The actor Robin Williams called the greatest ever: “There’s the rest of us, and then there’s him”
As far as comedians-turned-actors go, Robin Williams might be the best of all time. Plenty of icons and legends mastered both mediums, but is there anyone who did it to quite the same extent as the Academy Award-winning improvisational maestro?
Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Bill Murray, Jamie Foxx, and Peter Sellers are merely five performers who started out in stand-up or as sketch artists before taking cinema by storm, headlining hit movies, becoming global superstars, and winning plenty of acclaim and a bucketload of prestigious accolades along the way.
However, Williams always felt like he was in a class of his own. On stage, he was a force of nature. Sure, he was frequently accused of stealing jokes from other comics, but they couldn’t have delivered them like he did. His boisterous persona, effortless mastery of the non-sequitur, and penchant for pratfalling were unmatched, and he was every bit as good when he turned to drama.
Whether he was making audiences laugh or cry, Williams was phenomenal when he was at the top of his game. A certifiable comic genius and a dramatic powerhouse, he was one-of-a-kind. And yet, he wouldn’t dream of calling himself an actor with their own plane of existence when there was only one name he deemed worthy of being called a cut above.
There’s history between them, too, and it’s as offbeat as expected. Jack Nicholson was Williams’ favourite actor to impersonate, they had an unusual exchange about oysters once, and the latter was fuming when he was dangled like a carrot in front of Tim Burton’s Batman to encourage Nicholson to sign on and play the Joker in what was the most lucrative contract any performer had ever signed at the time.
They didn’t work together directly, but they were familiar enough to be friendly and appreciate each other’s work. That might be an understatement in one respect, though, after Williams outlined his belief that the three-time Oscar winner and ‘New Hollywood’ hellraiser was the one actor in the industry that nobody could match.
When Ray Bennett quizzed Williams on where he thought Nicholson should be placed in the grand scheme of Hollywood’s most vaunted thespians, only one position immediately came to mind. “There’s the rest of us,” he unequivocally answered. “And then there’s Jack.”
It’s not exactly a controversial or inconceivable assessment because anyone tasked to compile a list of cinema’s greatest-ever performers is virtually obligated to place Nicholson pretty high up the rankings; otherwise, it’s immediately invalidated because he absolutely deserves to be remembered among the upper echelons.
Nicholson would probably agree, seeing as he called himself the most successful actor the business has ever seen, and that’s not even arrogance because there’s a decent probability – at the very least – that he’s 100% correct.
