Robin Williams (1951-2014)

Robin Williams took his life August 11. He was 63. A stand-up comedian who initially gained fame in series TV as the alien Mork in Mork and Mindy, Williams went on to win a dramatic Oscar for his performance in Good Will Hunting and received another Oscar nomination for The Fisher King.

Williams’ genre roles included voicing the genie in Disney’s Aladdin and playing the title character in Popeye, a robot in Bicentennial Man, Theodore Roosevelt in two Night at the Museum movies, and a character trapped inside the game Jumanji.

Williams said in a Reddit community interview that his favorite reading was the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, and his favorite book growing up was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which he shared with his own children. “I would read the whole C.S. Lewis series out loud to my kids. I was once reading to Zelda, and she said ‘Don’t do any voices. Just read it as yourself.’ So I did, I just read it straight, and she said ‘That’s better.'”

3 thoughts on “Robin Williams (1951-2014)

  1. Robin Williams a fan of the Foundation series? Despite his appearance in “The Bicentennial Man” I would never have guessed that.

    There was a time when he portrayed probably the world’s favorite ET. No mean feat.

  2. The first Mork & Mindy I ever saw had Robin doing a revivalist preaching in response to Exidor, and the aliens were coming, not on Memorial Day, not on Independence Day, but Labor Day!

    My very first thought was he’d had to have been to a worldcon — he was “one of us.”

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