Robin Williams names the roles that changed his career: “Those films kicked it into high gear”
He’d already conquered the worlds of stand-up comedy and televised sitcoms by the mid-1980s, but Robin Williams remained on the hunt for the feature-length projects that would elevate his career to the next level and establish him as a cinematic superstar.
It’s understandable that he’d be casting envious glances in Eddie Murphy’s direction at the time, with the former Saturday Night Live standout seamlessly segueing from stage to screen by kicking off his movie career with nothing but box office smash hits.
Williams, meanwhile, discovered that the leap wasn’t going to be as easy as he hoped, with his first leading role in Robert Altman’s Popeye not quite what he’d call one of his best. He’d won a Golden Globe for Mork & Mindy and scooped a Grammy for ‘Best Comedy Album’ by 1984, but whereas Murphy had Beverly Hills Cop under his belt by that point, Williams didn’t have much else to go on.
The offbeat dramedy The World According to Garp was a minor success, The Survivors flopped, Moscow on the Hudson got sued, The Best of Times bombed, Club Paradise was panned, and Seize the Day didn’t even play in cinemas. Something needed to change, and Williams had no idea what his agents were even trying to accomplish before the perfect pictures finally arrived.
“I don’t know what they were trying to do; it was me just trying to keep working,” he admitted to Total Film before naming the two films that changed his fortunes. “It was Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society that kind of kicked the door open in terms of dramatic roles and really revived it for me.”
He earned Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actor’ in both, and when Barry Levinson’s war comedy and Peter Weir’s drama combined to bring in more than $350million in ticket sales and win the leading man the most praise he’d ever received in his movie career, he was suddenly up and running.
Summing up the impact Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society had on his professional life, Williams acknowledged that “those films kicked it into high gear for me.” He’d never look back, with his long-awaited rise to the summit of Hollywood underlining that there was much more to the performer than his signature style of heavily improvised comedy.
It was the first sign that in addition to being one of his era’s greatest comedians, Williams also had the potential to be remembered as one of his generation’s finest dramatic actors. Of course, he spent the next two decades hammering home that sentiment repeatedly as he pinballed between the two, justifying his self-belief that he was going to get there eventually, even if he had to wait a little longer than he’d imagined.
