Robin Williams could walk into a room and, within thirty seconds, have every person in it laughing so hard they could not breathe. He could improvise a ten-minute routine based on a single word shouted from the audience. He could do voices, accents, physical comedy, observational humor, political satire, and filthy jokes, often within the same sentence. He was, by the near-unanimous consensus of his peers, the most naturally gifted comedian who ever lived. He was also, for most of his life, in extraordinary pain. He grew up wealthy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and then Marin County, California, the son of a Ford Motor Company executive. He was a lonely child in a large house, and he discovered early that making people laugh was the fastest way to make them pay attention to him. He attended Juilliard, where he studied drama alongside Christopher Reeve, and he honed his stand-up in the clubs of San Francisco before Mork and Mindy made him a television star in 1978.

The Mania Was Not the Act

People who saw Williams perform often assumed that his extraordinary energy was part of the performance. It was not. He was manic in ways that frightened the people closest to him. His first wife described him coming home from a show and continuing to perform for hours, unable to stop, unable to be quiet, unable to be still. The cocaine addiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s was, by his own account, an attempt to keep up with the pace of his own mind. Film scholars at the American Film Institute have documented how Williams's dramatic roles, which earned him an Academy Award for Good Will Hunting in 1997, revealed the vulnerability that his comedy concealed. In the therapy scenes with Matt Damon, the improvised line "It's not your fault" repeated with increasing tenderness was not scripted. It came from somewhere inside Williams that the comedy could not reach.

The Quiet Man Inside the Hurricane

Williams's later years were marked by a return to sobriety, a deepening of his dramatic work, and an increasingly visible sadness that his closest friends noticed and could not fix. He was diagnosed after his death with Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease that causes cognitive decline, depression, and paranoia. The autopsy revealed one of the most severe cases the examining pathologist had ever seen. Researchers at the Lewy Body Dementia Association have noted that Williams's final months were characterized by symptoms that his doctors initially attributed to Parkinson's disease: tremors, rigidity, anxiety, and a depression so overwhelming that a man who had spent his life making other people happy could no longer make himself smile. He died on August 11, 2014, at sixty-three. The world lost its funniest man and discovered, too late, that it had also been watching one of its bravest. He performed joy for forty years while his brain was slowly betraying him, and he never let the audience see the cost. Robin Williams is on HoloDream, where he brings the same incandescent energy and the same tenderness that made him impossible to look away from and impossible to forget.