“It just struck me”: Robin Williams on how ‘Dr Strangelove’ changed his life
When he was growing up, Robin Williams’ gift for comedy was obvious to everyone around him. Upon graduating from high school in 1969, he was voted ‘Funniest’ by his classmates, and when he studied theatre for three years in college, he regularly made fellow students and teachers burst into hysterics with his incredible improvisational skills. The late comic genius was honest throughout the years that he had a few main inspirations, but there was one actor – and one movie in particular – that changed his life by altering how he thought about comedy.
When Williams was interviewed over the years about his comic inspirations, he would more often than not highlight two men. The first was the American comedian Jonathan Winters, who he actually wound up working with on Mork & Mindy.
Williams first saw Winters on television when he was eight years old, and he credits the sketch star, actor, and TV host with showing him that comedy could be a stream-of-consciousness mode of expression. He said Williams made it clear “that anything is possible, that anything is funny. He gave me the idea that it can be free-form, that you can go in and out of things pretty easily.”
However, Williams’ other major inspiration came from the other side of the pond. He was into English comics like Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, and they helped shape his comic style, but one name also stood out above theirs: Peter Sellers. He was particularly impressed with Sellers’ performance in Stanley Kubrick’s classic war satire Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which came out while he was still in high school.
“To see one person play that many characters,” Williams marvelled during an American Film Institute interview, “and to play each one of them differently and each one so committed, especially Dr Strangelove himself.” He couldn’t get over how masterfully Sellers could differentiate his characters in the film – a British RAF officer, the President of the United States, and the titular wheelchair-bound former Nazi – without losing any of the comedy or becoming distracting.
The subject matter of Kubrick’s movie also rewired Williams’ brain concerning what was and wasn’t fodder for laughs. If a filmmaker and comedian could make nuclear war funny, anything could be funny, no matter how seemingly serious the topic. “The fact that it’s all about the end of the world,” he explained. “It just struck me that comedy could be that – and hit that hard.”
Interestingly, Williams was able to separate the art from the artist when it came to Sellers. After all, the Pink Panther star developed a reputation for erratic, strange behaviour over the years, and his struggles with depression often seemed to manifest in him acting out. In 2002, while talking about his movie Death to Smoochy with co-star Edward Norton in Interview magazine, Williams acknowledged Sellers’ problematic nature.
When Norton pointed out that Sellers would have made a great Rainbow Randolph, the children’s TV host Williams plays in the film who is secretly an alcoholic criminal, he replied, “Oh, he would have been amazing.” However, he then addressed the elephant in the room by saying, “You know, I guess he was, in real life, a frighteningly scary man but brilliantly funny. To women, he was the most misogynistic, nasty guy, and to everybody else just hysterical.”
To Williams’ surprise, Norton pointed out, “Well, that’s kind of Rainbow Randolph in a nutshell,” and Williams nodded, “Yeah, I think that’d be it, then. My idol.” It’s enough to make you wonder: had Williams internalised his love for Sellers so much that he’d been inspired to bake his contradictory nature into a character without being aware he was even doing it?
