “unconscious and not breathing inside his residence.” Emergency personnel sent to the scene identified him as Mr. Williams and pronounced him dead at 12:02 p.m.
Mr. Williams’s publicist, Mara Buxbaum, said in a statement that Mr. Williams “has been battling severe depression.”
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His wife, Susan Schneider, said in a statement, “This morning, I lost my husband and my best friend, while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings.” She added: “As he is remembered, it is our hope the focus will not be on Robin’s death, but on the countless moments of joy and laughter he gave to millions.”
Robin Williams performs an excerpt from Rajiv Joseph’s Broadway play, “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.”
Video CreditBy Erik Piepenburg and Mekado Murphy on Publish DateMarch 31, 2011.
The privileged son of a Detroit auto executive who grew up chubby and lonesome, playing by himself with 2,000 toy soldiers in an empty room of a suburban mansion, Mr. Williams, as a boy, hardly fit the stereotype of someone who would grow to become a brainy comedian, or a goofy one, but he was both. Onstage he was known for ricochet riffs on politics, social issues and cultural matters both high and low; tales of drug and alcohol abuse; lewd commentaries on relations between the sexes; and lightning-like improvisations on anything an audience member might toss at him. His gigs were always rife with frenetic, spot-on impersonations that included Hollywood stars, presidents, princes, prime ministers, popes and anonymous citizens of the world. His irreverence was legendary and uncurtailable.
“Chuck, Cam, great to see you,” he once called out from a London stage at Charles, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. “Yo yo, wussup Wales, House of Windsor, keepin’ it real!”
And yet he never seemed to offend.
Almost from the moment that he first uttered the greeting “Nanoo, nanoo” as Mork from Ork, an alien who befriends a wholesome young Colorado woman (Pam Dawber), on the sitcom “Mork and Mindy,” Mr. Williams was a comedy celebrity. “Mork and Mindy” made its debut on ABC in September 1978, and within two weeks had reached No. 7 in the Nielsen ratings. By the spring of 1979, 60 million viewers were tuning in to “Mork and Mindy” each week to watch Mr. Williams drink water through his finger, stand on his head when told to sit down, speak gibberish words like “shazbot” and “nimnul” that came to have meaning when he used them, and misinterpret, in startlingly literal fashion, the ordinary idioms of modern life.
He went on to earn Academy Award nominations for his roles in films like“Good Morning, Vietnam,” in which he played a loquacious radio D.J.; “Dead Poets Society,” playing a mentor to students in need of inspiration; and “The Fisher King,” as a homeless man whose life has been struck by tragedy. He won an Oscar in 1998 for “Good Will Hunting,” playing a therapist who works with a troubled prodigy played by Matt Damon.
In a statement, President Obama said of Mr. Williams, “He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most — from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets.”
Robin McLaurin Williams was born in Chicago on July 21, 1951, and was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Marin County. He studied acting at the Juilliard School.
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He is survived by a son, Zak, from his marriage to Valerie Velardi, and a daughter, Zelda, and a son, Cody, from his marriage to Marsha Garces.
Beginning with roles in the 1977 sex farce “Can I Do It ‘Til I Need Glasses?” and “The Richard Pryor Show,” a variety series hosted by one of his comedy mentors, Mr. Williams rapidly ascended the entertainment industry’s ladder.
Soon after “Mork and Mindy” made him a star, Mr. Williams graduated into movie roles that included the title characters in “Popeye,” Robert Altman’s 1980 live-action musical about that spinach-gulping cartoon sailor, and “The World According to Garp,” the director George Roy Hill’s 1982 adaptation of the John Irving novel.
He also continued to appear in raucous stand-up comedy specials like “Robin Williams: An Evening at the Met,” which showcased his garrulous performance style and his indefatigable ability to free-associate without the apparent benefit of prepared material. Alongside his friends and fellow actors Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg, Mr. Williams appeared in an annual series of HBO telethons for Comic Relief, a charity organization that helps homeless people and others in need.
Mr. Williams’s acting career reached a new height in 1987 with his performance in Barry Levinson’s film “Good Morning, Vietnam,” in which he played Adrian Cronauer, a nonconformist Armed Forces Radio host working in Saigon in the 1960s. It earned Mr. Williams his first Oscar nomination. He earned another, two years later, for “Dead Poets Society,” directed by Peter Weir and released in 1989, in which he played an unconventional English teacher at a 1950s boarding school who inspires his students to tear up their textbooks and seize the day. (Or, as Mr. Williams’s character famously put it in the original Latin, “Carpe diem.”)
Robin Williams was one of the most explosively, exhaustingly, prodigiously verbal comedians who ever lived, says film critic A. O. Scott. And the only thing faster than Williams’s mouth was his mind.
Video CreditBy Adam Freelander on Publish DateAugust 12, 2014. Image CreditABC, via Associated Press
In dozens of film roles that followed, Mr. Williams could be warm and zany, whether providing the voice of an irrepressible magic genie in “Aladdin,” the 1992 animated Walt Disney feature, or playing a man who cross-dresses as a British housekeeper in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” a 1993 family comedy, or a doctor struggling to treat patients with an unknown neurological malady in “Awakenings,” the 1990 Penny Marshall drama adapted from the Oliver Sacks memoir.
Some of Mr. Williams’s performances were criticized for a mawkish sentimentality, like “Patch Adams,” a 1998 film that once again cast him as a good-hearted doctor, and “Bicentennial Man,” a 1999 science-fiction feature in which he played an android.
But Mr. Williams continued to keep audiences guessing. In addition to his Oscar-winning role in “Good Will Hunting,” which saw him play a gently humorous therapist, his résumé included roles as a villainous crime writer in “Insomnia,” Christopher Nolan’s 2002 thriller; Teddy Roosevelt in the “Night at the Museum” movies; and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 2013 drama “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”
Mr. Williams made his acting debut on Broadway in 2011 in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” a play written by Rajiv Joseph and set amid the American invasion of Iraq. (He had starred with Steve Martin in an Off Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot” in 1988.) In 2013, Mr. Williams returned to series television in “The Crazy Ones,” a CBS comedy that cast him as an idiosyncratic advertising executive, but it was canceled after one season.
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Mr. Williams had completed work on several films that have not yet been released, including a third installment of the “Night at the Museum” franchise that Fox has scheduled for December, and “Merry Friggin’ Christmas,” an independent comedy about a dysfunctional family. He also provided the voice of an animated character called Dennis the Dog in a British comedy, “Absolutely Anything,” that is planned for release next year, and appeared in “Boulevard,” an independent movie that was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival but does not yet have theatrical distribution.
Mr. Williams was an admitted abuser of cocaine — which he also referred to as “Peruvian marching powder” and “the devil’s dandruff” — in the 1970s and ‘80s, and addressed his drug habit in his comedy act. “What a wonderful drug,” he said in a sardonic routine from “Live at the Met.” “Anything that makes you paranoid and impotent, give me more of that.”
In 2006, he checked himself into the Hazelden center in Springbrook, Ore., to be treated for an addiction to alcohol, having fallen off the wagon after some 20 years of sobriety.
He later explained in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer that this addiction had not been “caused by anything, it’s just there.”
“It waits,” Mr. Williams continued. “It lays in wait for the time when you think, ‘It’s fine now, I’m O.K.’ Then, the next thing you know, it’s not O.K. Then you realize, ‘Where am I? I didn’t realize I was in Cleveland.’ ”
In 2009, he underwent heart surgery for an aortic valve replacement at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, an event that Mr. Williams said caused him to take stock of his life.
More seriously, Mr. Williams said he had reassessed himself as a performer. “How much more can you give?” he told The Times. “Other than, literally, open-heart surgery onstage? Not much. But the only cure you have right now is the honesty of going, this is who you are. I know who I am.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Williams checked himself into a rehab facility. His publicist told People magazine that he was “taking the opportunity to fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment, of which he remains extremely proud.”
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Busy Working, Robin Williams Fought Demons
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On Tuesday, police barricades were needed at Robin Williams’s star on Hollywood Boulevard as fans arrived to pay respects.CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times
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LOS ANGELES — Peering through his camera at Robin Williams in 2012, the cinematographer John Bailey thought he glimpsed something not previously evident in the comedian’s work. They were shooting the independent film “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn,” and Mr. Williams was playing a New York lawyer who, facing death, goes on a rant against the injustice and banality of life.
His performance, Mr. Bailey said Tuesday, was a window into the “Swiftian darkness of Robin’s heart.” The actor, like his character, was raging against the storm.
That defiance gave way on Monday to the personal demons that had long tormented Mr. Williams. With his suicide at age 63, Mr. Williams forever shut the window on a complicated soul that was rarely visible through the cracks of an astonishingly intact career.
Given his well-publicized troubles with depression, addiction, alcoholism and a significant heart surgery in 2009, Mr. Williams should have had a résumé filled with mysterious gaps. Instead, he worked nonstop.
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Robin Williams and the Science on Depression 7:05
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The comedian and Academy Award-winning actor died Monday in a suspected suicide. Matthew Nock, a Harvard psychology professor who studies depression and suicide, talked to Benedict Carey about what we know about severe depression and suicide in the context of Williams’s death. Benedict Carey and Jeffery DelViscio
At the very least — if his life had followed the familiar script of troubled actors — there would have been whispers of on-set antics: lateness, forgotten lines, the occasional flared temper.
Not so with Mr. Williams. “He was ready to work, he was the first one on the set,” said Mr. Bailey, speaking of Mr. Williams’s contribution to “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn,” of which he was the star.
“Robin was always 1,000 percent reliable,” said a senior movie agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity to conform to the wishes of Mr. Williams’s family. “He was almost impossibly high functioning.”
As Hollywood struggled on Tuesday to understand how Mr. Williams — effervescent in the extreme — could take his own life, authorities released details of his death. A clothed Mr. Williams hanged himself with a belt from a door frame in his bedroom in Tiburon, Calif., according to Lt. Keith Boyd, assistant deputy chief coroner for Marin County.
Mr. Williams’s wife, Susan Schneider, went to bed at 10:30 Sunday night and woke up on Monday believing her husband was still asleep in a separate bedroom. A personal assistant, concerned that he was not responding to knocks on his door, discovered the body, cool to the touch and with rigor mortis, at about 11:45 a.m. on Monday.
Mr. Williams, who had recently been treated for severe depression, was declared dead at 12:02 p.m. Officials found a pocketknife in the room, apparently with dried blood on it, and superficial wounds on Mr. Williams’s left wrist, said Lieutenant Boyd, who declined to say whether there was a suicide note. Toxicology reports are still pending.
To a large degree, said studio executives and agents who worked with him, Mr. Williams seemed to use work as a way to keep his personal demons caged. At an age when most actors are slowing down, Mr. Williams was engaged with a half-dozen recent and planned projects. They ranged from stage work and low-budget films to an anticipated — though still distant — big-budget sequel to his biggest hit, “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which took in about $728 million worldwide in 1993, after accounting for inflation.
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Mr. Williams and Mila Kunis in the movie “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn,” released in May.CreditLionsgate
Seeming to thrive on performance, despite the undertow of depression andsubstance abuse, Mr. Williams interrupted a live comedy tour for his heart surgery in 2009. But he quickly returned to finish his run. Stanley Wilson, a film producer who attended Juilliard with Mr. Williams and remained a close friend until the end, said a 2011 stint on Broadway left the actor “overwhelmed with joy.”
“He was totally proud” of his recent work, Mr. Wilson said, speaking by telephone on Tuesday. But he acknowledged that Mr. Williams had long been a “melancholic guy.”
Experts say that it is impossible to predict who will commit suicide. The act is so radical, individual and rare that it defies precise scientific analysis.
But there are factors that increase its likelihood, experts said, and many of them were Mr. Williams’s longtime companions: drugs, alcohol, depression. After a cocaine-fueled early career, Mr. Williams quit cold turkey in the mid-1980s and strung together two decades of sobriety before returning to alcohol while shooting a movie in Alaska, according to his own public statements. He entered rehab in Oregon in 2006.
Mr. Williams was also a middle-aged white male facing career challenges — his 2013 television series, “The Crazy Ones,” was canceled by CBS after one season — only a few years after the heart surgery. More than 70 percent of all suicides in the United States are white men, most of them in their middle years, and many take their lives in the wake of some loss, whether professional, personal or physical.
Charles J. Biederman, a Los Angeles lawyer who represented Mr. Williams in entertainment dealings, strongly refuted tabloid reports on Tuesday that the actor was in acute financial distress.
“No, no, he was doing fine,” Mr. Biederman said. Other members of Mr. Williams’s professional coterie also insisted that money problems were not an easy explanation for what happened. “He didn’t have crazy money like before his divorces, but the coffers were still full,” said a person who worked closely with Mr. Williams, who was currently on his third marriage.
Robin Williams was one of the most explosively, exhaustingly, prodigiously verbal comedians who ever lived, says film critic A. O. Scott. And the only thing faster than Williams’s mouth was his mind.
Video CreditBy Adam Freelander on Publish DateAugust 12, 2014. Image CreditABC, via Associated Press
Mr. Wilson said: “He was not broke. He got highly paid for the series, and he just did two movies.”
Mr. Wilson did acknowledge that money had been an issue for his friend roughly two years ago. In an interview with Parade last year, Mr. Williams said as much, telling an interviewer that he had decided to do “The Crazy Ones,” his first steady TV job in 30 years, because of the paycheck. Mr. Williams’s salary for the show was reportedly between $150,000 and $200,000 an episode, which for a season of 22 episodes could have paid more than $4 million.
“There are bills to pay,” Mr. Williams told Parade, adding that he had recently re-listed his Napa ranch for $29.9 million because “I just can’t afford it.” (The ranch, initially listed in 2012 for $35 million, is still for sale.)
Whether for emotional or financial reasons, Mr. Williams in recent years increased his workload, even taking on commercials. He played a football coach unhinged by hunger for Snickers and his voice was used in spots for iPad Air devices.
His 2006 relapse appeared related to concern about his ability to keep working. “It’s fear,” Mr. Williams said in a 2010 podcast interview with the comedian Marc Maron. “You’re kind of going, ‘What am I doing in my career? Where do you go next?’”
Mortality also appeared to weigh on him. While shooting “Boulevard,” an indie drama that was filmed in Tennessee in the spring of 2013, Mr. Williams spoke pointedly about the recent death of another famous comedian — his idol, Jonathan Winters.
“On set, Robin talked about losing Jonathan Winters in all his brilliance and goodness, like any other fan,” said Dito Montiel, the director of “Boulevard.”
For Mr. Bailey, Mr. Williams’s little-seen performance in “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn” is the comedian’s “defining role,” revealing him for the tormented, if comic, soul that he really was.
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