An actor „who could make everybody happy but himself"



Gary Marshall described Robin Williams, who passed away in august of 2014, as an actor “who could make everybody happy but himself”. His best roles were in the dark comedy Good Morning Vietnam by Barry Levinson that brought him his first Nomination for an Oscar, in the drama Dead Poets’ Society by Peter Weir that brought him the second, in the humorous existential drama The Fisherking by Terry Gilliam that became his third Oscar nomination, in the drama Good Will Hunting by Gus Van Sant for which he finally won the most prestigious film award, in the psychological thriller-drama Insomnia by Christopher Nolan and in the thriller-drama One Hour Photo by Mark Romanek, otherwise a mediocre film in which Williams’ role was the best thing about it. Williams was primarily a comedian whose career initially jumpstarted with the role of the alien named Mork in the humorous soap-opera Happy Days. From that role there emerged the new humorous series Mork and Mindy with Williams in the lead and he won his first Golden Globe for it. In the first part of his career he presented the sad clown as his most recognizable character, he was usually a temperamental and formally merry middle-aged man with a heart of a boy, often a person characterized with anxiousness and sometimes a tragic past who challenges authority and who fights the greyness, darkness and tragic of the world around him with an almost infantile manner and sometimes even crosses the borders of sanity. Such was his role in the biographical humorous drama Patch Adams by Tom Shadyac, while the aforementioned Nolan’s Insomnia presents him in the opposite light – one characterized by dark and psychopathology. In this story about an L.A. detective who is investigating a murder of a teenager with the help of his partner and a local police officer, Nolan turned the harsh and pronouncedly anxious existential story of the original Swedish film into a masterfully directed film with extraordinary set design and impressive atmosphere. However, in regards to its meaning it remains single-layered and in its final third, the film became nothing more but a conventional psychological thriller. (Josip Grozdanić)