The most devastating moment of Robin Williams’ career: “Well, the ride’s over, that’s it”
David Letterman once described Robin Williams’ comedic style as a hurricane—a fitting phrase for a man of such whirlwind talents. Williams was unlike anyone else in Hollywood. Throughout his career, he had audiences rolling in the aisles with his comedies or in tears with his dramas, always approaching every role as if it were his last. However, he once admitted that the most devastating moment of his career came when he truly believed he had already had his last hurrah—that his big Hollywood adventure was over before it had even begun.
In 1978, Williams was a standup comedian who had only performed his act for two short years. After building a reputation as a comedy maverick who was so unpredictable that no one knew what he would do or say before he did it, Williams attended an audition for a guest role on the beloved TV sitcom Happy Days. Fittingly, he turned expectations at that audition on their head – by literally sitting on his head when producer Garry Marshall asked him to take a seat. Marshall and his team thought this was hilarious, and Williams was hired to play the alien Mork from Ork.
When the episode aired, audiences quickly took the quirky alien into their hearts, and they loved Williams’ highly improvisational performance style. Recognising it had stumbled upon something special, ABC put together a spinoff show entitled Mork & Mindy that debuted less than seven months after Mork’s appearance on Happy Days. The show was an instant hit, and in its first season, it became the third most popular show in America – even placing above Happy Days in the fourth spot.
Over the course of four seasons and 95 episodes, Mork & Mindy gave Williams a comedic showcase that twisted and contorted itself to get the best out of his sensibilities. It was extremely popular for two seasons, then limped into a third and fourth before being cancelled in the summer of 1982. Amazingly, though, nobody at ABC saw fit to let Williams know his show was being axed, with the actor admitting to People magazine, “I found out the show was cancelled by reading it in Variety. In Hollywood, that’s like reading your own obituary: ‘You’re dead, good luck!'”
In 2006, Williams elaborated on this shocking day, revealing that he was shooting an episode of Faerie Tale Theatre at the time. “I didn’t even find out about that in person,” he remembered. “I read about it in Variety, and I was dressed at the time as a three-foot frog doing The Frog Prince with Eric Idle.”
This early in his career, Williams hadn’t experienced anything as potentially disastrous as his show being cancelled – and it truly rocked him. In fact, he admitted to thinking it signalled that his career in Hollywood, which had lasted all of four years, was dead in the water. “It was just this kind of devastating thing of like, ‘Well, the ride’s over. That’s it. Game’s done.'”
Thankfully, Williams had an experienced professional on hand to show him that all was not lost. Idle, a legendary comedian and actor in his own right, treated Williams to “a great and funny day of shooting” on The Frog Prince, and this rewired Williams’ brain. Instead of thinking the demise of Mork & Mindy meant the end of his career as a whole, he realised he actually had “a lot of places to go” in the industry and could now fully explore those options.
So, Williams refused to let the most devastating moment of his career derail him completely. He resolved to go back into standup, which he described as a “survival mechanism” that gave him instant feedback on his material again. He also left Los Angeles in his rearview mirror because he found that living in ‘The Town’ was detrimental to his mental health.
After all, in LA, Williams was constantly surrounded by the movie business, even admitting, “I was literally stopped by a cop once, and he handed me a script. ‘You were doing 40, but hey, Mr Williams, it’s just an idea’.” Before long, he was able to find his footing again, and then his movie career began in earnest with The World According to Garp.
