Robin Williams Biography (2)
An Academy Award-winning actor and a multiple Grammy-winning performer unparalleled in the scope of his imagination, Williams continues to enhance his repertoire of indelible characters with several upcoming projects.
In addition to ROBOTS, Williams co-stars in the Lions Gate release House of D, directed by David Duchovny. In the drama, Williams portrays a mentally challenged 40 year-old friend of a delivery boy. Most recently, Williams completed principal photography on Mark Mylod's The Big White, a black comedy co-starring Holly Hunter, Woody Harrelson and Giovanni Ribisi.
In 1997, Williams received Academy and Screen Actors Guild awards for his performance as Sean Maguire, the therapist who counsels Matt Damon's title character, a math genius, in Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting. The Academy previously nominated Williams for best actor in The Fisher King, Dead Poets Society, and Good Morning Vietnam. Williams garnered a special honor from the National Board of Review for his performance opposite Robert De Niro in Awakenings.
Williams' filmography includes a number of blockbusters. In 1993, he starred in Chris Columbus' Mrs. Doubtfire. For Mike Nichols, Williams portrayed Armand Goldman, in The Birdcage, for which the cast won a SAG ensemble award. In 1996, The Birdcage and Jumanji reached the $100 million mark in the United States in exactly the same week. Williams assumed the dual roles of Peter Pan/Peter Banning in Steven Spielberg's Hook and played a medical student who treats patients with humor in Patch Adams. Other blockbusters included the aforementioned Good Will Hunting, Dead Poet's Society and Good Morning,Vietnam; plus Flubber and Aladdin.
Williams collaborated with two accomplished young directors: Christopher Nolan and Mark Romanek. For Nolan, Williams starred in Insomnia opposite Al Pacino as reclusive novelist Walter Finch, the primary suspect in the murder of a teenage girl in a small Alaskan town in Insomnia. In Romanek's One Hour Photo, Williams played a photo lab employee who becomes obsessed with a young suburban family. Recently, Williams starred as a cutter (a person with the power to edit individuals' recorded histories) in Omar Naim's sci-fi thriller 'The Final Cut," co-starring Mira Sorvino and James Caviezel.
Williams' early motion picture credits include Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson, in which he played a Russian musician who decides to defect, and The World According to Garp, George Roy Hill's adaptation of John Irving's acclaimed best-selling novel about a writer and his feminist mother. He made his cinematic debut as the title character in Robert Altman's Popeye.
Williams, who began his career as a stand-up comedian, is well known for monologues in which he makes free associative leaps punctuated by one-liners about subjects as varied as politics, history, religion, ethnic strife and sex. Using only his voice, Williams created one of the most vivid characters in recent memory - Aladdin's Blue Genie of the Lamp (which redefined how animations are voiced). For audio versions of his one-man shows and the children's record Pecos Bill, Williams won five Grammy Awards. His stage credits include a landmark production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, directed by Mike Nichols, co-starring Steve Martin, and, most recently, a short run in San Francisco of The Exonerated.
Offstage, Williams takes great joy in supporting causes too numerous to identify, covering the spectrum from health care and human rights, to education, environmental protection, and the arts. He toured the Middle East twice in as many years to help raise morale among the troops, and he is perhaps best known philanthropically for his affiliation with Comic Relief.
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