Whether he was portraying a teacher, a therapist or a genie, the late actor made us laugh, cry and think like no one else could From his sold-out stand-up shows to his Oscar-winning turn on the big screen, we honor the late actor.
Born July 21, 1951, to a former model and a Ford Motor Company executive, Chicago native Robin Williams began his showbiz career inside his own home, where he’d make his mother laugh by doing impressions of his grandmother, according to the AP.
By the ‘70s, he took that talent to New York City’s prestigious Juilliard School. There, he befriended classmate Christopher Reeve (here with Williams at the 1979 People’s Choice Awards). “I’d sit back and hope to catch the girls that were downstream,” he later joked to PEOPLE.
Reaching for the stars took a literal turn when Williams portrayed Mork, an alien from Planet Ork, on Happy Days in 1978. His extraterrestrial performance earned him and costar Pam Dawber an ABC spin-off called Mork & Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982.
Williams’s career took a serious turn in 1987 when he portrayed convention-defying Armed Forces Radio Service deejay Adrian Cronauer in the war comedy Good Morning, Vietnam. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, as well as a Golden Globe Award.
With nearly 100 acting credits under his belt, Williams returned to the small screen, joining Sarah Michelle Gellar on the CBS series The Crazy Ones. “The idea of having a steady job is appealing,” he told Parade. “There are bills to pay. My life has downsized, in a good way.”
On the evening of Aug. 11, 2014, news broke that the actor died of an apparent suicide at age 63. He’d checked back into rehab in July to “fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment,” according to his rep, but as Williams told Good Morning America in 2006, addiction never ends. “It’s just there,” he said. “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.”
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