Juilliard told Robin Williams it had nothing left to teach him
Robin Williams was one of only two students John Houseman picked for Juilliard's advanced programme in 1973; the other was Christopher Reeve. His dialect teacher was baffled by how instantly he switched accents, and by 1976 Houseman suggested the school had nothing more to offer him. He left and headed for stand-up.
Williams was born in Chicago on July 21, 1951. His father was a senior executive at Ford's Lincoln-Mercury division, and his mother, a former model from Mississippi, was the person he most wanted to make laugh. He described himself as a shy boy. When he was 12 the family moved to a 40-room farmhouse outside Detroit, where he was class president and a wrestler but was bullied for his weight and often played alone, with the family maid as his main companion.
At 16 he moved again, to Tiburon, California, and at Redwood High the drama club finally brought him out of himself. His 1969 classmates voted him both Funniest and Most Likely Not to Succeed. He dropped political science at Claremont Men's College to act, studied theatre at the College of Marin, then won a full scholarship to Juilliard, one of 20 freshmen. Reeve remembered a tie-dyed whirlwind who talked at astonishing speed; the pair stayed close friends until Reeve died in 2004.
Not every teacher was charmed at first. Michael Kahn dismissed his antics as mere stand-up, until Williams played an old man in Night of the Iguana so completely that Reeve was astonished. Another teacher, Gerald Freedman, called him a genius whom classical training simply did not fit. Summers were spent bussing tables at The Trident in Sausalito.
Stand-up in San Francisco and Los Angeles led to the alien Mork in Mork and Mindy (1978 to 1982), his first film lead in Popeye (1980) and, after three earlier nominations, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Good Will Hunting (1997). He also won five Grammys. In his last years he lived with severe depression and, his widow said, a Parkinson's diagnosis; he died by suicide in 2014 at 63, and his autopsy found diffuse Lewy body disease.
Source: Robin Williams
